Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: GerbilSoft - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

http://www.assembler...Real-Sega-Pluto

An ex-Sega employee has uploaded photos of a prototype Sega Pluto console. It appears to be a Saturn with a built-in NetLink.

It does turn on and show a standard Saturn boot screen (US NTSC), and functionality-wise seems to be the same as a regular Saturn.

It's time for TSC's second Charity Marathon! Our charity this week is the American Cancer Society.

TSC stream page: http://www.soniccenter.org/stream
Twitch.tv stream page: http://www.twitch.tv/tsc_streams

We've got a great line of of good and not-so-good games planned for this week, as well as two games with audience participation:

• Puyo Puyo VS 2 (Win32; Friday, March 29 @ 7:30 PM EDT)
  
• Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (360; Saturday, March 30 @ 7:15 PM EDT)

I'll also be participating in several of Saturday's games: Sonic Shuffle, Mario & Sonic 2012, and All-Stars Racing Transformed.

We'll also be accepting donations for possible bonus streams.

So I've started working on Gens/GS II again, and I decided to get some UI and translation work done. Here's a few screenshots of various parts of the program so far, in three languages.



Here's the About window. Nothing too fancy right now, and it still has the old Gens logo. (I might start a "logo contest" when we get near a final release.)



The General Configuration window is much improved compared to Gens, Gens/GS, and earlier builds of Gens/GS II. I decided to switch from the multi-column/grid scattered layout to a single-column layout, which is common in many programs.



The Controller Configuration window isn't functional yet. I'm planning on rewriting the controller subsystem this week. Currently, each physical control port has its own object, which seemed like a good idea when creating LibGens, but turned out to be horrible to maintain, especially when offering user configurability. I'm going to convert it to a single controller manager class, which should be a lot easier to maintain and integrate with the UI.

BONUS ROUND



A fourth translation, en_GB! For those of you who like having their 'u's in color, erm, colour.

Special thanks to the following people for providing translations:

• Scarred Sun: Japanese
  
• Overlord: British English
  
• Miles Prower: French

I'd like to add more translations later on, but since Gens/GS II is not in string freeze, it's a bit of a pain to juggle new translations and changing strings. I'll announce when Gens/GS II enters string freeze in case anyone wants to contribute later on.

EDIT: Also, the git URLs have changed:

• gitweb: http://www.dusers.dr...gens-gs-ii.git/
  
• git-daemon: git://dusers.drexel.edu/srv/git/~korth/gens-gs-ii.git

To update your local repository to point to the new URL, use this command:

git remote set-url origin git://dusers.drexel.edu/srv/git/~korth/gens-gs-ii.git

Announcing the Sonic Retro App, designed exclusively for Microsoft® Windows® and Google® Chrome OS®.

Exclusive features:

• Direct access to all of Sonic Retro's subsites.
  
• Simple to use; no extensions, add-ons, or any of that bloatware.
  
• Sonic runs when pages are loading!

Download it now:

• Microsoft® Windows® version
  
• Google® Chrome OS® version

Here's a screenshot of the Microsoft® Windows® version:


EDIT: On some systems, you may need to register the three bundled OCX files with the system. To do this, open a command prompt (Administrator Command Prompt on Vista and later), and run the following comands:

EDIT: You may need to run regsvr32 on the three OCX files included with the Sonic Retro App. To do this, open a command line (Administrator command line on Vista or later), cd to the Sonic Retro App directory, and run the following commands:

regsvr32 mscomctl.ocx
regsvr32 coolbar4.ocx
regsvr32 picclp32.ocx

I tested this on a Win7 64-bit system and it seems to have worked. (Only coolbar4.ocx and picclp32.ocx needed registration; mscomctl.ocx already existed.) Also, some users have reported success when setting compatibility mode to Windows 98 or XP SP3.

Last week, my GameCube memory card corrupted for some reason. I ended up reformatting it, but later I figured that the "format" procedure probably works like formatting a regular hard disk. That is, it only wipes the file system information, not the actual data. I found a utility to dump a full image of the memory card: http://wiibrew.org/w...acoTaco-Edition and proceeded to examine the hex dump. Sure enough, the old game saves were still there! I was able to restore almost all of the files. (My Mario Kart: Double Dash save wouldn't restore properly on the Wii, but it loaded fine in Dolphin, so this might just be a bug in ctr-gcs's restore function.)

Here's a screenshot of the program so far: (actually, it's a few days old, though not much has changed visually other than a bugfix for the blank icon for "Luigi's Mansion".)


(Save file contributed by MainMemory.)

Parsing the directory structure, block table, and banners was the first step. The next step is adding the capability to scan "empty" blocks for save files. In order to do this, I'll need to compile a database with known strings for different games. I expect to encounter a few issues:

• Fragmented files won't be recoverable easily, since the block linkage is gone. Files usually don't have magic strings in every block, so it will be difficult (or perhaps impossible) to find fragmented files. I won't implement support for this in the first version.
  
• Japanese games are distinguishable by the text encoding, but US and European games might not be. The file system table has the full game ID, including region code, so the US version of e.g. SADX won't be able to read saves created by the European version of SADX, since their game code is different. I will probably need to prompt the user to specify the region code in this case.
  
• Some games with multiple save slots use a single file for all slots. Examples include Mario Party 7 and Sonic Adventure DX. (EDIT: SADX/GC apparently uses multiple files, unlike the DC version which uses one file. :V) Other games, such as Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, use a different file for each slot. The "comment" section of the file indicates the file number, so I'll have to include some way to specify that a file number is used in the database.
  
• Most games don't use any form of wear-levelling on the memory card, so they simply overwrite their existing save with the new data. The only game I've seen that actually creates new files instead of overwriting existing files is Metroid Prime 1. The result is that lots of Metroid Prime files will show up in the "empty" space. I can either show these, or add a way to only show the newest file. (Metroid Prime includes a timestamp in the comment section, so that can probably be used.)

Anyways, regarding the subject at hand: I need corrupted (or previously corrupted) memory card dumps in order to add functionality to this program. You can use the previously-mentioned ctr-gcs utility on softmodded Wiis to dump the full image to an SD card. (Note that if you're using an official Nintendo memory card, you'll need to "unlock" it first by going to the GameCube data management screen and selecting the memory card.)

If anyone wants to help out, I'll be around on irc.badnik.net in the new #retrotech channel.