Best Front Mission game so far

So I’ve been replaying games I really loved when the PSX was out. My old PSX lost it’s function already so I opted for an emulator. I can’t post links to an emulator but it’s called the ePSXe. Just google it.

Anyway, one of my favorite PSX games of all time would have to be Front Mission 3. It’s this cool RPG-Mecha-Turn based-Strategy game which I thought was very advanced at the time of it’s conception and release.

I was playing the game on my emulator when the game suddenly CRASHED when the mission for the Rural Village was next. This was in Emma’s story mode right after Yingko. I found out that almost the entirety of the people who were replaying the game also had the same problem, if not more. As I tried to search for ways to fix this little bug, I googled myself a few possible solutions.

1. Update the plugins of the emulator

2. Change the emulator

3. Fix the emulator

4. Look for my original copy of the game

5. Download a “cleaner” version

I’m pleased to say that I did all of the steps above with the last step taking too much of my time and almost had me give up on the game. Why you ask? I got at least 3 “other” copies of the game. Two of which are from a torrent site. One of them was said to work perfectly for the PSP (They were PSX-PSP versions, all I had to do was extract the ISO and it was playable via ePSXe) but when I finally played it, it was still bugged. The other one sucked at seeds that it took me almost 7 hours to have it at 60%. Mind you, the download was only 300+ MB large; you can just imagine my frustration so I eventually had to let it go.

It wasn’t until I saw this site for roms via google in which I saw this particular thread (Yes. I googled hard for this) in which it pointed me to the perfect copy of the game, with the bug that annoyed the hell out of me fixed, rather, made it nonexistent.

I owe my thanks to those guys. In case you’re wondering, I downloaded Aguia’s version. Works well so far. Too bad my characters are already too strong for the current missions. Why? I’ve been practicing and mastering their skills in simulator mode while I let the time pass for my downloads to finish. And yes, I went uber because of the Fukushima stage in TEST mode.

Want to take your SNES emulation to your friend’s house? [Chris] worked out a way to fit the important parts inside of an original Super Nintendo controller. He removed the case from a 4GB thumb drive as well as a USB hub. Using a RetroZone kit he gave the controller a USB interface. By soldering the thumb drive and RetroZone board directly to the hub he’s reduced the package down to just one cable. Everything fits inside the controller case and now when you plug it into the computer you can fire up the ROMs you copied from your original cartridges that are stored on the thumb drive.

Of course this isn’t limited to SNES emulation but the real question is can you boot from the thumb drive?

Roms are things that let you play systems on your computer.

Note the following post suggests nor complies that i have downloaded or you should download any of the following objects
Of complete and total awesomeness!

http://vbalink.info

<— your gba

http://doperoms.com/files/roms/gameboy_advance_gba/Pokemon+-+Sapphire+Version+%28Europe%29+%28Rev+A%29.zip/123129/Pokemon+-+Sapphire+Version+.zip

Your pokemon saphire ^^^^^^^^^^^

(more soon but right now its 11 at night..)

UAE is the best Amiga emulator we have. Unfortunately the application in the Karmic repos segfaults and is badly maintained. I had to download the source and compile. Like cooking a meal. Works fine, except the sound isn’t exactly what it should be. If you want to test it. Here is the link to the deb compiled against Alsa. I might try this exercise again when I have the time, adding the < –with-oss flag> for the OSS open-sound server. Enjoy.

[Yuppicide] sent us a link to a photo album of an Atari 2600 modified to play ROMs stored inside. We did some digging around and have an idea of what’s going on. It seems that the creator, [Victor] has taken his Atari 2600 cartridge emulator one step further.

Previously, he had replaced the chip in an Atari cartridge with an EEPROM that he could reprogram via a ribbon cable. This new iteration places that EEPROM inside the case of the gaming console along with a PIC development board. The PIC board interfaces an SD card with somewhere around 1200 ROMs on it. Three switches added to the front of the Atari allow the user to cycle through available games and flash the desired title to the EEPROM. As you can see, a 2×16 LCD display now resides in the cartridge opening.

This seems a little more eloquent (and less legal) than the Super Genintari.

Trying out ScribeFire for blogging, looks decent (and is a plugin for FireFox so cross-platform). So far looks nice.

