N64 - CD64 copier BIOS replacement

I sold my N64, so I can't test anything now.

You can download Med's cd64 BIOS files here:

http://gtamp.com/misc/cd64-med-h641.zip

 

Well, how long did you wait before trying the n64 again after attaching the cd64?
I had similar problems when attaching hw to the cd64 that drew too much current or whatever from the n64(solution was to use external atx psu).
Think it blew some autofuse or something, after few minutes the n64 would work again. But, power light being lit on your n64, make it sound like it might not be same prob...
Sure you just dont have loose connection on the a/v cable or something?

 

fat16 is a bit limiting if you want to store every single N64 game on a single CF card. Does this support multiple partitions?

 

No, only one for now. But it could be extended to support more. Also fat32 support could be added, its just a matter of lazyness.

 

This is amazing. I've been trying to find a suitable replacement for the CD drive that came with my CD64, with no luck at all. (I just discovered this forum after Googling "CD64 hacks".) I have one that works maybe 1% of the time, which I'll try to get spinning enough to get this BIOS flashed. If you ever get around to writing a 32bit update, I would be forever in your debt. Thank you for this!

 

Hmm, well, sorry for the double post, but I've flashed the BIOS and any ROM I've tried to load has resulted in a garbled, static screen with no sound. They're all in .v64 format and were previously tested perfectly in the CD-ROM drive. What has been tested working with this BIOS, so I can make sure it's flashed correctly?

 

Sorry for late response, been bit busy, that sounds odd, are you sure you have correct boot cart? this bios does not autopatch any games yet to correct boot code. Your games might need cracks.
Banjo tooie(usa), blast corps(eur), mario 64(both usa and eur), goldeneye(usa) is some of the games ive tested more extensively.Try mario64 to start with... that game should work for sure.

edit: the bios does support both v64 and z64 formats.

 

I'm using Goldeneye 007 as a bootcart, so no issues there. I've also ran a diag on the HDD and it reports no errors, and I'm using an external ATX power supply to power it. It was previously a PS2 HDD and ran perfectly fine. I've also used UCON64 to interleave, de-interleave, v64-ize, and z64-ize the roms with no luck. I'm almost 100% sure it's an incompatibility with the HDD itself, as it doesn't seem to load the ROM after the initial bootup. I don't hear the drive "crunching" as it's loading the roms, and it's a pretty noisy one usually. If I didn't set the jumper to MASTER, it wouldn't even read the table, so I figured that one out pretty quickly. It's also got a 32GB clip jumper setting which didn't seem to help, either.

I've ordered a Syba IDE to CF adapter and a 4GB CF card that looks more or less identical to the one you're using in your YouTube video, so hopefully that'll solve the issue. Have you had luck with 4GB partitions or is it safer to stick with 2GB?



Thanks again for your help! When/ if I get things working, I'll post about my findings in the thread so you won't get a hundred people asking you my same questions.

 

HDD64 review!

OK! Another double post! But that's OK, because this one is an important one.

So, I got the BIOS working, and played around with it a lot, and I figured I'd write a bit of a review in order to get some people interested in it!

THE GOOD STUFF:

So, first off, I'll tell you it IS safe to flash. You can go back and forth between the CD-ROM bios and the HDD bios with ease, and I've done it quite a few times. So no worries there. The one caveat is that you need to make sure you have the right hardware in order for the bios to see (and play) your games. My personal recommendation is this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TMDE6G/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It's a very cheap CF card to IDE adapter that works great, and you don't need to use a separate ATX power supply. I'm using a Transcend 4GB CF card and it's fast and reliable.

The other nice part about it is reliability and boot time. With the CF card installed, it boots up to the game selection screen almost instantly, and even a 256mb game loads in about 1/3 the time as it would take via CD. In terms of reliability, most CD64's have power issues... that's no secret. My unit, for example, will usually read a CD for the first 15 minutes or so of operation, but if I try to load anything after that, the unit gets too hot and won't send enough power to the CD drive to spin it at the right speed. With the CF adapter, the power draw is minimized, and since it's solid state, it will read data all day long. The lack of a giant CD-ROM drive in the bay helps out with airflow, too. I believe that using this bios will most likely result in lengthening the life of your CD64 unit.

