Request: Code Warrior Guide

Hey,

sorry if this exists already - I can't find the answers I'm looking for, so hoping someone here can help.

I've love a quick guide to get a Code Warrior project booted up on a SET 5.24 as a debug target.

I've tried one of the projects included in r11, but it just hangs on the 'under licence by SEGA' screen.

I then have to go back into DA-Check and switch it back to OS mode to play games again.

Would love to get some of the example code up and running, then tweak and learn from it.

Cheers!

 

Which example did you try ?
Depending on the example, you might need to do some extra stuff besides compiling.

Try eg. \Sample\km2Demo\CheapBump.
That one should be an easy one to start with.

 

Thanks for getting back to me T-chan.

I've tried a few.

CheapBump doesn't have a project file... is it simple to make one and just add everything in?

'FilmTV' does have a project file, but bombs out after the sega screen. Maybe it's region coded and I've got it set to 0/NTSC-J?

Would love some extra help. Thanks!

 

FilmTV works here - region is set on 0.
I'm outputting to VGA.

(CheapBump -> very easy, just create a Dreamcast project, add all *.c files, and you're done !)

 

So we seem to be getting somewhere... managed to get FilmTV to work.. .and what a beauty it is! Thanks dude.

Also I seem to have a problem with mounting my GD-M to a drive in win7. Can Win7 read old-skool FAT? Maybe thats' why.

Or am I misunderstanding what the GD-M is? I know there's a proto on the HDD but can't see the drive/folder structure let alone boot it up.

 

You're welcome. For reference purposes, what solved your problem ? Changing the region or changing the cable ?

When you boot your pc with the devkit on, your SCSI card should show you two lines:
- one with the GD-DA
- one with the GD-M
if you don't see the GD-M line, it's normal that Win7 doesn't see a drive.
If you see the GD-M line, normally Win7 should detect the drive & assign a drive letter to it.
This allows you then to browse through the drive.

So... first question is: do you see the GD-M line when your SCSI card boots ?

 

Firstly T_chan, thanks so much for your help with this dude. You've restored my faith in the internet!

on boot i do see two devices. here's a screen grab of both trying to browse the 'd' drive (can windows 7 even read old-skool FAT?) and also trying the GD-M TEST.

I THINK I can just format this drive as NTFS, right? But I'd hate to loose what I'm told is on it's HDD.



Win7, pretty much a fresh install and used the tutorial here to get everything up and running.


On the previous problem, it looks like it was because I was not set to VGA. (I was enjoying Picture-in-picture, which oddly only works with composite inputs on this first-yen Sony HDTV/Monitor hybrid I use for this cornet of the games room!)

 

If the drive is formatted as FAT16, you won't be able to read it in Windows 7. FAT32 would work fine however. It's possible you're getting that error because the drive itself isn't working though, IE, it could be physically dead and not even spinning, still, that will become clear later if this is the case.

Before doing ANYTHING to the drive though, you should take a full disk image. This is not a file copy, it's a physical disk image, and you can take one of these even if Windows can't understand the filesystem or even if the filesystem is corrupted. Taking a full disk image is essential, as often people might just "shift+delete" the drive contents, but the files are still there, and a disk image will contain that data, which can then be recovered, possibly revealing beta versions of a game the previous owners thought they'd removed.

I suggest you download and install this:
http://www.r-tt.com/downloads/RStudio7.exe
It's a trial but it'll do everything you need it to for this task. After it's installed, do the following:
-Launch R-Studio
-Identify the physical drive from the drive list shown on the screen. This drive looks like it should contain the "D" partition on your computer. You need to select the drive itself from the list, not the partition. See the image below:

In this case, you'd select the "WDC WD7500BPKT...." item from the list, the name of the physical disk itself, not the "D" partition the disk contains.
-Rightclick on the physical drive from the drive list, and select "Create Image".
-Select "Byte to byte image"
-Check the name and path of the image file, and press "OK".
-Once the image is created, compress it (I'd suggest with 7z) and upload it somewhere (I'd suggest https://mega.co.nz)

After that, someone will be able to check out the drive image and see if it contains remains of any important files.

 

wow awesome tip.. looks like that D drive is indeed setup for the GD-M . It's like so:

CPL-GMM
- D:
- CPLKATANA DA4090

Will let you know if I find anything of interest!

EDIT - 'Create image' is greyed out. Any tips on this?Thought it might be because it's a demo but it's happy to make an image of my C: or usb thumb drive.


Guessing I just format away after this is backed up?

I understand it just needs a GD rom set of files on that drive... can it contain a few, or just one game/project? Does a 'loader' exist that could boot different games from the HDD?

 

Hmmm, not sure. Can you create an image if you select the D: drive itself from the list? I don't know that it's a demo limitation, I think the only limitation is supposed to be on the data recovery scanning. Have you run the program with administrator privileges (rightclick "Run as administrator")? The program would need admin privileges in order to image the physical disk, I didn't think to mention that.