Looking at Diego Torres Milano’s blog: Android: Testing on the Android platform – Unit tests – obviously this is over a year old and out of date (1.0 was current then). When creating a project now the ADT plugin allows you to create a parallel test project at the same time or a later time. I somehow picked out the right way to run a simple unit test once, but it doesn’t seem to want to run again. And when running as an “Android unit test” it actually opens an emulator in order to do unit tests?!? I can kind of understand that but it seems unnecessary for unit testing. For now, writing this off as too out of date.

Continuing with Diego Torres Milano’s blog: Android: Testing on the Android platform – ApiDemos tests. I followed the directions – I think – but when I pasted the source files into the test project they got pasted in the original package locations (e.g. com.example.android.apis not com.example.android.apis.test), which seemed to cause no problems. Linking the test project to the original was as advertised. Directions are ambiguous as to which manifest file to copy to the test project – get the one from the test directory. I was able to run the ApiDemosTests package as an Android Junit Test and see it actually go; did not have to do anything in the emulator, and the results show up in the JUnit widget in eclipse. I could see things happening in the emulator, so I guess it makes sense to have it up I also tried running them from the Dev Tools or from adb and that worked as specified. Good to know.

Diego didn’t label this post so I almost missed it: Diego Torres Milano’s blog: Android: Testing on the Android platform – Creating tests; and this is a pretty good starting point. Got my test suite runner and a unit test shell set up, going to have to stop here for now.

So it’s great to see that this guy is also a bit frustrated with the docs (mostly, lack thereof) on testing; like emulator skins, tests are provided for you to reverse engineer, but not explained anywhere. I guess working tests are a little better than actual documentation which can get out of date fast. Diego seems to have a good understanding of JUnit and testing before coming to Android, which helps him. I don’t have that, but my brother does; this seems like an area that’s ripe for exploration and making a name by explaining. Heck, it would probably be worthwhile just to provide links to selected relevant posts by Diego putting them in an order that would be helpful to a beginner learning this stuff.

At my last meetup I told people that after you create an AVD, the tool doesn’t provide you any way to change its configuration. This is true, but you can edit the files that specify the config pretty easily – they aren’t even XML. The question is whether the emulator image itself (in the user’s .android directory) is modified at all according to config. I suspect the answer is “no.” At least, I tried changing the skin on an AVD (edit config.ini within the .avd definition) with no adverse consequences. But that’s superficial; other elements that refer to actual capabilities might need a matching setting inside the emulator image. I don’t know yet.

Of note Android-wise lately:

• Android from scratch got added to Planet Android as requested, yay! Got a couple comments right away.
• Android dev setup meetup Thursday went OK – except those showing up either already had the SDK installed or didn’t bring computers, so I had to shift gears and discussed the SDK environment and a little bit about fundamentals.
• Planned hack session this afternoon really turned into me helping two guys get setup and talking about stuff; these two are at least somewhat likely to continue on the path of Android dev so it was somewhat worthwhile.

Working on merging these two G1 emulator skins into one; should just mean merging the layout and jiggering the images in the skins directory. Thing is, there’s no doc as to the formats. I thought the parts {} section was somewhere you could just make up names for the parts you wanted; apparently not, only particular names are allowed for the parts. Looks like parts that can be reused with simple rotation/translation have names, and then you can define portrait or landscape parts for the specific bits that can’t be reused. Actually have this almost figured out, I think. More tomorrow.

WINDOWS: Ctrl + F12

LINUX: Ctrl + F12

MAC OS X: fn + control + F12

(only reminding that when you change the device screen orientation, the current Activity is restarted).

Hello PEOPLE VISITING MY SITE! ITS TIME FOR PROJECT REBIRTH! I AM GOING TO

Remake kora12 and all its compoents plus more on this game

http://www.whirled.com/welcome/2160570/world-s3825670

To help donate, all you need to do is click that link.  You will then be redirected.  From there simple click connect to facebook if you have one and are logged on, log onto facebook then click it, or sign up

When 3 members have signed up to it the group for kora12 will be done

The groups name will be kora.

The game requires no download; I have to switch to it because some features i now use arnt available at wordpress.

I will give you cheats

partys

emulators ( free games for your computer)
codes for

Action replay

Gameshark

And codebreaker!

There will be awesomness!

