Franco72 Posted May 16, 2022 Share Posted May 16, 2022 Hi, the New games do not work on my Harmony Encore SD Card: Mappy Galagon Draconian_20171020_RC8 Because? they had to send me the fixed games. what could be the problem? Harmony Encore I purchased in 2022 SD Pal Version Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+batari Posted May 16, 2022 Share Posted May 16, 2022 The chips used in Harmony carts come in three different silicon revisions. Until last year, I hadn't used any chips from one particular silicon revision, as the ones I got from various suppliers were always the other two. When I started using the chips from this one silicon revision late last year, it was discovered that some of them had an issue with some of the current CDFJ games and at least one DPC+ game I know of. Fortunately some investigation revealed a way to fix the games to work on all silicon revisions. What happened last year is all of the normal suppliers' stocks dried up due to the global silicon shortage, but I was able to find a relatively large stock of NOS surplus chips and bought them up. I have enough such that I can continue to make Harmony carts for years to come without having to raise prices, and this is a good thing in a world where everyone else is jacking up prices! So, most of the chips from that large stock I have are from that one silicon revision that I hadn't used before. Some of the fixed binaries are not public so I can't post them here, but if you bought digital copies and have an older version of the game then of course you can get a fixed version (and fixed versions will work on all silicon revisions.) At least one of the games is publicly available (Space Rocks) which I fixed, so I can post that one here. I have to post it as a zip file because the forum won't let me post the actual binary for some reason, so make sure to unzip it first. If any other games are publicly available and need fixing, I can do that and post them, of course, just let me know. spacerocks_Harmony_fix.bin.zip 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Franco72 Posted May 17, 2022 Author Share Posted May 17, 2022 draconian_20171020_RC8 not work Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SpiceWare Posted May 19, 2022 Share Posted May 19, 2022 On 5/16/2022 at 3:20 PM, batari said: If any other games are publicly available and need fixing, I can do that and post them, of course, just let me know. The Draconian ROM is publicly available here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted May 19, 2022 Share Posted May 19, 2022 On 5/16/2022 at 10:20 PM, batari said: The chips used in Harmony carts come in three different silicon revisions. Until last year, I hadn't used any chips from one particular silicon revision, as the ones I got from various suppliers were always the other two. When I started using the chips from this one silicon revision late last year, it was discovered that some of them had an issue with some of the current CDFJ games and at least one DPC+ game I know of. Fortunately some investigation revealed a way to fix the games to work on all silicon revisions. Can you explain a few more details here, please? If one revision works and one does not, why does this happen? Due to a hardware and/or a software bug/spec change? And how can we make sure, that the games continue to function in future revisions? Else these games might stop working in the future on then available hardware. While the original games from the 70s and 80s have no such problem. Eventually there will be no one left, who can fix the ROMs and then these games can only be played in emulation. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+batari Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 17 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said: Can you explain a few more details here, please? If one revision works and one does not, why does this happen? Due to a hardware and/or a software bug/spec change? And how can we make sure, that the games continue to function in future revisions? Else these games might stop working in the future on then available hardware. While the original games from the 70s and 80s have no such problem. Eventually there will be no one left, who can fix the ROMs and then these games can only be played in emulation. The manufacturer doesn't tell us exactly what is different in the various silicon revisions. I have even contacted them to ask specifics and got no reply. They only will tell us things like, "if you encounter a problem, here is a workaround." So essentially, I just applied the workarounds to the existing code. I think someone commented that one game had only three bytes changed, as the workarounds are usually pretty simple. I have also found conversations online where some have speculated about the nature of the issues and have figured out their own workarounds that work, so when possible I have also applied those workarounds to be sure. There are likely to be no future revisions of these chips. The last revision was around 10 years ago. Some original games from the 70s and 80s definitely have had problems with various silicon revisions. To name just one off the top of my head, Kool-Aid Man would function differently (some say incorrectly) on late TIA chips. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+batari Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 On 5/16/2022 at 5:18 PM, Franco72 said: draconian_20171020_RC8 not work Just FYI, I am working on this. I need to backport the fixes to the older driver used for Draconian, so I should have that together in a day or two. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 3 hours ago, batari said: There are likely to be no future revisions of these chips. The last revision was around 10 years ago. That's good news, thanks! 3 hours ago, batari said: Some original games from the 70s and 80s definitely have had problems with various silicon revisions. To name just one off the top of my head, Kool-Aid Man would function differently (some say incorrectly) on late TIA chips. That's exactly the situation we should try to avoid. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Erik Zimmermann Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 The Games spacerocks and Draconian are an inspiration for a own space game! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 3 hours ago, batari said: Just FYI, I am working on this. I need to backport the fixes to the older driver used for Draconian, so I should have that together in a day or two. Will the fixed ROMs require fixes in Stella too? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+batari Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 11 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said: Will the fixed ROMs require fixes in Stella too? No, they should work the same in Stella. