To the moon and back

My homebrew development kit has recently been upgraded to include a shiny DS lite, in order to enjoy the true colors of my pixels. That's for the neat side. I asked my brother to get me a R4 chip to fuel it, since i had quite a good experience with his (see former entries), and so he ordered me a R4-IIISDHC. Quite confusing device, i must say. On the web, everything looks like it is indeed an upgrade of the former R4, but documentation provided doesn't match the device's operation. It doesn't seem to be really using MoonShell at all (which my bross installed on the device, following former instruction), and it is said to be "a fake, scam, don't buy" on forums (as of june 2008)...

En plus de ma DS "phat" et sa Supercard, me voici équipé d'une DS Lite et sa R4-IIIsdhc, légèrement différente de la R4 "originale" de mon frère, et un rien intriguante (nombreux forums la dénonce comme "clone pirate" de la R4), mais en gros, je n'ai pas à m'en plaindre. Seul hic, ils ont fait l'impasse sur le "CD d'installation", pourtant annoncé sur le site du constructeur (www.r4iii.com, www.r4iiisdhc.com ou www.r4dsl.net selon celle que vous avez obtenue). Il faudra donc aller télécharger le "kernel" adapté et installer les fichiers à la racine de votre carte mémoire micro-SD, faute de quoi, vous aurez juste droit à un écran bigarré avec un petit logo "loading" animé en bas à droite de l'écran ...

I first thought that the authors of MoonShell didn't like that their product was embedded and defaced into a device's firmware, but i'm really starting to wonder whether that R4iii has anything to do with the earlier device :-/

Anyway, my software runs flawlessly on that beast. So far, i only regret it has no notion of directories and obviously recursively scan the media for some .nds, showing 4 of them per screen ... i feel like i'm gonna miss my supercard's menu, somehow.

At least, tweaking directories names and things alike could allow me to have files in a more "usable" order. On the other side, it made me realise that Moonshell is capable of something that i still have to implement in runme : soft reset to the firmware. And they do this quite simply via "reset.mse" (MoonShell Executable) pluging provided by the card vendor.

To quote "reset.txt" that comes along with the "R4iii upgrade" :

MoonShell execute plug-in

This plug-in is exclusive return to firmware function.

Reference URL that becomes base of reset function.
Most of reset.mse is a copy of LoveLite.

Lick + ds homebrew
http://licklick.wordpress.com/tag/lovelite/

For other homebrew developers.
'reset.mse' can be used from your self-made application.

Please make the C/D bank of VRAM accessible from ARM9.
example.
VRAM_C_CR = VRAM_ENABLE | _VRAM_CD_MAIN_BG_0x6000000;
VRAM_D_CR = VRAM_ENABLE | _VRAM_CD_MAIN_BG_0x6020000;

Please write the following values in 1024 bytes from 0x0603FC00. (16bit access is necessary.)
0x0603FC00 0x01
0x0603FC01 0x01
0x0603FC02 0x01
0x0603FC03 0x01
0x0603FC04 '?'
0x0603FC05 '?'
0x0603FC06 '?'
0x0603FC07 '?'
0x0603FC08 0x00
0x0603FC09 0x00
0x0603FC0A 0x00
0x0603FC0B 0x00
0x0603FC0C 0x00,0x00,0x00...
Please input the adaptor name (four characters) from 0x0603FC04 to 0x0603FC07.
Please fill zero from 0x0603FC0C to 0x0603FFFF.

Please start 'reset.mse'. (Please begin with usual NDS multi boot in a similar way.)

As a matter of fact, i did not even tried to implement this directly. I happen to have a slightly different memory setup in exec.cpp:LoadNDS_VRAM, which is the root of my devstation (and comes from GrizzlyAdams' work in DSChannels, remember?). All i want is a way from runme to the firmware without going through the power button. Moonshell does this ? fine. So just

if (keys & KEY_SELECT) {
  if ((keysHeld()&KEY_L)) {
printf("** trying to switch to moonshell **\n");
LoadNDS_VRAM("_DS_MSHL.NDS","/",0);
  }
  printf("checking for updates...");

does the trick ... at the expense of going through moonshell, i admit (which is a shortcut if you had just uploaded some MP3 to your system, i must add). This is somehow an ugly hack, true. I'm not proud of it in any way, but it's there and maybe at some point it will save the day. Who knows.

It could be equally sufficient if moonshell was able to run my tools, but for some reason, all i get is some "not support adapter type" error message when i try to. Only a few programs (without DLDI ?) seem to work with the version of moonshell that ended up on my system. Wait and see...