So ill cya on the other side! This may be my last post to wordpress EVER!!!!

JPC

Interesting and useful PC emulator with the potential to run on a mobile phone running Java. Looks pretty impressive!

Emulator lets you see your website as it would appear on a Sony K750 or a Nokia N70 cell phone screen.

A N64 Emulator is the works for the iPhone 3GS and 3rd generation iPod Touch. The emulator called 3G4 has been created by a 14-year-old boy. This could be the first native N64 emulator for the iPhone, however ZodTTD has been working on an emulator for some time, but unfortunately we haven’t heard any news in a long time.

There are of course the usual problems with any project in development such as “duplicate button registers, delay of presses, and crashes when heavy gameplay occurs. “

The emulator has an expected release of Spring 2010, according to the developer.

Alright, so about a week ago,

I picked up this game for really cheap off ebay and i played it in my spare time. I expected the game to be at least decent, and I really liked the fact that the art wasn’t the same anime style (i didn’t mind it, but i preferred the old style) from Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin (though those games were still moderate).

I really also liked the new way weapons (or rather, “glyphs”) were handled in this game, it was hard to adjust to but in the end VERY satisfying.

To be completely honest, I’ve played quite a lot of 2D castlevania games (I have only played curse of darkness for the 3D ones) and I always enjoy them, no matter what time they’re from or what storyline. They’re always enjoyable. But this game was the first game that actually caused me a bit of stress.

I’ve never died so many times unintentionally in a Castlevania game in my entire life! Even the NES Castlevania games weren’t this hard, at least I could get past the first stage without dying. Sheesh. But that all added to the quality of the game.
Dying constantly makes you formulate different strategies and to study your opponents movements, etc.
All in all, this was a very quality game, and its graphics rivaled Symphony of the Night (which I am still debating if this game was better or worse than order of ecclesia, that’s how good this game was).

Only downsides really was the music in this game. Though the QUALITY of the music was superb, I didn’t really enjoy it. It wasn’t as great as Symphony of the Night’s soundtrack. Not to say it’s soundtrack wasn’t bad though, it was still very nice, and I respected the quality of it, due to the fact that the horrid GBA soundtracks sound outdated.

So, to summarize, I think anyone with spare time and a DS or a DS emulator should definitely try this game out. It’s frustrating as hell but it’s VERY satisfying.

Hello pinball fans and fellas, here comes the pinball wizardry with modern and vintage retro atmosphere back to your Windows PC.

Listen to Pinball Wizard from “The Who” while reading this post!

About

The famous Gottlieb, Williams and Bally arcade game creators ring a bell? And you spent some time with pinball games on Amiga/PC or the real deal in the past?

I discovered a really neat possibility to “emulate” real pinball tables on Windows. As I don’t really know a decent pinball game recently released for any non-console system, I crawled the web for any news on this kind of games.

The results are, there are two decent pinball emulators which you can load a helluva lotsa real tables in and play them in decent smooth speed.

I’ll give you a shot on one of them and how you could install and use it.

Visual Pinball

Also VP for short it is a decent editor, emulator and display tool/manager for any imaginable pinball table.

First of all get some files:

• Visual Pinball – The main “emulator” program install package
• Update v9.03 - Updated .exe
• VPinMAME Binary v2.1 – The LCD display emulator
• A demo table – used in my example table installation below

If you want a sneak peek what awaits you resp. what tables VP could run (besides many more), click on the screenshot below:

Installation

It’s a bit tricky to get this bitch running, so I tried to figure out how it’s the best way to get it installed with the right directory structures and registry setups.

1. Download & install the “Visual_Install_Pack_8.1_2.1+NT_3C.exe” file to any folder. Prefer a folder on any partition on top of their root: f.e. “E:\vpinball”, not “C:\Programs (x86)”.
2. Download & unzip “VP903.zip” package to a temporary folder. Pay attention on that all new files have to be in the root of the in 1.) created new directory!
   This is not the default in the .zip archive! And don’t overwrite “VPinball.exe”, rename the new/old one to their respective version e.g. “VPinball 9.03.exe” resp. “VPinball 8.1.exe”.
3. Download & unzip “vpinmame_21.zip” to a temporary directory and run its setup, click install. That should be all. Keep the files/archive for later troubleshooting.
4. Go to the install-dir selected in 1.) and set run as admin in properties menu for the vpinball*.exe files.

