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Showing results for tags 'flashback 9'.
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I did some hacking yesterday and was able to package my own custom firmware in order to get SD card roms and box art fully integrated into the main menu screen. See anything interesting? I am also able to remove or suppress any of the built-in ROMs that I might not want. I did a simple test of suppressing the non-original version of Frogger that ships with the console. Now I can't take all of the credit. I mean, I did do a lot of hacking, and I did use a bunch of arcane Linux tools and commands to unpack, customize and re-pack this firmware. But I'm sure to nobody's surprise it turns out that the Atari Flashback 9 and the AtGames Sega Genesis Flashback 2018 are virtually the same hardware and system. They just run different emulators and have different roms and creative content for menus. So people have already been hacking that system and already found this same approach. I had already unpacked and was poking around the official firmware image and thinking about my options when I stumbled across this thread: https://gbatemp.net/threads/custom-firmware-for-sega-flashback-2018.523590/page-5 I followed the whole thread, and from reading it I "reverse engineered" what they were doing. These guys came up with an ingenious approach, so I am simply following their lead for the Atari Flashback 9. Basically it works like this: 1. There is a /rom NAND flash partition that contains all of the built-in .a26 roms, box art, a few sound files and the all-games.ini file which configures the menu items. 2. The new firmware I developed inserts a script that unmounts the /rom partition and re-mounts it to a /rom folder on the SD card. This is driven by the presence of a control file on the SD card. Delete the control file or remove the SD card and the unit will simply mount the internal /rom partition and as per normal. So not permanent change. 3. The latest official firmware included the entire /rom partition contents. it's possible to dump the NAND flash from the device, but it wasn't necessary as I was able to extract it from the official firmware. 4. I copied the extract /rom partition contents to the /rom folder on my SD card. 5. Now I can add custom .a26 rom files and corresponding box art and then add the necessary entries to the all-games.ini file, which will populate the menu item and descriptive info page. So in short I am "hiding" the internal /rom partition and loading all roms, box art and rom config file from the SD card. In that Sega thread somebody also started to build a nice GUI tool to manage the somewhat daunting task of editing the .ini file for all the new game rom entries. It's something I will probably be looking to borrow/steal/copy for the Atari Flashback (I'm a software developer by trade). It would also be cool if the community could somehow edit and contribute all these ini file entries and maybe box art to a common repository. I was originally poking around looking at the menu and emulator binaries that are included in the official firmware, seeing if there was anything interesting I could learn or modify with a hex editor. I also had in mind to do some reverse engineering. In theory I could flash the device to run a fully custom UI and/or emulator, although there are some tight limitation in the NAND partition sizes. Let's not get carried away or get ahead of ourselves yet. I think I will get another FB9 to do some more hacking, so I don't accidentally bork my working unit. Also the regular non-Gold FB 9 HD would need a slightly different firmware to retains its UI. I'm going to look at making a leaner CFW that doesn't redistribute roms, but I could maybe post something in a few days if there is interest. -
Hi all! I've got a working Flashback 9 with a working SD card. My question is: When I add new games to the SD card, the new games appear to alphabetize on the PC, but they don't alphabetize on the FB9 console. Is there a way to clean this up? (Do I have to start over and reformat/reload the SD card each time?)
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I put hundreds on roms on my Atari Flashback 9 and all games work except for 2. Draconian is one of them. The other is "Super Cobra the arcade game" which is a homebrew port to the 2600. Does anyone know why these games don't work on the flashback 9? All the other homebrew games work. I also tried deleting spaces in the names to get some roms to work. But those I mentioned are the only 2 that don't. -
Hi everyone, I bought my dad an Atari Flashback 9 for christmas for us to play together. We plugged it in today and the video worked okay but there was no sound. After plugging it into multiple tvs and ports I found out that our menu was also different. I have the AR3230 model which uses composite cables, but the ports we plugged everything into are known to be functional. I'm not sure what else to do, is there a way to get the good menu and to fix the sound not working? The only suggestions on AtGames are to turn up the volume or to unplug and replug the audio cable.
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