Video issuses - fixed with 2.0?

[Katagia]

Hi

With current stable release v1.9 I have video issues with some homebrew
apps, e.g. myPS2.
I use PAL.
The problem is colors are wrong. Blue is orange and so on.
I think instead of PAL NTSC is used.
I tried all settings in bootmanager to fix those problems.

Are there some changes in video mode handling with 2.0 so
I have chances to get it to work?

Cheers,

[Jones23]

Strange. Never heard of such wrong colors. NTSC on a PAL tv shouldn't have any colors at all.
Give it a try with latest release 24. Maybe it solves your prob.

best regards Jones23

[Katagia]

Well I think my TV set displays the colors wrong when NTSC is used.
So for some reason some apps use NTSC instead of PAL and the
fix commands won't help.

[CrystalChip]

I assume you have a v14 console. As of v14, Sony has started using a special BIOS ROM chip which combines all regions into the same chip. The problem is that the way some homebrew applications detect the console region(and determine what video mode to use) no longer works because they always see the console as Japanese. This is not something that we can fix, you will need to hack the application itself to resolve this issue or contact the author(s).

[Katagia]

Yes, I have a V14 console. Thank you for that information.
That explains many things.
So when I get an application with sourcecode I can patch it
myself and force PAL?

Cheers,

[CrystalChip]

Yes, in fact you can patch existing applications to force PAL if you know a bit of MIPS assembler and have a disassembler. The code, in C, will look something like: if(*(u8 *) (0x1FC7FF52) == 'E') { vmode = PAL; }

The problem is that this byte in the BIOS at 0x1FC7FF52 is always "J".

[Katagia]

Thanl you. I've taken a look at the code of myPS2 and found
your example code.
Is it possible to change the bios register to "E"?

Can you tell my a mips (dis)assembler to use?
I use linux and I have installed the mips-linux cross compile
package. I tried mips-linux-objdump. It was able to recognize the
file but didn't output the assembler code.

In the asm file I just have to find the address of the register and
change the jump commands after it?

/Edit

I've downloaded ps2dis and tried to search for the mention hex address.
I was not able to find it. Can't I just search for the hex string?

[CrystalChip]

The BIOS is a ROM(Read-Only Memory) which means that you can't change anything in it.

ps2dis should be adequate for your needs. Using the unpacked BOOT.ELF included in the uLE package you can do:

1. Search for "52 FF"
2. This show this line: lb v1, $1fc7ff52
3. Look in the top hex-view window and write down the highlighted byte and the 7 that follow it.
4. Edit Line Attributes and for command change it to: ori v1, zero, $45
5. Look in the top hex-view window and write down the highlighted byte and the 3 that follow it.
6. Open the ELF in a hex-editor program and search for the 8 bytes you wrote down. Change the first 4 bytes to the 4 bytes you wrote down after changing the "command".

I hope that helps, unfortunately that's as much help as I can give you on this issue.

[Katagia]

Sounds great, thank you.
I think one mistakte I did was to use a compressed
ELF file.
I will take a look about this tomorrow.
Thank you for your help.