Chihiro on XBOX

[JayFoxRox]

Any other Chihiro games use 128mb or less?

Should be all of them.

To my understanding the Mediaboard is presented mostly as storage media.

The xbox is completly on its own and always uses the 128MB motherboard - there is not room for more and the kernel will not be able to handle more either.
The xbox and chihiro kernel are the same except for some keys (which have been figured out already). None of the kernels support virtual memory.

The mediaboard driver should be in the staticly linked libraries. By easily making the game data accessible (I forgot wether it supports mapping files for reading (writing not possible at least) to memory / sorta-virtual memory) it provides sorta-virtual rom.

I'm not sure if the mediaboard itself is accepted as flash or wether the flash of the xbox was modified. I can't remember if the jvs part uses it's own communication code (which would very likely still be in the games code - the chihiro kernel has the same exports as the debug kernel iirc) or if it provides a gamepad which the xbox automaticly detects.


If chihiro games crash even though enough memory is installed you should probably check which memory allocation routines they are using and which paths they try to access. It's very likely they try to allocate memory in the lower 64MB when that region is already full - swapping or fixing the allocation function for 128MB should be enough then (and probably what MAMEX does).
If the path goes to the mediaboard you should remap that to the FATX rom image somehow.

[/iirc and afaik]

[blueshogun96]

Okay, I started dumping the contents of some of the Chihiro chds and testing them on my debug Xbox. So far, the only ones I tried is Ollie King and House of the Dead 3. When I try running those on my debug Xbox, I get some flashing LEDs. The sequence is Red and Orange. Not sure why this happens. Is it memory related or do the .xbe files need to be patched first? I have no idea how much memory is needed for HOTD3, but Ollie King needs at least 512mb afaik.

Any insight to this would be appreciated.

[Borman]

That is normal behavior. Likely a RAM issue, among who knows what else.

[blueshogun96]

We'll see. JayFox said that he got Ghost Squad to load the menus before crashing, and that game required at least 512mb. I assume that ram doesn't become an issue until the game is getting ready to go ingame, unless a game explicitly checks for enough ram to load before starting up. Most Xbox games don't bother checking, but further tests will tell...

[Grippen]

Heh. If only porting were so easy. Talking about living in fantasy land.

Thanks for the laugh. ;)

Well I'm no expert but I only said that because Ghost Squad was ported. And the game engine of Ghost Squad should be very similar if not the same of Virtua Cop 3. As so I doubt they went and port the game not anticipating a future need and if that was the case for sure they have a script to do it. Maybe it won't work out of box but would be close. Anyway I just said this because the games are very similar just different graphics.

But I'm glad I made you laugh :P

[JayFoxRox]

We'll see. JayFox said that he got Ghost Squad to load the menus before crashing, and that game required at least 512mb. I assume that ram doesn't become an issue until the game is getting ready to go ingame, unless a game explicitly checks for enough ram to load before starting up. Most Xbox games don't bother checking, but further tests will tell...

The 512 MB is not actual "RAM" in the sense of "system RAM" which can be accessed from the CPU.
Instead you have to think about the chihiro like a solid state drive.
Each GD-ROM basicly has multiple images for different DIMM Boards (The content is - at least for some games the same [but more likely for all of them]).
The image, like I already said in my last post, is only a FATX image.
You install 512 MB DIMM Board and what the chihiro does at startup, is basicly copying the matching game image from the GD-ROM to that RAM. That (DIMM Board) RAM, however, can not be addressed by the x86.

Instead it's mapped as a (if I remember correctly IDE) harddisk-style/filesystem device on the xbox. So when the game requires data it can read the data from the mediaboard RAM using the filesystem (It's part of the idex subsystem in the kernel and the driver was called mediabrd or something like that).
However, the xbox is still limited to 128 MB RAM which can be addressed by the CPU and the GPU (and hence the application will and can not require more).

This also means that none of the chihiro games should have problems running on an actual 128 MB debug xbox unless they try to fetch data from the mediaboard (which can be hooked rather easily probably) or write to chihiro specific ports directly.

[blueshogun96]

Yes, I was sorta getting this impression since numerous GD-ROMs contain a separate image for 512 and 1GB FATX images. I haven't done enough research on how Chihiro works from that stand point. I didn't believe that the RAM would be an immediate issue because when launching the service/rom test .xbe file, I also get the flashing LEDs, and I've already checked and confirmed though Cxbx that it does not do any memory checks, so that's not it. I'm really curious as to why OllieKing and HotD3 cause my LEDs to flash. I'm going to try Crazy Taxi and see if I get the same result. Maybe there's something wrong with the way I'm dumping it, I dunno. I had someone else dump VC3 for me.

[JayFoxRox]

VC3 only works on one of my xboxes (I have quite a few xboxes - all applications except for VC3 work accross all of them) too. I guess it's related to the kernel and maybe even the hardware revision.

The flashing could be the missing filesystem or missing / bad video-cable. Besides that, the only problem I could imagine would be the mediaboard access using IO ports (Can't remember if that was even done because I don't remember any chihiro specific IO ports even existing, though, for force feedback and cabinet lighting that probably exists somewhere on a per-game basis).

[LoveGHz]

Besides that, the only problem I could imagine would be the mediaboard access using IO ports (Can't remember if that was even done because I don't remember any chihiro specific IO ports even existing, though, for force feedback and cabinet lighting that probably exists somewhere on a per-game basis).

The Chihiro boards I have look to be stock except for the LPC port.

'mediabrd' should be a place to start reading though.. Though I need to get around to extracting some of the images so I can load an XBE in IDA and start poking around.

[nonosto]

I noticed that, with VC3 and Ghostsquad (before crash with arcade xbe) controller or light gun work fine.
Moreover, for arcade xbe game crash exactly after one minute if you let it run (demo game) or mission select download, for other game black screen boot.
It seem be it look like crash when you extract security chip from Chihiro motherboard. Normaly, in extract process we decrypted the FATX image, but Chihiro game need check security chip every minute, else freeze, like with XBOX actually. With Naomi Netboot no problem, maybe one way for our problem.
The other problem, like JayFoxRoy said we need creat a patch for point the right address from HDD to RAM.

[nonosto]

Dear all

Crediar succes to use Triforce game on Wii with Quadforce. Naomi emulator or netboot system runtoo. Triforce,Naomi, and CHihiro has the same security chip system, do you think can us to inspirate of Quadforce or netboot python script to will work VC3 and Ghostsquad arcade file.

[Shinebi]

Oooh, that would be nice if VC3 worked on the Wii as well without any upgrade.

[nonosto]

Not on Wii it's impossible, For xbox dev kit 128mb only