Hopefully I will get my thoughts together and write up what I have learnt about this product through reverse engineering some of the emulators and exploring the SD card and the underlying OS (Linux).
Please backup your SD card before going any further.
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dat files for the FBNeo emulator.
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a screenshot of a couple of bytes to patch to enable the P1 R and P1 L buttons to work in the FBNeo emulator. This screenshot show the changes to be made to /emus/fbneo/fbneo. Please check the SHA-256 hash of the file first and if it is not
24B4026764C6B8F218D56222A534EDB3D21210A2C8FCDEE8A5F96505D6B85E9Fthen please don't perform this edit. -
a remap file for the (patched) FBNeo emulator that orders the 6 buttons (of each player) correctly for Street Fighter 2 (maybe more).
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some information extracted from the running system
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a list of the built-in games.
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some details and pictures of the hardware
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some details of the emulators
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Use a program to refresh the /game.db sqlite db.
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delete the built in roms and images and place your own in the /roms sub folders and then rebuild the game.db index doing away with using the /download folder (see issues below for why).
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Fix the issue of FBNeo arcade games being listed as their cryptic (upto) 8 character rom names and give them human readable names..
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replace the mame emulator (because it is an exact dupe of the fbneo emulator) with a script that can run other scripts to extract information from the running system such as:
- directory listing to see what programs and files are available in the Linux OS
- getting the FBNeo emulator to dump its dat files
- process list
- debugging information
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improving some of the menu wordings by editing:
- /tr/en_US.json
- /menu/2/menubg*.png
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MAME is shown as a separate emulator but it is just a copy of the FBNeo (aka FBA) emulator. (let's repurpose it).
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If you add roms to the appropriate emulator sub dir in /downloads, duplicate entries for some games might appear after saving a game and rebooting the console. This is because while most emulators save their game state in the emulator folder, some emulators eg GB, GBC, MD save their state in the rom folder and the next time the console is rebooted it will rescan the download folder and add a non working entry to the list. You will end up with a non working entry for every save state slot you use. (we can fix this).
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FBNeo emulator (and it's clone MAME) have a misconfiguration which means that the Player 1 L and R buttons have no effect, which impacts many fighting games. (fixable by patching emulator and adding a keyremap files).
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FBNeo games are listed as their cryptic rom .zip file name which is ugly by comparison to the other emulators which can have nice human readable names. (See page 10 in the manual for an example of this). (let's do something about this).
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Most emulators are fully stretched to fill the screen. It would be nice to be able to control the scaling especially for Gameboy games. (no luck so far).
The key to exploring the running OS of the system (if you care) is to replace one of the emulator binaries eg /emus/mame/fbneo (because it is a duplicate emulator) with a bash style (actually mksh) shell script.
#!/bin/sh
logfile="$0.log"; log () { echo $1 >> $logfile && /bin/sync; }
log "Current Working Directory: $PWD"
filename=$1
log "Rom: $filename"
and then loading up any rom in that emulator which will cause the script to be run instead.
Note:
- line endings must be Linux style
LFnot Windows StyleCRLF - call
/bin/syncliberally otherwise file output might not be flushed to the SD Card before you turn it off - you can check then check the output of this script eg
/emus/mame/fbneo.log - the current working directory is the emulator's folder eg
/emu/mame - the path to the SDcard is
/mnt/extsd/