The bios will truncate filenames automatically, and like the official bios, display the header names on the screen, so there's no need to rename your roms or anything.

Compatibility is good! The only roms I had issues with were the ones that the CD64 has issues with anyways, like Star Wars Racer, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Banjo Tooie, and Perfect Dark. I do have one of those cartridge-adapter things to use as a boot emulator, but the only two physical games I have (Goldeneye and Beetle Adventure Racing) are both 6102 carts, so I couldn't try it out.

WHAT CAN BE IMPROVED:

There are a lot of benefits to this bios, but it is, of course, still in a beta stage. So there are a few bugs and things that need work, which I'll list here so people know what to expect, and so med (the developer) can take note.

First of all, FAT16 really sucks. It's a bit of a pain to format the drive correctly. I had to use a gparted live CD http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php to set the CF card up correctly, and that requires booting into a Linux shell off of the disc. Luckily, you only need to do it once, and it's a GUI application, so there's no command-line stuff for Linux newbies to worry about.

Secondly, the bios itself isn't very robust. It's simply a list of games, an instruction to press start for an SRAM backup, and some HDD and boot cart info. I kind of miss the X-Terminator codes because it made Goldeneye 007 a lot of fun when you had some cheats running on it. Also, there's no way to change the boot emulator modes if for some reason the unit doesn't auto-detect the boot chip. This sometimes happens with hacked games or homebrew. I didn't see it making a big difference in any games I tried, but it's nice to have the option.

A very minor gripe is that for some reason on my TV (Panasonic 27" CRT), the Top and bottom of the screen is cut off, so I wasn't able to read the "HDD64" header at the top, or the instruction to press start for SRAM backup on the bottom. I needed to hook the N64 up to my HDTV in order to see the whole picture. I'm not sure if this is because I'm in an NTSC region with a USA N64. For the record, on the CRT TV I'm using a Monster Cables s-video cable, and a standard composite cable on the HDTV.

I originally tried to use a larger 164GB HDD in the drive, formatted to FAT16 and reduced to a 2GB partition. The bios was able to see the files on the drive, but wasn't able to load anything successfully. They would seem to load, but then show a garbled, colored screen and freeze there. med and I went back and forth via email, trying everything we could think of, but finally came to the conclusion that the drive was simply incompatible. The drives he had tested it with were very old, 40GB max, so that will be the way to go for now if you don't want to use a CF card.

The last issue, which is I guess the biggest, is the file quantity limitation. To test the limits of the unit, I stuck pretty much the entire USA collection of N64 games on the CF card, subtracting a lot of the older crappy sports games because they wouldn't fit. I believe it came out to 242 ROMs in all on the card. The problem is, the list showed the games starting from the letter "P" and not "A!" So I started at "P," scrolled down past "Z," and "A" started after that. It went down to the letter "C" and once I got a few games in, it froze and I had to reset the N64. So, I'm not sure if that's a hardware limitation, a FAT16 limitation, or a bug in the coding, but the list seems to max out between 150 and 200 items before erroring. It's still a LOT more than you can fit on a CD!

IN SUMMARY:

This bios is pretty rad. I think the pros (fast loading, larger storage space, less power drain) really outweigh the cons (lack of cheats and simple UI.) I'd LOVE to see a FAT32 version, or some improvements on the HDD handling, but it's very useable as-is.

