Uninstall and/or fix black screen on snes?

[winston]

Hey all. Please excuse the long-winded nature of this post!

I've been a happy user of LJP RC2 on my treo 650 for a while now, but it got borked, so I "upgraded" to a treo 680. I'm now having trouble getting any SNES games to work (they're all I really play on it).

Initially, I used the RC2 PSI installer, as I had that lying around my desktop. When running any SNES game, however, it presents me with a black screen, which for some ROMs flickers between black and a colour. (Red for mariokart, blue for chronotrigger.) I then tried the regular RC2 (sorry, I'm loathe to upgrade without due reason ), to be presented with "incorrect zem version" messages (got/wanted FFFF/0100) when trying to launch anything.

I tried again, uninstalling everything as best as i was able (.prc from the phone via "delete" menu & all the .zems & .ini from the card), and reinstalled the regular RC2, but the incorrect version messages still kept coming.

I gave in, and tried RC5 & RC3, but still got the same incorrect zem version messages (still FFFF/0100).

Now, I'm back with the RC2 PSI package, and am still getting the black screens on launch. I've tried changing all the settings (asm/c core, sound on/off, smoothing, transparency, all 4 hacks), but to no avail (except that all 4 hacks on produces a soft reset).

The most irritating problem is that of my apparent inability to completely remove the PSI, and I don't seem to be able to find one for a newer version than RC2 to overwrite it with. I delete the application itself, and the zems & ini on the card (even replaced all my ROMs, just in case) ... it seems to me as if it's acting like the zems are present in phone memory too, but I can't locate them anywhere with FileZ!

My sincere thanks for reading all of that! Any help with either getting rid of the "hidden RC2 PSI files," or fixing the black screen stuff would be most appreciated.

I realise that I ought to try something other than SNES - I tried briefly last night to download some NES roms, but after endless porn popups & no download links, I gave up. I'll try again later!

[_Em]

I'd suggest upgrading to RC5 - it fixes a number of these issues, and also lets you map your phone buttons
-I had similar problems intermittantly on recent NVFS devices... however, eventually the problems went away, and I haven't been able to recreate them since (I was using RC2 both before and after).
One thing I did that you haven't yet is a hard reset without restoring my prefs DBs.

[metaview]

Download RescoExplorer and check if you have .zem files on the internal hidden volume on your Treo. It sounds like...

[winston]

I've looked with FileZ (which can browse the hidden volume) & also now looked with RescoExplorer - can't find anything that starts with or contains "ljp" in its name, nor anything with "zem."
As all the .zem files seem to start with "ljp," this would appear to indicate that there aren't any.

Shame, I had hoped this could be sorted without a hard reset!

[metaview]

you only need to look in /PALM/Programs/LJP/

[winston]

Thats a card directory?
This error persists even when I delete /palm/Programs/LJP altogether, and then recreate it, and put roms & RC5 zems in it.

There's nothing related to LJP in BuiltIn\PALM_DM. Nor can I locate anything under Resco's list of Saved Preferences, RAM, or ROM.

Its always the same, whatever rom:
Error while unzipping
1
.zem file has wrong version number. Please check your install.
Version got/wanted:
FFFF/0100


Also, while I understand this to be irrelevant, when launching RC5 for the first time, it says "Welcome to RC3", and at the top of the screen says its RC4 - confusing!

[_Em]

Hmm... do you have zlib installed?

[Tinnus]

The zlib LJP uses is contained inside the software itself--it's compiled along with the LJP code.

[_Em]

Hmm... the only issue I can see him having then is mixing and matching .ini, .zem and .prc files from differing versions of LJP. If he deleted his ini, used the RC5 .zem and .prc files, this sounds suspiciously like that old bug from RC2 popping back up. I can't recall what caused it that time.

[metaview]

Btw: it's a memory problem. Unzip fails because of not enough memory (DBCache I guess) and then the value for the version check is uninitialized.

[winston]

Thanks guys, but I'm a bit confused by all this!

As described in the How to Optimise Your Lifedrive for LJP thread, I have:

• UDMH installed & enabled
  
• MemUnfragment installed, and lurking in the background
  
• DBCacheTool & DBLauncher installed, and the cache cleared (as far as I can tell)
  
• Done various combinations of resetting & cache clearing
  

Unfortunately, the end result is still the same: Error unzipping, FFFF/0100, etc...

MemInfo reports that I have 19945 kb free DBCache, with the largest chunk being 16383 kb.
Also
10560 kb dynamic heap, with 8750 kb free, and a 8542 kb chunk.

DBCacheTool, through DALauncher, reports:
FREE = 20419200
MAX = 16777200


I might just hard-reset & start from scratch, it seems easier!

[_Em]

Agreed... with those numbers, you should have absolutely no difficulties; something else must be interfering.

[countbuggula]

Have you tried copying unzipped roms to your rom directory instead to see if those will run? At least you can be sure if that's the problem then.

