VMU development resources for your use

[frozenbinarystudio]

Hey all!

First off, thanks for your help and patience with my questions and issues over the last year.

Now thats over with, I did something that may be of interest. I spent since last July attempting to write VMU programs, with some minor successes. After many failed attempts, study, digging up a lot of old documentation, and frustration, I compiled everything I have done into one convenient archive. I did this with the hope I can save people the effort I had to put in to get this far.

What this archive consists of:
A port of SoftVMS for Linux, with the added ability to save data. This is handy for my project that interacts with the flash memory of the VMU ROMs, and is useful for a few commercial games that utilize this functionality (Chao Adventure comes to mind). This was done so KOS can be used side by side with this emulator, as it would be convenient to do so IMO. The unmodified sources were included too, at the request of Marcus Comstedt who was kind enough to grant me permission to share this so long as I did not modify his source code directly.

The assembler and disassembler. Self explanatory, though the compiled assembler has been modified to run on Linux. Sources provided for additional mods as you may see fit.

Ports of the sample code contained in the official VMU developers manual. I painstakingly ported all of the code samples contained in the dev manual to be compatible with the unofficial assembler, as it does not translate one to one. Not only that, I fully documented it all too. This I did so I could learn things such as saving to flash memory and displaying decimal digits from hex values, as such examples did not seem to exist elsewhere.

Header files used to compile the sources. The standard ones were not enough for performing tasks like creating counters and writing to flash memory. Only include the ones you require for your project, typically the standard is acceptable unless you need to perform either of the tasks I stated.

Installation script. This was based on the KOS installation script as stated in the README. It is run in pretty much the exact way. The resulting uncompressed archive will install in the toolchains folder alongside KOS.

I have tested all of the compiled VMS files to ensure they run on the emulator. A few I did run on a physical VMU, though not all of them. Please note SoftVMS has no sound emulation, so those samples will only function correctly on an actual VMU device. Some of the ported VMS sources may have things I overlooked, though I did QA them line by line, I am only human and I probably missed a line or two. They all will compile however.

This is all provided as is. None of this was tested by me on Windows or OSX, and certainly not AmigaOS (as I have no ability to do so), however I have been told WIndows 10 will run SoftVMS the same way Linux does. If you wish to modify any of this, please do so, however I have no ownership of the source code, and was granted permission by the authors to redistribute. I ask that you please respect that as this was provided in good faith.

I hope this helps others get up to speed on VMU development! Please let me know if any improvements need to be made!

Thank you again.

[lerabot]

Wow, super nice research project.
Thanks for sharing.

[frozenbinarystudio]

You are welcome. I hope this saves someone the headaches I endured in my efforts. Please enjoy and make use it would give me great satisfaction knowing this helped someone else.