RPi based modchip

[novenary]

So my mom won't let me order a WKF for now. Still, I want to hack around with my Cube.
I have a Raspberry Pi taking dust in my drawer and I thought I could use it to reproduce XenoGC functionality (including loading Swiss instead of the Xeno shell, plenty of room for that on an SD card), as well as other cool stuff.
The Xeno source is not commented at all though so I don't get any of it. :/
I can C (well to an extent) so I'd have no problem getting this to work if I had some understanding of the way the Xeno works.
So if anyone would please care to explain I'd be very grateful.

Edit : If it's easier I'd go with an IPL replacement though. Integrates better. If I do that then I'd just need to load up Swiss.

[emu_kidid]

You could probably do both eventually but by that time you will be out of the house and able to afford a WKF

[novenary]

LOL yeah I guess so. I'll try to negotiate some more. Not that I can't afford the chip, bit rather she says that if I'm more reasonable with my nerdy activities (is stop having something in my hands 24/7) she'll let me.

How about an Arduino by the way ? The Atmega328P is similar enough to the Atmega8 to run the Xeno firmware with minor tweaking. While I don't have any lying around it should be nice for beginners.

[emu_kidid]

possibly you could get a XenoGC out of a arduino.. again, just drop $7 for a XenoGC :p

[novenary]

Not gonna do that. I'm gonna wait until I can get a WKF since it's the same issue.

[BoFoSho]

Just some extra info, you can get some nice Atmega8 Arduinos from the chinese.

[iamdablasta]

LOL yeah I guess so. :P I'll try to negotiate some more. Not that I can't afford the chip, bit rather she says that if I'm more reasonable with my nerdy activities (is stop having something in my hands 24/7) she'll let me.

How about an Arduino by the way ? The Atmega328P is similar enough to the Atmega8 to run the Xeno firmware with minor tweaking. While I don't have any lying around it should be nice for beginners. :)

I am encouraged to buy "nerdy" stuff instead off other "stuff" :>

[novenary]

LOL I'm always on my phone/tablet. When I have my PC I'm on it all day long too. For a while I'd spend all my time programming graphing calculators (I have seven of these) and solving Rubik's cubes (two 3*3's and one 4*4).

I'm not giving up by the way. Still doing some research but that source is really obscure to me. Guess I'll have to calmly sit in front of my computer instead of trying to figure it out on a tablet. XD The worst part about it is that there seems to be some GC code and Atmega code mixed in the same directories.

[Dragoon]

I'm not sure how hard it is to sniff out a DVDReset packet, but once that's done you can send the debug commands every time the DVD gets reset.
And that's basically every time you open the DVD drive or get a DRE.
We can already do it(ish) from software level, but once it resets the patch is gone and you need to run swiss/gcos/cobra again.
I think the xeno and the duo Q (basically just different HW with Xeno FW) are the only chips that can do this.

Or you could go hardcore and hook up the PI to the DVD port and use it as a streaming solution
I'm not sure if that's possible though.

[MockyLock]

I have no knowledge at all in what you discuss here, but if i can understand well the proposition of Dragoon, something like this has been done for the Dreamcast, for a GD-Rom drive emulator:
http://dknute.livejournal.com/39276.html

It leaded to this wonderful item unfortunatly not for sell:
http://dknute.livejournal.com/42609.html

[novenary]

Not sure what hardware that's based on.

In the Xeno source I found some references to a certain MN10200. A quick Google search showed that it's either a Panasonic CPU or a Matsushita chip (they make optical drives so it's more likely).
According to WiiBrew it's the controller chip used in the Wii (and certainly GC) drive. Also looks like Matsushita belongs to Panasonic.
Opening the cube yielded nothing. I can't find that chip either on the drive nor motherboard (both sides checked on both). There is a Panasonic chip on the bottom of the drive though.

Gonna do more research on this controller.

[novenary]

So it actually is that Panasonic chip. It's an 8bit CPU used to drive the drive (LOL accidental pun). Apparently it is also used by the Xeno updater to flash the Atmega.
Now I need to find the code that communicates with it since that's pretty much all I need to port.
Also this source is a mess. Binaries and source files are all over the place. x.x

[megalomaniac]

what is it you want to accomplish?
run this code over RPI or do you want an ardrino based solution or something else?
arduino or any other avr can be used with very little modification to the code.


start here
http://code.google.com/p/xenogcfork/sou ... T%2Fsource

[novenary]

The only programmable hardware I can hook to my Cube is my Pi. I was just asking if it would work on an Arduino out of curiosity, my ultimate goal using an RPi to do basically the same as the Xeno, with Swiss instead of XenoShell.

[megalomaniac]

before working on porting the code over to PI you need to determine if you can perform one of the following:

emulate SPI over GPIO
or
convert USB thru FTDI to SPI

[novenary]

The Raspberry Pi has hardware SPI available on it's GPIO header, so no problem hooking to EXI.

[novenary]

Bump.

[Dragoon]

You don't have to bump the thread only 24 hours later.
It's not a sale thread and I'm sure there is interest in this.

[novenary]

Yeah sorry, that's not good for my netiquette.