4 Attachment(s)
PSP: Convert MVS and CPS2 ROMS For NJ's Arcade Emulators On OS X With MacX_romcnv
I've spent a bit of my spare time over the last few months porting NJ's ROM converters to OS X. Anyway, what with all of the different OS X versions and the different PowerPC and Intel macs, I do not know how many setups this will work under, but I've thoroughly tested it on a PowerPC running 10.3.9. Feedback on how this works on other people's Macs would be very much appreciated (although I don't pretend that I'll be able to do anything about problems arising from setups that I can't duplicate/anticipate).
It should go without saying, but this is only for use with games that you legally own. Accordingly, I have only tested it with a few games (and even then, I've only checked that they initially work, I haven't had the chance to extensively test-play any yet). If you find that this doesn't work with any of your games, please post which one(s) they are and I will see if there isn't anything I can do to fix it.
The usage should be self explanatory, but complete instructions are included in the readme file.
Much thanks to NJ and the original MAME team for making this possible.
Note About The GUIs
In a seperate thread, Paladinja pointed out that if you choose the "Generate compressed cache files" under the CPS2 section, and then later try to unzip and use those files, that they WON'T work. When I first read that, I thought "of course", but then I recently launched the GUI and saw that displayed text message does say that it WILL work. I appologize for this, but the cache system has undergone many changes since I started porting this tool, and originally the zipped cache files WERE the same as the unzipped files. I can't remember when the change occured, but the data contained in each file type is now indeed different. So, rather than releasing a GUI update just to fix that one sentance, I'm letting you know here.
Update: 3/14/2007
Attachment 16817
These are the backend command line tools for converting roms for compatibility with the 2.0.6 versions of both emulators. As before, I haven't tested much, and if you like graphical interfaces, then you'll need to add these to one of the appropriate packages from below.
Due to the fact that NJ made some major changes to the source code, I think that these will run on Intels, but I don't know for sure.
If these don't work on Intels, cheer up, because NJ's raw source is now super-easy to compile on macs, so just go ahead and grab the sources and compile yourself some converters.
These steps were all it took to compile the converters from NJ's virgin source on my mac:
- Change all instances of "zopen(" to something else (I use "z_open("). This doesn't even take 10 seconds using a text editor that can recursively search-and-replace. TextWrangler (freeware) does this beautifully.
- Remove all <malloc.h> headers. I only found one in common.h and unzip.c each.
- cd into the romcnv source directory and compile! (make -f makefile.mvs UNIX=1)
- I always ran into a problem at this point that required me to run: ranlib ./obj_mvs/zlib.a
- Run make one more time
Of course, I had to tweak the code to make them compatible with the GUI front end, so raw compiles from NJ's source won't work with my GUI. -- Just in case anyone was interested.
Update: 2/18/2007
Attachment 15893
Finished porting the converters for the 2.0 versions of both emulators. I've tested these even less then the previous versions, but the tests I have done have gone well. Please let me know if you have any problems.
These are just the command line tools, so if you prefer to use a graphical interface, you'll also need one of the GUI versions from below.
Update: 1/20/2007
Attachment 14555
There have been reports that the GUI below doesn't recognize zip files for some people. The details of the reports have been somewhat vague so I can't say for sure, but I think this is a 10.4+ specific problem. In any case, if this is a problem that you've had, either use the raw CLI backends or try this alternate GUI which has been confirmed to address this specific issue. This package does not contain any of the nessecary CLI backends, so you will have to use use the ones from the 2.0 update above, or the original release below. See this post for instructions on where to put the CLI backends.
Original GUI+Converters Release: 1/17/2007
Attachment 14465
This is the original release package which contains both the GUI and the CLI backends for romcnv_mvs for MVSPSP 1.63 and romcnv_cps2 for CPS2PSP 1.66. Source is included in this package. There are English and Japanese versions of the program and all materials, and I can always package more if anyone out there is willing to do translations for other languages.