If you still have problems with R-Studio, download and install this instead:
http://download.cnet.com/Hex-Workshop/3000-2352_4-10004918.html
Once you've got it installed, do the following:
-Launch Hex Workshop with administrator privileges
-Select "Disk->Open Drive" from the main menu
-Change the "Select" combobox to "Physical Disks"
-Select your Katana HDD from the list (Look for the 4GB drive)
-Press "Ok". The drive should open up and display data in the window.
-Select "Disk->Save Sectors" from the main menu
-Tick the "Entire Disk" checkbox
-Set the file path to what you want, and press "ok".
-Compress and upload the file as per the R-Studio instructions

Yep, once you've fully imaged the drive, and we've verified that image process has worked correctly, you'll be free to wipe the drive clean.

The GD Workshop app allows you to pick one of any number of images to load from the drive. Only one is active at a time, but you can store as many on the drive as you can fit, and pick one to load into the GD emulator, and switch them at runtime if you want to (IE, to change the disk in a multi-disk game).

 

That was easy
You're in the right part of the internet here, young padawan

You can indeed use NTFS or FAT32.
There is an additional requirement if you do that:
"Caution: If the emulation drive is formatted with a cluster size smaller than 32K, the emulator will not emulate."
(cfr \Utl\Dev\GDWorkshop\Gdworks.hlp)

Also:
Note: NTFS only.
The emulator cannot handle resident files which can occur when using small files (between 512bytes and 32k-bytes) on an NTFS formatted emulation drive. To avoid resident files, always copy files onto the emulation drive via GD Workshop using one of the Add File features, this way GD Workshop can allocate space to small files on the emulation drive and prevent resident files from occurring.


Now I'm wondering if I would program myself a small program to view the FAT16-contents of the devkit HDD under Win7...
could be interesting to have... maybe one day if I find the time....

 

You should make a backup of that drive right away. Using a good software like DD that keeps all sectors instead of just reading files.

 

better results with this method .. it's now dumping the data.

It said is was 8GB, not 4... but who knows who's been messing with this box, so it could just be a bigger drive that's not fully partitioned. (FAT was max 2gb, right?)

Happy to share this dump if I find anything interesting. Can you let me know how I'd 'extract' the data? Hoping to find what I was told is on there!

 

I didn't mention it, but I completely agree with Nemesis & Familiguy.
The more you wait with this, the higher the chances to loose some precious information... and we all want to avoid that !

If you have problems doing a dump, just tell it here, and we'll help you further

Edit: already busy with it I see... nice !

 

You could open the cover of the devkit & see what kind of HDD is in the kit... usually its a 4gb Seagate ST34520N.

FAT16 was max 2gb under Windows 95.
Under Windows XP, it was 4gb.

 

a quick look (opening the dumped.bin with HW again) makes me think it's a lost cause... very little data when viewed as ASCII Legacy and others.

any tips on cracking this nut? I'd like to try myself before handing it over - here to learn

 

I wouldn't assume that yet, 40GB is a lot of space, there could be all kinds of things on there.

For the data recovery, you need to use R-Studio again. R-Studio has very good data recognition, it's the best program I've seen at recovering file fragments, even if the drive has been formatted again or the filesystem is a mess. The trial is going to hurt you here though, it'll only let you recover identified files up to 64Kb in size. Still, the first step here is to do a scan and see what you find. Do the following:
-Launch R-Studio
-Select "Drive->Open Image" from the main menu
-Select the file you created when you did the drive image from Hex Workshop
-Find the loaded image from the "Drives" list on the main screen
-Rightclick on the loaded image, and select "Scan".
-Leave all the defaults on the panel (or select "Save to File" and enter a path if you want to save the scan information)
-Click the "Scan" button
-Once the scan is complete, R-Studio will hopefully have a list of one or more identified file systems appearing under the loaded image. Doubleclick on one, and you'll get a new window that'll allow you to browse, and attempt to recover, data from the drive.

I'd suggest after you do a scan, posting a few screenshots of what it comes up with in the list of identified file systems, and the located data under those file systems. That'll help make it clearer what is, or used to be, on the drive, and what chance there is of recovering useful data.

 

Also, to give a better idea if the drive has been zero filled or securely wiped, you could also try the following:
-Open the drive image in Hex Workshop
-Select "Tools->Character Distribution". This could take awhile on a 40GB file.
-Sort the data by concurrence count, highest to lowest, by clicking on the count column header.
-If the character distribution is pretty much even across all characters (check the percent column), it indicates the drive is primarily filled with random or compressed data. In this case, we'd assume that means it's been securely erased.
-If the 0x00 value is almost all the content (over 99% or there abouts), then it indicates the drive has been zero filled recently, and there's probably not much on there.
-If the result is anything else, there's probably some kind of data on there that can be recovered.

 

There are several free file-slicers you can use for recovery from Linux. Unfortunately it's been over two years since I have used one, so I don't remember any names. I'll see if I can dig them up over the weekend.

(Very little ASCII is to be expected BTW. 99% of the stuff on the disk would be textures, models, music and other resources that is just random bytes. Even the executable would normally be mostly random stuff.)

 

As simple check, you can also look for the string "SEGAKATANA" & tell us what you see after that...