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+batari Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 OK, I have applied the patches to Draconian. Again, the forum is not allowing me to upload the .bin file, so I had to zip it first. Draconian_Harmony_fix.bin.zip 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SpiceWare Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 On 5/16/2022 at 3:20 PM, batari said: At least one of the games is publicly available (Space Rocks) which I fixed, so I can post that one here. This version fixed an issue seen by Dave2600 in this topic. He's in the UK so the colors were wrong as that was the NTSC version. I did this to create an updated version of the PAL build for him, like I did when the Encore patch came out, and posted them in the Space Rocks topic (which I've since removed). dd count=3 if=spacerocks_Harmony_fix.bin of=DPC+20220411.arm bs=1024 dd skip=3 count=29 if=spacerocks20121129_NTSC.bin of=srn29K.bin bs=1024 cat DPC+20220411.arm srn29K.bin > spacerocks2022519_NTSC.bin dd skip=3 count=29 if=spacerocks20121129_PAL.bin of=srp29K.bin bs=1024 cat DPC+20220411.arm srp29K.bin > spacerocks2022519_PAL60.bin He reported that the problem was fixed with your version, but not with mine. I did a hexdump then diff and the game code was different. Any ideas? Here's the files I did it with: HarmonyFix2.zip 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+batari Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 4 minutes ago, SpiceWare said: This version fixed an issue seen by Dave2600 in this topic. He's in the UK so the colors were wrong as that was the NTSC version. I did this to create an updated version of the PAL build for him, like I did when the Encore patch came out, and posted them in the Space Rocks topic (which I've since removed). dd count=3 if=spacerocks_Harmony_fix.bin of=DPC+20220411.arm bs=1024 dd skip=3 count=29 if=spacerocks20121129_NTSC.bin of=srn29K.bin bs=1024 cat DPC+20220411.arm srn29K.bin > spacerocks2022519_NTSC.bin dd skip=3 count=29 if=spacerocks20121129_PAL.bin of=srp29K.bin bs=1024 cat DPC+20220411.arm srp29K.bin > spacerocks2022519_PAL60.bin He reported that the problem was fixed with your version, but not with mine. I did a hexdump then diff and the game code was different. Any ideas? Here's the files I did it with: HarmonyFix2.zip 338.37 kB · 0 downloads One of the fixes for Space Rocks involved changing the stack pointer, and the only way to do that was to rebuild the game from source. If the version is different it is likely because I was using a different version of the C compiler. EDIT: I changed the stack pointer from 0x40001FDC to 0x40001FFC in the linker script. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SpiceWare Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 That makes sense. I swapped the driver out like that as the last time I tried to rebuild Space Rocks from source the ROM ended up > 32K as the compiler version had changed. The VM I'd originally used stopped working after an update to Parallels, which is why I switched to Virtual Box. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted May 20, 2022 Share Posted May 20, 2022 17 minutes ago, batari said: Again, the forum is not allowing me to upload the .bin file, so I had to zip it first. Weird. Works for me. Draconian_Harmony_fix.bin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aragorn7 Posted June 14, 2022 Share Posted June 14, 2022 (edited) Private messaged instead. Edited June 14, 2022 by Aragorn7 PM'd instead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pres Posted July 15, 2022 Share Posted July 15, 2022 This thread has really brought me some relief. I bought a Harmony cart this year and have been having issues with some newer games which was the reason for purchase. I am in the UK (PAL) and sourcing these newer titles is tricky now thanks to Boris and co. I bought Wizard of Wor Arcade from Champ and that is mostly fine, but corrupts when you go to the character points screen. Robot War will not even load. But I am only trying the demo, don’t want to risk buying that until the demo works. Stay Frosty 2 crashes on the third screen when you flick a switch for a platform. Draconian was another, but seeing the new version load up really made my day. How about a sticky list for reported game issues? Or a column on an existing table with an updated flag? I know I am new here and making a request. I can handle the answer being just monitor the posts. Thanks everyone for all the efforts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+batari Posted July 15, 2022 Share Posted July 15, 2022 You are reminding me now that the issue you mentioned with Stay Frosty 2 was fixed a year or so ago. I'll attach this version here (PAL version.) I will look for the NTSC version as well for others. I don't recall if I fixed WoW yet, let me take a look. If not I can get a fixed version to Champ Games so you can get that. I do not recall fixing RobotWar yet, but I can take a look at the demo, and eventually get the commercial version fixed. SF2fix_PAL.bin 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+batari Posted July 15, 2022 Share Posted July 15, 2022 I applied the fixes to the RobotWar demo. This is NTSC, but if there are no issues I can apply the same fixes to the PAL demo. RobotWar-2684_demo_final_NTSC_Harmonyfix.bin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pres Posted July 15, 2022 Share Posted July 15, 2022 Thank you very much for those files. I can confirm that i made it through six levels of Stay Frosty and three levels of Robot War. They did not crash, I just need to improve Thanks for fixing them batari. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Child_of_Winter Posted August 10, 2022 Share Posted August 10, 2022 I am having issues with the Qyx demo from Champ Games, I believe it's because of this chip revision problem. The player marker does not show up on the Title Screen or the Instructions Screen, and during gameplay the Qix is invisible. Also, have you got the NTSC version of Stay Frosty 2? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mezmaron Posted October 22, 2022 Share Posted October 22, 2022 I also have the issue on the Qyx demo with the invisible Qix. Also getting the glitches with Wizard of Wor mentioned above, both with the demo and then on the full version I purchased. If you let it go in attract mode, the character name screen gets all glitchy, and the gameplay soon follows with monsters and players going through or getting stuck in walls in the attract mode and in-game if you start a game after it happens. It will also occasionally wipe out my high scores for the game on my SaveKey when it glitches out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+batari Posted February 3, 2023 Share Posted February 3, 2023 I thought I had posted the NTSC Stay Frosty 2 fix, but I do not see it above. I will post it here. I am pretty sure this is it, but let me know if there are any issues. SF2fix_NTSC.bin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Child_of_Winter Posted February 3, 2023 Share Posted February 3, 2023 Just tried that Stay Frosty 2 ROM and it works. Thank you! Also the current Qyx demo on the Champ Games website seems to have been fixed and is working fine for me too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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