For 2 reasons today is a good day.
1) I just finished my final project for my History class for the summer.  Still have to take the final, but I’m done with class.  I’m expecting a C, which is sad really, I could have gotten an A, but I blew off a couple of the assignments, not something you can do in a summer course.  Having it online didn’t make it any easier for me though.  I much rather perfer in-class classes.
2) I got my version of VirtuaNES with 7-zip support working :D That means ROMs compressed with LMZA can now be extracted natively in VirtuaNES instead of having to use IZArc‘s archive conversion stuff.  It was actually an easy patch.  I found 7-zip32.dll after doing a couple days worth of searching.  It was actually a search for the function names I saw in VirtuaNES that lead me to it.  There are a few of these compression libraries that have very similar named functions for messing with archives, I’m guessing so programs can more easily use more libraries, but none the less.  After getting some of the other libraries and watching how it worked it was fairly simple to get 7-zip32.dll to work.  Only major problem: documentation is all in Japanese.  To translate it I had to stick the text file documentation into google to get the correct characters back, then into Babelfish to get a rough translation, just using one of them never worked, weird.  Anyway, that gave me a rough idea on how the library worked, but I couldn’t get it to extract the libraries.  It kept saying “Don’t open [archive here] file.” Like it was a virus or something :D Anyway after a little more googling I found this post about getting the dll to work in mame.  I made one simple change to my code (removing a space after the -o in the command line) and badda boom, badda bing it worked.  Fun stuff!
So until that gets put into mainline VirtuaNes (I submitted an email to Norix with a unified diff) I offer the world my compiled VirtualNes.exe (and in case you don’t have them, the archive DLLs that will work with it.)
VirtuaNES Executable Only (replace current executable): VirtuaNES.zip
Archive Extraction DLLs: VirtuaNES-ArchiveDlls.zip
Diff Patch File based on 0.93e sources: patch-virtuanes7z.txt
Full Source with Changes to compile on Visual Studio 2005: virtuanessrc093-7z.zip

Labels: Computers, School

¶ 12:27 AM