[metaview]

Winston: Are you sure you have a Treo 650? Are you sure the numbers of free memory are correct? A virgin Treo 650 has usually around 5 MB free dyn. Mem and 8MB free DBCache. Means something is wrong here...

[_Em]

winston said:

MemInfo reports that I have 19945 kb free DBCache, with the largest chunk being 16383 kb.
Also
10560 kb dynamic heap, with 8750 kb free, and a 8542 kb chunk.

DBCacheTool, through DALauncher, reports:
FREE = 20419200
MAX = 16777200

On second glance, I agree with Henk; on a 650, the ENTIRE working memory should be 20419200 -- including dynamic memory. There shouldn't be any way to get more than 13MB DB Cache free, even with all the extra software enhancements you've got. The numbers listed for dynamic heap actually look like the numbers I would get for DB Cache under your setup; the numbers listed for DB Cache look like the numbers I'd expect for Dynamic Heap with UDMH installed. Either you don't actually have a 650, you're mixing up the numbers, or there's something seriously wrong with your device.

[winston]

winston said:

I've been a happy user of LJP RC2 on my treo 650 for a while now, but it got borked, so I "upgraded" to a treo 680.

Apologies, I should have made that clearer - its a Treo 680

[_Em]

Sorry; I somehow missed that part

Anyone have any LJP experience with the 680 other than Winston?

[metaview]

I use LJP on a Treo 680 and a TX. The TX has real memory issues which are hardly to solve (SNES takes 2 MB dyn Mem for the emulation core and 6 MB FtrMem or DBCache for the ROM, plus whatever it needs for the screenbuffer and system mem.). The Treo 680 runs just fine. Btw. you get an error unzipping before it comes to version mismatch, right? How much memory did you assigned with UDMH? Please try to remove LJP from UDMH. On a Treo 680 it might also run without UDMH at all.

[winston]

Yeah, its error unzipping, then version mismatch. I haven't done anything other than enable UDMH, i seemed to remember it being recommended not to use any custom settings for LJP.
I've just tried with UDMH off (but not uninstalled), and its still the same.

I'm away for the weekend, when I get back I'll hard-reset, and try LJP on its own, and see how that goes. If it works, I'll add everything back in, and see if there's a conflict with anything, or if this is just a weird fluke.

[metaview]

Ok, here is the error:

if ( !zip_file )
{
Sys_PrintF("Couldn't find emulation module!");
return 1;
}

Why that? I don't know and will add some more debug stuff for this case for rc6.

[countbuggula]

winston said:

Yeah, its error unzipping, then version mismatch. I haven't done anything other than enable UDMH, i seemed to remember it being recommended not to use any custom settings for LJP.
I've just tried with UDMH off (but not uninstalled), and its still the same.

I'm away for the weekend, when I get back I'll hard-reset, and try LJP on its own, and see how that goes. If it works, I'll add everything back in, and see if there's a conflict with anything, or if this is just a weird fluke.

Did you try running with unzipped ROMs yet?

[metaview]

The error happens when loading the emulation module, not the ROM. Anyway, rc6 is online on my website. It comes with better error reporting.

[winston]

Cool, a new release
I'll hold off from hard-resetting to see if this can be resolved now, for reference's sake if nothing else!

When launching a ROM with RC6, after the initial black screen,

The purple file info box lists 02:/PALM/Programs/LJP/ljp-snes.zem,
and the popup says "Couldn't find emulation mo..." (module?)

I push OK, and "Stack use 20%" appears near the top, and the same message blocks appear with Error while unzipping / 1 / Couldn't load emulation module.

There is no longer the Version Got / Wanted: FFFF / 0100, however.

I guess the decent thing to do at this stage would be to test a different memory card. I have a 32 meg one, I'll try that & then update.


*** Update ***
That's the ticket! It works fine with the other card. The card I was using was a (quite new) Gigabyte Micro SD card in an SD adapter - one of these:


Strange that it didn't work with LJP, as it seems to work fine with everything else I've tried (Duke3D, videos in TCPMP, etc).
Does anyone else have experience with LJP and a micro SD card? I'm curious as to whether this is a slight incompatability, or whether I have a wonky card.

Thanks again everyone for all the help - all much appreciated!

[metaview]

winston said:

When launching a ROM with RC6, after the initial black screen,

The purple file info box lists 02:/PALM/Programs/LJP/ljp-snes.zem,
and the popup says "Couldn't find emulation mo..." (module?)

First, I assume, 02 is also shown for your ROM files, and they are together with the .zem on the external card. Second, I would ask you if you could double check if the path to the .zem file has exactly the same case as it is written there. That's almost all I could think about. You might use RescoExplorer and just try to open the ljp-snes.zem in RescoExplorer (use "view") to see if RescoExplorer is able to open and read the file.

Thanx
Henk