I'd almost recommend renaming this bios "CF64," as compact flash cards are where this software really shines. It's the one device where modern equipment still works and is very cheap. Finding a HDD old enough to be compatible would be like finding a needle in a haystack, at least where I live. Maybe FAT32 would fix that issue! :friendly_wink:

med has been a great help in getting this bios to work for me, so if anyone has questions about anything here, I'd be happy to help as well, on the user side of things. med is the guy to go to for development-related issues. I'm also willing to beta-test any new bioses that come out, so we can make this thing a real viable replacement! :encouragement:

 

Great that you got it working!
As for the filelist limit... ye you probably found a bug in my code.. i'll check that one out. And i guess sorting the filenames would be a good thing too.
The problem with not seeing whole screen is probably cos i coded this stuff and tested on PAL tv only(bigger vert resolution), i'll fix it for the next release.
I have planned some X-Terminator/Action Replay support, but need to fix some more important things before i do that(bugs and compatibility!).
I'll have a second look at FAT32, i guess it's probably so much better to be worth the effort of implementing it.

Great someone finally tested it except me, nice to hear it works on ntsc systems! Thanks!
Just let me know if there is anything else you stumble upon!

 

Very nice! Are you open to releasing the src for others (me me me!) to see your work? I would love to at least read through it.

My CD64 has sat dormant for years and I can't wait to try this out!

 

Project has sorta been dropped cos i dont have a permanent location atm so all my n64 hardware is stashed in a closet far away. But i did upload the code to git quite a while ago.

https://github.com/rvah/hdd64

The source really sux, i never got the time/chance to clean it up, but it will probably spare you the trouble of figuring out how to communicate with the machine yourself.

And ye, you probably have to edit the binaries a bit after you compile, iirc the cd64 puts 000000 or FFFFF beyond end of rom.. whatever is the opposite of that n64 romtool uses to calc checksum from, else it will crash cos of checksum errors.
Better have a ROM burner anyway if youre gonna attempt modifying this bios.

 

I saw the thread notification in my email and got super excited lol

treyjazz, if you happen to compile anything and you'd like a beta tester, let me know! I've still got all the equipment needed.

 

I have had a busted cd64 plus ( cdrom dead) sitting in my attic for YEARS i brought it down today just because of this release , formatted an old hardrive i had laying around , flashed the eeproms, put it all together ..... and nothing.... had the eeproms in reversed lol put them in correctly and everything is working great! Just to let everyone know mine s NTSC and its working fine..... the list seems to be somehow miss alined but it also could just be my tv.

 

Nope, that's normal. There's a bug in the alphabetical sorting, and the BIOS was developed for a PAL TV so the image bleeds off the edge of an NTSC screen, so it's not just you. Just for curiosity's sake, what kind of hard drive are you using? Compatibility seems to be pretty slim unless you're using a CF card.

 

Even though your code is just for loading and running games it is a great start.

I'm not sure if there would be enough room in the ROM space to use FAT32 or even NTFS but either of those would be ideal for disk size support and long file names. I think extX might be lighter on code but would give Windows users headaches.

Having modules loaded from the hard drive for cheats, patches, CIC hacks, etc. would lighten the load up and make this more feasible. It also would make it a lot easier to debug (and be much safer for those without programmers) since it wouldn't require reprogramming the EPROMs each time.

I can't make any promises but I will try to take time to work on it and I will definitely include you guys in on it.

 

Actually you dont really have to reflash for every iteration, just load the new rom from old bios, thats what i did.
(But before i actually had anything loading from hdd i used to burn a CD with new bios, load into ram, swap cd to hdd, test code. I probably did this 100-200 times.. man that was fun )
And fat32 driver should be possible, shouldnt take that much more space than fat16, just needed smth quickly to work, and fat16 was bit simpler to implement. Guess you could use some 3rd party lib, but then size could become a problem indeed.

 

You guys should collaborate!

 

I just wanted to bump this thread up, to see if anyone is interested in looking at med's source code and possibly improving on this awesome project. I'm still available for beta testing if you don't have a CD64!

 

Hi Guys, I am new here , best Vibes to everyone!! I just bought a couple of CD 64 PLUS both with Bios 1.3 bios and i would like to try these HDD bios with a 3GB HDD I was able to found xD I hope thast enough. But It seems this thread is a little lonely by now. Please anybody can share the HDD bios again? The original Meg link is already dead. BEST VIBES!