(04-06-2010, 09:49 AM)Bositman Wrote: [ -> ]I agree that the BIOS dumper has serious flaws. The problem is florin, the team member who solely worked on and developed this tool hasn't been around in years (since 2006) and I think there is no source code available either.
Yes, I assumed that he had 'disappeared' from this context, as he would otherwise have fixed those flaws himself as soon as it was decided that the new PCSX2 should not use the new ".P2b" format after all...
Quote:Still, the download DOES include the old v1 dumper (the exact same vsub posted) with a note to use that if the newer one fails.
Unfortunately the download you speak of, on the main pcsx2.net site was not available, and by all indications it still is not available, due to the DNS problems that have prevented access to most of the downloads.
The only downloads that worked for me here were those using links to "forums.pcsx2.net" (so mainly post attachments), and the ones I found for the dumper only contained the 'new' one by florin (until vsub attached a .rar with the older version for me).
Quote:In any case this is a problem with the emulator itself too, since we haven't agreed on a standard yet for bios filenames and if we will only accept certain filenames (to try preventing pirated files from being usable).
Sure, but unfortunately that dumper and the emulator do not agree on what files to use. The emulator demands "EROM" and "ROM2" files, even though that dumper is unable to produce them. Some files it does produce contains the same stuff, but apparently not in a form that pcsx2 accepts.
Quote:I never had problems with this dumper (apart from the p2b part which should be removed obviously).
I never said that I had any problems running the dumper (except for its failure to use my USB drives, requiring ps2link use instead). But pcsx2 will not run an emulation without error messages when using only the dumped bios files from that 'new' dumper. But using the files of the old dumper there will be no such error messages.
Quote:I had to try a couple of usb sticks until it worked but after I found one that worked it was a 2 minute job. They were all FAT32 formatted too.
Then I suppose it is just a matter of this elf using obsolete USB drivers, much like the early versions of USBAdvance and many PS2 homebrew applications did. These gave compatibility to a small fraction of all available drives, with some preference for obsolete drive types.
Modern PS2 homebrew USB drivers on the other hand, as used by FMCB, uLaunchELF and "Open PS2 Loader", have compatibility to appx 95%+ of all available USB drives, so I guess I have become a bit 'spoiled' by that...
Quote:Again, we are all trying our best here and you're not coming off really helpful bashing the whole thing.
I haven't bashed any individual in all of this, and I never would.
That was never my intention with any post in this forum, but merely to draw attention to a problem that needs to be fixed.
For I do think that this problem urgently needs fixing, as it can mess things up for many newbies who have no clue how else to get a legal bios dump to use with the emulator, and then they start asking for illegal bios attachments etc (as has happened many times already).
Quote:Yes it needs to be improved, yes there are problems with it but people are doing this on their free time. If you want perfectly working, ready to use out of the box software, this isn't it (it's free after all).
I understand all that, and sympathise completely, as I too am a homebrew developer, though not of pcsx2 stuff, as my homebrew software work is focused more on the real PS2 console (though partly usable in pcsx2 as well).
And I realize that it can be hard to fix this as well as we would like when the people who wrote the original dumpers have disappeared, and apparently the source code for those tools have gone the same way...
But some things can be done right away, even without access to any source code, to allow all newbies to do this right and get a bios file set that works perfectly (without false error messages).
One of those things is to correct the tutorial pages that currently tell people to use the new dumper as stated in the docs of that package. The docs which are no longer valid as the format they describe using was never adopted by the real emulator. This situation needs to be clearly stated in the tutorials, to clarify to the users what they need to do.
And then another package should be put together, containing both the old and the new bios dumper, and with instructions for how to use both of them and combine the files they produce so as to get a perfect bios file set.
In the end that is what I did myself. (After my previous post here.)
I took the files dumped by the new dumper program (except that silly ".bat") and to these I added the ".EROM" and ".ROM2" files dumped by the older program, and then I renamed all of those files to use the same name prefix (with CRC strings removed), so that they only differ in their extensions (within a given bios version set that is).
With the resulting combined file set I get the specific advantages of both the separate sets I'd tried before.
Just as with the files of the old dumper I can now run the emulator without any error messages, but I also get the bioses of the slim consoles correctly identified as european by pcsx2, which failed when using only the bios files of the old dumper (pcsx2 then saw those bioses as being japanese).
It should not be very hard or demanding at all for someone to write up a small text describing how to combine the file sets, and put that text file inside a ZIP (or '.7z' file) together with both of the two dumpers needed to get the complete bios file set that pcsx2 wants. And with that package added to edited versions of the tutorial pages this problem would cease to exist.
Of course some of the newbies could still mess up in other ways.
That sort of thing will always happen to some of them.
But at least it would no longer be caused by incorrect tutorials.
Best regards: dlanor