Usage & Troubleshooting

First of all ATI videocards do have issues of incompatibility to Visual Pinball. There’s not (yet) a fix or workaround for that. Main bugs are strange looking transparencies, dithers, jerky pinball and some glitches with gfx overlays. So if you got an nvidia gfx card you’re lucky!

Fellow sys2074 from H1DD3N.R350URC3 tested it on nvidia board and reported smooth gameplay along no glitches. Thx for testing!

If all is setup correctly you have to simply start VPinball.exe (i’d always recommend v9.0.3!), load a table, and “PRESS PLAY ON TAPE”.

Running the right .exe depends on the requirements of the chosen table, v9.0.3 is always slower but with fewer bugs.

Example Table installation

I highly recommend it, as I describe it step by step HOW TO SETUP this table with table-data and ROMs:

• Get the table here: SCAPINOSVPINS Twilight Zone
• Put the .vpt into the PROGDIR:/Tables folder, the other files where you want or trash.
• Run VP, press play
• You’ll get errors, if VPinMAME is installed correctly it displays what’s missing

• Now guess what we’re doing: The ROMs are on ipdb.org. Go there and have a look what’s missing!
• You’ll need the tz_94h.zip ROM set and put it into PROGDIR:/ROMs
• I did not find any documentation who says tz_92.zip is also needed for music, extended sounds AND smoother gameplay. So also get this and put the .zip into PROGDIR:/ROMs
• Regarding to ipdb.org and VPinMAME Game Info you’ll need the Revision L-2 Sound ROMs. Since its not “ROM set conform naming” you have to EXTRACT this to PROGDIR:/ROMs
• Start VP over. Should run now. If not repeat the above steps.

I like it! Where to get more stuff?

Main

• Old visual pinball original site
• Most recent visual pinball actual site

Help

• Very good help forum, table downloads, tutorials (also for creating own tables!) – Great related site

Some table creators

• Scapinosvpins
• JP’s pinballs
• Roney Pinball

Other download pages

• Pinball Nirvana
• IR Pinball
• Pinball Originals

Essential ROMs (IMPORTANT!)

• Essential for running some tables, especially VPinMAME ones – Internet Pinball Database

Installing new tables

The rules for getting new tables to run are:

1. Get the table package, mostly a .zip file and extract it to a temporary folder.
2. Copy the .vpt and .vps (if any) files to PROGDIR:/tables
3. Copy any fonts to SYS:/Windows/Fonts. Backup any existing fonts!!
4. Check if there are ROMs for this table on the internet pinball machine database
   VP table = no ROMs; VPM table = needs ROMs
   Download the PinMAME ROMs and maybe samples (if any), leave them zipped and put them into PROGDIR:/ROMs resp. PROGDIR:/samples
5. Startup VP, load table, check ROMs, play.

Troubleshooting

If any errors, check what error is displayed?

Be sure to run “VPinball.exe” as Administrator!

If it’s VPinMAME related you might not have got every needed rom in the ROMs dir, go back to step 4.) of “Installing new tables” and check what’s missing, maybe you have to extract the sound ROMs or downloading some more .zip ROMs for the same table, it is a little bit fiddling around and not much documented.

Second common error: VPinMAME isn’t setup properly, repeat the installation as described above in the installation topic. It runs properly if you can see the “Game Info” screen after pressing play in VP and an LCD scoreboard etc. on the table ingame.

Always leave ROM SETS ZIPPED! Sound ROMs may need to be extracted. Documentation needed!

You can also try to extract the VPinMAME  .zip archive to the root VP directory and integrate its folders, overwrite existing files etc.

Don’t see the LCD score/FX table ingame? Press Alt-Tab to switch windows to get it to front/overlay.

Feedback

… is appreciated. Feel free to comment and tell me your problems with installing/running this. I’ll try to keep it up to date and helpful for users installing/using this from scratch. I might upload a complete working set with one table (the one described in the “example installation”) if it won’t work at all.

HAVE FUN!

Currently, I am working on an ARM SoC simulator. I have based my project on Skyeye.I started this project out of frustration over available simulators in linux. I love Keil IDE. I am planning to create something similar.

Goals of My project:

1) User friendly GUI interface like keil, VDSP++, CCS, etc.

