PlusCart (an inexpensive DIY WiFi multicart)

[Capellão]

2 minutes ago, Al_Nafuur said:

@MarcoJ @ZackAttack and @Capellão, what firmware version has your ESP8266 on the PlusCart (Setup -> System Info -> WiFi Firmware)?

 

 

Wi-Fi firmware 1.7.4.0

[+MarcoJ]

2 hours ago, Al_Nafuur said:

what firmware version has your ESP8266 on the PlusCart (Setup -> System Info -> WiFi Firmware)?

1.2.0.0 

 

I tried numerous times to upgrade it, but it didn't work.

[+MarcoJ]

On 4/24/2024 at 12:01 AM, Prizrak said:

I was looking for tutankham, I also looked at games by alphabet and it's cut off at like 5 company names.

I also came across this today. A workaround i'm using is to have less roms per folder. It seems that there is a current limit of around 29 ROMs per folder. If there are 29 or less it displays all of them. If there are 30 or more it show only 5 of the first ones. 

[+Al_Nafuur]

1 hour ago, MarcoJ said:

I also came across this today. A workaround i'm using is to have less roms per folder. It seems that there is a current limit of around 29 ROMs per folder. If there are 29 or less it displays all of them. If there are 30 or more it show only 5 of the first ones. 

This should be fixed with v2.3.21. @Prizrak as far as I can see from the logs you have successfully update to v2.3.21, can you retest?

 

For all beta tester that have failed updates via the PlusStore, here are the firmware files to update manually:

PlusCart_2.3.21.binPlusCart_2.3.21.elf

 

It would be interesting to test the loading of particularly large ROMs, like e.g.:

Penult Demo (Public ROMs/Homebrew/NTSC/M-P/Penult Demo)

Prince Of Indiana I/II/III (Public ROMs/Homebrew/Author Spotlight/GFVH/Prince of Indiana 1|2|3)

Some of the ACE Demos (Public ROMs/PlusCart Exclusives/ACE Demos/RPG_4K_ACE)

 

[+MarcoJ]

14 minutes ago, Al_Nafuur said:

This should be fixed with v2.3.21

Confirmed. All the folders have their files now. Thank you

13 minutes ago, Al_Nafuur said:

Penult Demo (Public ROMs/Homebrew/NTSC/M-P/Penult Demo)

Prince Of Indiana I/II/III (Public ROMs/Homebrew/Author Spotlight/GFVH/Prince of Indiana 1|2|3)

Some of the ACE Demos (Public ROMs/PlusCart Exclusives/ACE Demos/RPG_4K_ACE)

Penult: Failed

Prince of Indiana I/II/II: Failed

ACE Demos: Failed

 

I imagine these are all trying to fill the Buffer completely to perform ROM detection. 

 

[+Al_Nafuur]

2 minutes ago, MarcoJ said:

Confirmed. All the folders have their files now. Thank you

Penult: Failed

Prince of Indiana I/II/II: Failed

ACE Demos: Failed

 

I imagine these are all trying to fill the Buffer completely to perform ROM detection. 

 

I only see the first 32K request from your PlusCart in the logs.

 

My suspicion is that because of the missing "Content-Length" HTTP header some hubs get the idea to convert the response into "Transport-Encoding: chunked". The larger the response, the more so. And the further away the client is from the server, the more hubs there are between them and the greater the risk that one of these hubs will do it.

 

The small chunk headers in the response would end up in the ROM bin that the PlusCart will execute. But even worse is that these small headers will make the response longer than the PlusCart expects and the ESP8266 is still sending some chars on the UART connection between the STM and the ESP when the STM is trying to make the next request.

 

What speaks against this theory is that I did not find the chunk headers in your ROM dump.

 

 

 

[+MarcoJ]

1 minute ago, Al_Nafuur said:

The larger the response, the more so. And the further away the client is from the server, the more hubs there are between them and the greater the risk that one of these hubs will do it.

Is there another PlusCart user in your country that could trial this theory? Perhaps the firmware upgrade is also behaving this way too?

[+Al_Nafuur]

@MarcoJ do you have ESPlorer (https://github.com/4refr0nt/ESPlorer) to send a request to a large folder listing or a file with the ESP8266 on the PC to the PlusStore API?

 

Remote-IP/Host: pluscart.firmaplus.de

 

GET /api.php?p=URL_ENCODE_PATH_TO_FILE_OR_FOLDER HTTP/1.0
Host: pluscart.firmaplus.de
plusstore-id: v2.3.21 YOUR_PLUSCART_DEVICE_ID
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: */*

 

[+Al_Nafuur]

4 minutes ago, MarcoJ said:

Perhaps the firmware upgrade is also behaving this way too?

Yes of course, the firmware download is using the same functions in the PlusCart than the ROM download

[+MarcoJ]

I have tried as shown. When I click the buttons, I don't see feedback. What is meant to happen?

 

[+Al_Nafuur]

1 hour ago, MarcoJ said:

I have tried as shown. When I click the buttons, I don't see feedback. What is meant to happen?

 

You have to connect to your ESP8266 via a FTDI (baud rate 115000)

 

See this thread:

 

 

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I am not following the discussion very closely, so can someone provide a summary of the current state, please?

 

What's the chance that my PlusCart will soon continue to work again?

Edited April 28 by Thomas Jentzsch

[+MarcoJ]

25 minutes ago, Al_Nafuur said:

ou have to connect to your ESP8266 via a FTDI (baud rate 115000)

Oh right, I need the USB to Wifi adapter and a spare adapter. I'll have a rummage through my parts bin and see if I still have them.

[+MarcoJ]

24 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

so can someone provide a summary of the current state, please

For me at least, PlusCart works for <32kB roms with USB/ST-Link upgrade of firmware to latest 2.3.18+ firmware. Firmware <=2.3.17 is broken due to API issue. 

