Announcing the 64drive nearing completion

Well, I'm not sure on the progress of shipping to be honest, that's something you'd have to email marshall about. You'll get the product though, just fine.

From what it seems, saves from the ED64 should be compatible with the 64drive if you want to use both devices and swap.

 

Ordered 29th August. Heard nothing back so far. I emailed marshallh mid December but no reply yet.

 

LaC patched the DK game to work all those years ago. He has already confirmed on this forum that only two games (Banjo Tooie & Jet Force Gemini) use the advanced copy protection of checking for the 6105 after boot and that Donkey Kong 64 doesn't. http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showpost.php?p=533607&postcount=26

 

Does anyone know where those patches can be acquired from?

 

The GoodN64 set, just google it.. I'm not going to help you find it, and moderators, if naming it was in the wrong, please edit it out of my post.

 

Thanks. I wasn't requesting ROMs, I just wanted the patches that I can apply to my own ROMs.

 

Donkey Kong 64 (U) [f2].z64 is the N64 backup that you want to use for the time being. However, be sure to force 256 save-type in the 64drive game loading menu, since that will force it to save to SRAM, which that fixed backup was hacked for.

It also seems people with the ED64 are using the same backup and a similar method to be able to play the game.

 

A different question: How does homebrew need to be prepared to run of the 64Drive? Is there an equivalent of devkitpro, with gcc to cross-compile MIPS code and reimplemented headers/libraries?
(Most of the old N64 homebrew links seem to have fallen off the internet...)

 

All the files you need for compiling stuff for the N64 should be floating around the net. You just have to use your head to find them.

Perhaps anyone who's experienced in N64dev can PM this guy and point him in the right direction? It'd be much appreciated.

 

Ah, I see. Thanks. Is N64Dev the most recent/complete project?

 

Most recent project is the dragon lib which date from 2010 IIRC.

A complete toolchain is include for compiling in both Linux and Windows environment.

Lib:
http://www.dragonminded.com/n64dev/libdragon/

Toolchain:
http://www.dragonminded.com/n64dev/

 

UPDATE:

If you load default and use the 16kbit EEPROM option, it'll load and you can play, but you'll eventually lose your save as well.

If you want to keep your save, follow the instructions in my previous post. So far loading the f2 ROM which is LaC's 101% fix, and using the 256 option, which is forcing SRAM, it'll keep it's save and you can play.

Thanks for posting this, I was wondering about this stuff as well. How good is this toolchain for N64 development? Know of anything better? PM me if you can't post it on the forums.

 

I think this is the best toolchain freely available.

Problem with N64 homebrew is that people take the easy route of using the Nintendo SDK.

This lib look good to me, only need more people to start using it and contributing to make it better.

Using closed source lib is a waste of time IMHO for the whole community.


Didn't got time to play with that lib yet but that's what I'm planning to use in the future.

 

That is exactly the reason I was asking. On GC/Wii you can do most (all?) things with open source libraries now. There are a few attempts for N64, but many are obsolete or abandoned now. Not to mention the assembler code that is not easily reusable.
Another thing I faintly remember is that the first few blocks of the ROM are verified against the CIC, but the links where I used to find that information are dead now. That's why I was asking if there is a checksum/patching procedure required for 64drive.

 

I made a VMWare image some time ago with libdragon already setup under a linux enviroment. I think it's a good way if you just wanna have a quick look at libdragon:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZYHAWYHB
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IFH7UQ95
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=12H9PXNB
The root password is: dev

As far as I remember I did put some examples in there to so you can do a quick start with developing some simple programs.

(Both Ubuntu and libdragon are opensource, so it should be okay for me to post this here.)

 

Thanks, it'll save me a bit of time.

 

Over at benheck.com Marshal wrote that he has another pile of packages ready to ship out. Hopefully mine is one of them ;-) because I've been waiting so long, and can't wait to get mine (ordered on Aug. 24th)
He also wrote that he has been working on another secret project that uses the untapped power of the 64drive. Any guesses?

 

Thanks for the update tdb

 

I ran into an issue yesterday while playing Conker's Bad Fur Day.

I had been playing for about a week without issue. Then I went to play yesterday and my save file was empty. I doubt it is an issue with the 64Drive. Most likely an issue with the game itself. However, I have an idea.

What about having the 64Drive create backup saves? I hit reset and the 64drive dumps the gamesave to the memory card. Then the 64Drive copies the save and renames it. So on your SD card in the \saves folder you would have 2 files instead of 1. You could make it configurable as to how many backups to keep, but that way should a gamesave become corrupt you could also take the memory card out, connect it to your PC and rename the save file.

I think this should be possible. Anyone think marshall might be interested in adding a feature like this?

 

Are you sure you hit reset when you were done playing? If you didn't, the save wouldn't have been wrote to the memory device you were using.

Also, do you have any idea how much game time you really had on it? I doubt you played the game for about a 168 hours.