2) Say goodbye to command line interactive mode.

3) Peripheral devices emulation for entire SoC design.(LCD, Flash, UART, etc.) All these peripheral devices should be configurable through GUI.

4) Fast simulaton through Dynamic Binary Transation.

5) Peripheral devices, machs, archs,etc should be loadable plug-ins. So anyone can design their own implementation of devices or board plug-in for simulation.

6) More emphasis on GUI.

I know this is a big wish list. As of now, I have completed this far,

1) GUI for debugging memory, register, fetch unit,etc. GUI for displaying breakpoints, console, global variables,etc.

2) GUI for configuring the SoC.(Incomplete).

3) Implementing design for dynamically loading plug-ins.

4) Currently, simulator is conventional. Just now started work on DBT.

Screenshot:

Screenshot of Third Eye.

Contribution:

If anybody feels the same and wants to contribute you are most welcome. If you want the source code of this project, contact me. I am currently working on MMU, cache and tlb implementation of ARM processors, Dynamic Binary Translation and support for various machs and boards.

• Nov 27: Theobomos frissítés: – sok hiányzó NPC hozzáadva.
• Nov 26: Gathering támogatás hozzáadva a frissen létrehozott karakterekhez.
• Nov 24: Verteronban gatheringhez kapcsolódó objektum spawnok létrehozva.
• Nov 23: Objektum spawnok hozzáadva: Altgard, Pandaemonium, Verteron & Sanctum.
• Nov 21: Mesterséges Intelligencia javítások. Hazatérés, stb…
• Nov 17: Több spawn létrehozva Verteron és Altgard területén.
• Nov 16: Stat megjelenítés javítások.
• Nov 15: Power Shardok hordhatóak a második slotban is.
• Nov 10: Majdnem minden szükséges objektum hozzáadva a questekhez Poeta & Ishalgen területén.
• Nov 04: Friendlisten kis javítás.

Ezek csak a közérthetőbb javítások, a teljes listát itt találjtok: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/ae-go/stream

Don’t you think you can play GameBoys’ game on your computer? Now you can believe that actually you can! By using the GameBoy Emulator which is ‘VisualBoy Advance’, you can open and play all the Game Boys’ platform game. This emulator can work for all GameBoy games.

Simple appearance, although the graph is displayed depends on the game will be played. By generating a small square box on the left side, you can quickly play your favorite games with a way to open the tab of ‘File > Open’. Need to ensure that you are ready ‘game stock’, because if not, what game is going to be play?  You can get GameBoy games through the Internet and CD / DVD in some stores, including many malls. Hopefully with this emulator equipment you can play more that caused more joy in your face!

Ever wanted to play Nintendo DS games on your PC? You can actually do it using a Nintendo DS Emulator. The emulator is called NO$GBS. The process is very simple. Just go to Emulator Zone and browse to the Nintendo DS emulators page which is available in the menu bar to the right of the page. Then click on NO$GBA emulator found at the bottom of the page. Click here to directly go to the NO$GBA emulator page. Download the emulator using the download link at the bottom of the page.

Once you have downloaded the emulator you will have to extract it using WinRAR. Go to the extracted folder and click on NO$GBA.exe. You will need ROMS to play games on your emulator. Just Google Nintendo DS ROMS and download whatever game you need and have fun! If you face any kind of problems with the emulator please leave a comment below and I will respond to it as soon as possible.

Wer in den späten 90ern bereits begeisterter Videospielezocker und Fan von Sonys PSX war, der wird sich noch an den kommerziellen Playstation Emulator bleem! und die vielen Kontroversen die ihn umgeben haben erinnern. Der Hintergrund: dadurch, dass nun plötzlich Sonys Spiele außerhalb von Sonys Hardware laufen konnte bestand nun keine Notwendigkeit mehr sich eine Playstation zu kaufen, was für Sony natürlich ein riesiges Verlustgeschäft bedeutet hätte.

Die Geschichte von bleem! beginnt im März 1999, mit dem Release der ersten Version. Und sie schlug ein wie eine Bombe. bleem! hatte nämlich den heutigen Emulatoren einiges voraus. Es war der erste Emulator, der praktisch mit der echten Konsole “konkurrierte” und dazu noch einer der wenigen, der öffentlich dafür warb und im Laden gekauft werden konnte. bleem! hatte zwei Versionen, einmal die normale, die auf PCs lief, und bleemcast!, welches euch ermöglichte, PSX Spiele auf der Dreamcast von Sega zu zocken.