[+Al_Nafuur]

27 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

I am not following the discussion very closely, so can someone provide a summary of the current state, please?

 

What's the chance that my PlusCart will soon continue to work again?

Currently it looks like we are not finding a workaround for the "bad" server settings that is working "worldwide". So worst case, if the hoster is not reverting the changes, is to move the domain to a self-managed server. This would take me a few days, because I am not a admin and I would need some time to configure the webserver for our needs.

 

[+Al_Nafuur]

The smallest virtual server is only € 1 per month:

https://www.ionos.de/server/vps#tarife

 

I'll ask the support during my daily nagging call tomorrow, if this vServers have access to the databases of my hosting package.

 

[+Al_Nafuur]

@MarcoJ can you retest loading larger files with v2.3.21? I have added more Cache-Control headers (no-transform) to the response:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control#must-understand

 

Intermediates like Hubs, Proxies and Caches should now not change the response. I am not sure this will work, because from the hubs' point of view they only "repair" an invalid response, an HTTP/1.1 response without Content-Length can only be a chunked response.

 

[+MarcoJ]

2 hours ago, Al_Nafuur said:

can you retest loading larger files with v2.3.21?

Will do in 12h

[Capellão]

9 hours ago, Al_Nafuur said:

Isso deve ser corrigido com v2.3.21.@PrizrakPelo que posso ver nos logs que você atualizou com sucesso para v2.3.21, você pode testar novamente?

 

Para todos os testadores beta que falharam nas atualizações por meio do PlusStore, aqui estão os arquivos de firmware para atualizar manualmente:

PlusCart_2.3.21.bin 117,32kB · 3 downloads PlusCart_2.3.21.elf 164,85 KB · 1 baixar

 

Seria interessante testar o carregamento de ROMs particularmente grandes, como por exemplo:

Demonstração Penult (ROMs públicas/Homebrew/NTSC/MP/Demonstração Penult)

Prince Of Indiana I/II/III (ROMs públicas/Homebrew/Autor Spotlight/GFVH/Prince of Indiana 1|2|3)

Algumas das demonstrações ACE (ROMs públicas/Exclusivos PlusCart/Demos ACE/RPG_4K_ACE)

 

I installed version 2.3 21 on a new cartridge and it worked fine.

[+Al_Nafuur]

31 minutes ago, Capellão said:

I installed version 2.3 21 on a new cartridge and it worked fine.

Have you tested large ROMs, like e.g.:

Penult Demo (Public ROMs/Homebrew/NTSC/M-P/Penult Demo)

Prince Of Indiana I/II/III (Public ROMs/Homebrew/Author Spotlight/GFVH/Prince of Indiana 1|2|3)

Some of the ACE Demos (Public ROMs/PlusCart Exclusives/ACE Demos/RPG_4K_ACE)

 

[Capellão]

32 minutes ago, Al_Nafuur said:

Have you tested large ROMs, like e.g.:

Penult Demo (Public ROMs/Homebrew/NTSC/M-P/Penult Demo)

Prince Of Indiana I/II/III (Public ROMs/Homebrew/Author Spotlight/GFVH/Prince of Indiana 1|2|3)

Some of the ACE Demos (Public ROMs/PlusCart Exclusives/ACE Demos/RPG_4K_ACE)

 

these did not load. I had only tested the classics before.

[+MarcoJ]

8 hours ago, MarcoJ said:

Will do in 12h

No go sorry @Al_Nafuur. "ROM Download failed"

[+Al_Nafuur]

On 4/28/2024 at 6:11 PM, Al_Nafuur said:

The smallest virtual server is only € 1 per month:

https://www.ionos.de/server/vps#tarife

 

I'll ask the support during my daily nagging call tomorrow, if this vServers have access to the databases of my hosting package.

 

No they don't have access to the DBs and the files of the hosting package.

 

But after thinking about it a bit, it occurred to me that this is not necessary at all if I just set up a "proxy" Apache/PHP on the vServer that simply forwards the request to the hosting package and fixes the broken headers in the response to the PlusCart clients.

 

After tinkering with this idea the best part of the evening the PlusCart API subdomain is now pointing to the vServer and the API on the webhosting has a new subdomain. This seems to work now and all my test PlusCarts with v2.3.17 firmware are working again.

 

However, there are some disadvantages:

All links to other services and the PlusCart website on the subdomain are now pointing to the vServer too. I had to redirect them on the vServer to the new subdomain. But since I don't have a SSL certificate on the server this only works if they are requested via http and not https.

[Capellão]

3 hours ago, Al_Nafuur said:

No they don't have access to the DBs and the files of the hosting package.

 

But after thinking about it a bit, it occurred to me that this is not necessary at all if I just set up a "proxy" Apache/PHP on the vServer that simply forwards the request to the hosting package and fixes the broken headers in the response to the PlusCart clients.

 

After tinkering with this idea the best part of the evening the PlusCart API subdomain is now pointing to the vServer and the API on the webhosting has a new subdomain. This seems to work now and all my test PlusCarts with v2.3.17 firmware are working again.

 

However, there are some disadvantages:

All links to other services and the PlusCart website on the subdomain are now pointing to the vServer too. I had to redirect them on the vServer to the new subdomain. But since I don't have a SSL certificate on the server this only works if they are requested via http and not https.

Good evening, access is normal here. I would like to thank you for your great effort in handling this case.

[spspspsp]

I've been following this thread--it sounds like a pain. But thank you for keeping the server going.

 

I just tried connecting carts with ID# 68 & 70 and they seemed to work fine. 

 

However, cart 68 has WiFi firmware v1.6.2 and PlusCart software v2.3.16 and I was unable to do an OTA update.

 

Could the error be on my end?