Die Technik hinter bleem! war dabei durchaus beeindruckend, vor allem im PC Sektor. Man brauchte keine Mördermaschine, denn teilweise lieferten sogar Low-End PCs erstaunlich hohe Frameraten für die PSX Spiele. Verantwortlich dafür ist die Programmiersprache assembly, die es den anfangs gerade mal zwei Mitarbeitern der Firma bleem! ermöglichte, den Code perfekt zu optimieren. Und wer doch einen Rechner der oberen Klasse sein Eigen nennen durfte, der konnte mithilfe des Emulators sogar die Grafik der Spiele aufpeppen, indem er höhere Auflösungen als auf der PSX möglich aktivierte oder bessere Texturfilter einschaltete.

Die Kehrseite der Medaille ist jedoch, die Spiele überhaupt erst einmal fehlerfrei zum laufen zu bekommen. Denn während heutige Emulatoren eine sehr hohe Kompatibilitätsrate erreicht haben, kämpfte bleem! mit Bugs, Grafikfehlern und dergleichen. Sogar bleems! eigene Kompatibilitätsliste konnte lediglich ein einziges bugfreies Spiel aufweisen: One. Das heißt aber nicht, dass kein Spiel vernünftig lief, die meisten konnten Problemlos von Anfang bis Ende durchgezockt werden, kleinere Fehler musstet ihr dafür aber in Kauf nehmen. Das sorgte dafür, dass sogar freeware Emulatoren, die es bereits vor bleem! gab, teilweise eine höhere Kompatibilität hatten. Ein weiteres Problem: wer Windows NT basierte Betriebssysteme hatte (dazu gehört auch Windows 2000), guckte in die Röhre. bleem! wurde nämlich vollends für Windows 98 entwickelt, dem damals wichtigsten Betriebssystem für Computerspieler.

Klingt ja alles schön und gut. Doch wie bereits am Anfang dieses Artikels erwähnt stellte der Emulator für Sony eine erhebliche Gefahr da. Und so ist es wenig überraschend, dass, kaum konnten die ersten Versionen des Emulators bestellt werden, Sony seine Anwälte einschaltete. Denn wer will sich noch eine Playstation kaufen, wenn das ganze auch auf Dreamcast und PC funktioniert? Das Verbot das Emulators war eigentlich nur noch Formsache, konnte sich doch keiner vorstellen dass bleem! einfach so davonkommen würde. Doch falsch gedacht! Am Ende verlor Sony in sämtlichen Anklagepunkten, sogar was die Verwendung von PSX Spielescreenshots auf der bleem! Verpackung angeht. David hatte tatsächlich gegen Goliath gewonnen, konnte man meinen.

Doch trotz der Erfolge vor Gericht zwangen die Kosten dafür die Firma letztendlich doch in die Knie. Ende 2001 gingen bei bleem! die Lichter aus. Doch trotzdem hat bleem! vielen gezeigt, dass auch Emulatoren eine Daseinsberechtigung haben. Viele Hobby Programmierer haben sich seit dem Ende von bleem! an die Arbeit gemacht, einen noch besseren, schnelleren und stabileren Emulator auf die Beine zu stellen. Und nebenbei sollte man auch erwähnen, dass die Emulatoren an sich völlig legal sind. Erst wenn man sie in Verbindung mit illegal heruntergeladenen Spielen benutzt begibt man sich auf dünnes Eis. Übrigens, um den Kreis zu schließen: ein paar ehemalige bleem! Mitarbeiter sind heute bei Sony beschäftigt wo sie sich, natürlich, um die Portierung alter Sony Spiele für die neue Generation der Playstation kümmern. Feine Sache!

Hi, I’m Tyson Key, a college student currently residing somewhere in the north of England.

When I’m not studying, I happen to advocate and contribute to open source, and open platforms and enjoy spending time testing and documenting software, and exploring various aspects of low-level operating system and computer networking technology – all whilst trying to be a generally reasonable and agreeable person…

Of course, I also happen to be a heavy user, and advocate of the Symbian platform, and have been involved with the Symbian Foundation to varying extents, since its announcement.

Introduction aside, I’ve been invited to introduce the Symbian Virtual Platform. This is a project that I’ve been involved in beta testing, prior to the release of the Symbian Kernel Taster Kit.

What’s the Symbian Virtual Platform?

The Symbian Virtual Platform consists of a customised version of QEMU (an Open Source CPU instruction set and hardware emulator), containing several additional features, along with a corresponding baseport referred to as Syborg.

This combination potentially represents the future of inexpensive, accurate, user-level application testing, and low-level debugging and experimentation on the Symbian Platform, without the need for additional hardware.

As a bonus, some of the hallmark causes of frustration with the older Windows-based emulator (commonly referred to as WINS or WINSCW dependant upon toolchain used) are removed, such as:

• Low performance
• Simulation inaccuracy (e.g. differing memory models with various limitations, behavioural differences from real hardware, and disabled/restricted software functionality)
• Platform dependence – QEMU is well-supported under Windows, most Linux distributions and Mac OS X, and also runs under many other operating systems

What can it do for you?

The “official”/mainline version of QEMU already emulates an ARMv5 architecture CPU, and a number of hardware features including – but not limited to:

• Serial ports – complete with the ability to redirect traffic to a file, which is essential for Symbian Platform debugging and problem diagnosis
• Ethernet chipsets – a driver for which is included in Syborg, although additional work is necessary, before being suitable for intensive use
• Various forms of Flash memory devices (e.g. MultiMediaCard/SD Card, and SPI NAND Flash)
• An audio chipset – support for this in the baseport was recently contributed by Johnathan White of Accenture

However, the version supplied by Symbian also adds a number of useful features that enhance this functionality to potentially save development time and effort, and let users/enthusiasts test software quickly and easily without access to a physical handset, including:

• The ability to run real Symbian OS binaries “as-is” – meaning that you no longer also need to rebuild software to run within an x86 and Windows-only simulator
• A host file system-backed emulated drive (S:\ on the QEMU guest, which maps to \svphostfs on the host) that acts as an extension of firmware when custom executables are added, and allows for quickly moving files between the host and guest whilst the Platform is running
• A Python-based dynamic hardware modelling system that allows for varying degrees of control over the behaviour of the emulated system at runtime, without needing to modify QEMU source code and rebuild

The source code for these enhancements, and the baseport are available in the Symbian Foundation repositories.

Intrigued? Here’s what it looks like…

An EShell session, showing the output of various utilities, on a Windows XP host

What have I done with QEMU?

• Built several ROM images containing various Platform components, and documented the results on the Symbian forums so that others can assist in resolving problems, and enhancing the results
• Spent time debugging the execution of various binaries using serial port file redirection, and resolving dependency issues, as they arose

Which leads nicely on to a practical example, based upon a problem that I faced…

Getting the EUserHL Walkthrough test suite running

A forum thread that I started, with additional suggestions from the community, prior to writing this post is available here for reference. I’ll now attempt to explain how I answered a not-too-uncommon question using several features of the Symbian Virtual Platform, and a process of elimination -

How can I test a Platform component (in this case – EUserHL), when I don’t have access to the source code?

The initial steps involved boil down to:

• Install and configure the Symbian Kernel Taster Kit and RVCT 4.0 according to the instructions on the Symbian Wiki
• Create a directory on the host file system at \svphostfs and a set of subdirectories to hold executables and DLLs inside: sys\bin
• Copy \epoc32\release\armv5\urel\euserhl_walkthrough.exe and \epoc32\release\armv5\urel\euserhl.dll to \svphostfs\sys\bin
• Start a cmd.exe prompt session, and switch to \symbian-qemu-0.9.1\bin\

• Run QEMU using the prebuilt Syborg ROM image using: arm-none-symbianelf-qemu-system -M \sf\adaptation\qemu\baseport\syborg\syborg.dtb -kernel \epoc32\rom\syborg.img within the active cmd.exe session
• Once the ROM has booted to EShell, attempt to invoke euserhl_walkthrough.exe
• Notice that execution simply bails, before printing a rather vague, generic “Not found” error message

Obviously, this a rather sorry state of affairs – but there’s hope.  So, let’s move on:

• Halt the previous QEMU session
• This time, run QEMU again using arm-none-symbianelf-qemu-system -M \sf\adaptation\qemu\baseport\syborg\syborg.dtb -kernel \epoc32\rom\syborg.img -serial file:”EUserHLDebug.txt” to redirect serial port output to a file
• Within the EShell session, invoke trace /L 4 to enable debugging of executable loading and DLL iteration
• Attempt to invoke euserhl_walkthrough.exe once again within EShell, to receive the familiar “Not found” error
• Open \symbian-qemu-0.9.1\bin\EUserHLDebug.txt on the host, using your favourite text editor
• Following the chain of execution, from euserhl_walkthrough.exe onwards, to euserhl.dll, we can see that various dependency DLLs are located successfully (demarcated by “New image found“)
• However, if we closely follow euserhl.dll, the fact that a critical dependency is missing at a late stage is alluded to by “No suitable image found” – although reattempts are constantly being made to locate the missing DLL
• Unfortunately, this debug output does not tell us exactly which DLL we require – so we turn to another useful tool (elftran)
• At this stage, it would be a good idea to halt the QEMU session, to avoid some rather confusing behaviour that arises from the handling of the S:\ drive, and executable caching when copying additional DLLs and executables to \sys\bin within it

Now, we should be on the home stretch:

• Within another cmd.exe session, run: elftran \svphostfs\sys\bin\euserhl.dll > EUserHLDeps.txt to create a file containing information related to the dependencies of the euserhl.dll binary, amongst other attributes
• Searching for “imports from” within the EUserHLDeps.txt file will reveal that euserhl.dll depends upon estor.dll – which doesn’t exist in the prebuilt ROM image, or in \svphostfs\sys\bin
• Copy \epoc32\release\armv5\urel\estor.dll to \svphostfs\sys\bin
• Run arm-none-symbianelf-qemu-system -M \sf\adaptation\qemu\baseport\syborg\syborg.dtb -kernel \epoc32\rom\syborg.img once again
• With a little luck, attempting to invoke euserhl_walkthrough.exe should result in:


Partial output from running the EUserHL Walkthrough test suite

• Have fun exploring the serial debugging and tracing tracing functionality, and the host-bound file system

If that’s not enough, you can even try to build these components into a ROM image:

• Copy \sf\os\kernelhwsrv\kernel\eka\rombuild\tshell.oby to \sf\os\kernelhwsrv\kernel\eka\rombuild\tshellwitheuserhl.oby
• Add the following lines to the bottom of \sf\os\kernelhwsrv\kernel\eka\rombuild\tshellwitheuserhl.oby:
  file=\epoc32\release\armv5\udeb\estor.dll \sys\bin\estor.dll
  file=\epoc32\release\armv5\udeb\euserhl_walkthrough.exe\sys\bin\euserhl_walkthrough.exe
  file=\epoc32\release\armv5\udeb\euserhl.dll \sys\bin\euserhl.dll

• Delete euserhl_walkthrough.exe, euserhl.dll and estor.dll from \svphostfs\sys\bin\ to ensure that the contents of the ROM are not being supplemented/overridden with the contents of S:\sys\bin on the guest at boot time
• Within a cmd.exe session, switch to \sf\os\kernelhwsrv\kernel\eka\rombuild
• Run rom –variant=syborg –inst=armv5 –build=udeb –type=tshellwitheuserhl –name=\epoc32\rom\tshellwitheuserhl.img to attempt to build a new ROM image containing the EUserHL DLL, walkthrough/demo application, and the EStor DLL
• If everything worked according to plan, you should be able to run your new ROM image using: arm-none-symbianelf-qemu-system -M \sf\adaptation\qemu\baseport\syborg\syborg.dtb -kernel \epoc32\rom\tshellwitheuserhl.img within the \symbian-qemu-0.9.1\bin\ directory
• Invoking euserhl_walkthrough.exe for the final time should produce the same result as the previous exercise!

Additional Resources and Information

• A series of forum threads related to PIPS and networking, and the legacy, development-specific TechView GUI, in addition to the aforementioned EUserHL thread that I started, and continue to contribute to
• A list of backlog items and planned features for the Symbian Virtual Platform are available, here
• Johnathan’s presentation about the Symbian Virtual Platform at SEE 2009:
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