Cobra BiOS v1.0

Mental-Cube escribió: - COBRA FOR VIPER GC V1.0 -

1st of april, 2005


So, you were wondering what was the surprise in Cobra 1.0 ? Well...
We are proud to give you the very first Gamecube BIOS that works
Without swap. Seems that the Viper GC was unwittingly 2nd Generation
from the very beginning, since we made nice use of the lid switch
sensor cable designed by the Viper Team. Thanks guys you made it easy
with your foresight, for us to make the Cobra BIOS swapless. Don't
mess with the disc & lid anymore. Turn on your console and play.

FEATURES

- Direct boot of all media, without swapping!
- Automatic Media Detection: Insert disc, turn on GC and play!
- Supports all regions PAL / USA / JAP
- Play originals or backups from any region, thanks to the built-in
region-free feature
- Idle-bug free (no more Disc Read Errors when the drive is resting
- Unique MultiBoot feature: put several games on one single disc!
- Disc Explorer to browse the content of original GC discs or DVDs and
that allows you:
- To flash your Viper GC by burning the flash file on a DVD
- To execute homebrew programs (.DOL) from DVD, and enjoy many
already-released homebrew productions!
- To flash your Viper GC by burning the flash file on a DVD
- To run the game you want from a MultiBoot compilation
- To load cheat codes from disc into Viper GC Memory
- Powerful Cheat Code System compatible with Action Replay codes,
codes are stored in the Viper GC Flash so no memory card is needed!
- Cheat codes can be either entered using Cobra Menus or loaded from
a file using the Disc Explorer
- BIOS Configuration stored into the Viper GC Flash
- Selectable default boot action (Main menu, Boot disc, Original BIOS,
Disc Explorer) and special boot action (when the X key is held)
- Calls Original BIOS Game Loader for 100% compatibility
- Supports all hardware revisions (including DOL-101 units)
- User-Friendly GUI

So what do you need exactly ?
- A Viper GC chip
- This very flash file
- Some Compatible Media and a DVD-burner


WHAT'S NEW ?

Well, as you can see from the feature list, there are a lot of new
features we introduced in this release.
- Direct boot of all media, without swapping !
- Fixed compatibility problem with DOL-101 units
- Automatic Media Detection: Insert disc, turn on GC and play!
- Fixed Idle bug, you won't have any DRE if the drive is resting
- Powerful Cheat Code System compatible with Action Replay codes,
codes are stored in the Viper GC Flash so no memory card is needed!
- Cheat codes can be either entered using Cobra Menus or loaded from
a file using the Disc Explorer
- Unique MultiBoot feature: put several games on one single disc!
- A lot of fixes and low-level changes

A Swap disc option was left in (called "Change Disc" as you could also
replace a backup with another backup) to be totally backward
compatible. Read more below


USER MANUAL

- If you want to use full-size DVD-R you can remove the top of the
console. Team Xtender will be releasing replacement lids compatible
with full DVD-R within two week. Best of all, we learned this week
that they will be officially Viper GC branded!

- Flash the Viper GC with this BIOS then remove the parallel port
connector from the programmer. If you prefear you can flash this
BIOS from DVD if you have Cobra 0.3+ already running on your chip.
We've heard Viper Team will release an USB programmer for the chip
soon if you prefear USB.

- Turn on your GC with the disc you want to run. It can be an
original or a backup, but if it's a backup it should be filled with
1.3GB of data at least (for now). If you have a black screen coming,
it's probably beause your Viper installation is not clean.

- While turning on your GC:
- Hold Y to go to Main Menu (if it's not your Default Boot mode)
- Hold X for the other boot mode (can be set in Config Menu)
- Don't hold anything for Default Boot Action

- Select "Direct Disc Boot" if you want to play a backup or homebrew
program from DVD. If you have problems using the Direct Disc Boot
method with your media, you can still use the Swap trick.

- If you want to use the old Swap Trick Method (for discs that are
not full or that have problems to sync with the Direct Disc Boot)
boot your GC with an original disc. Then choose the "Change Disc"
option and follow the instructions. After the swap is done, you
can select Direct Disc Boot option again.

- Select "Original BIOS" if you want to play an original Game
compatible with your GC region, or if you want to go into the
Original BIOS menus.

- Select "Configuration Menu" if you want to change your Cobra BIOS
configuration. The options are quite self-explanatory.

- Select "Disc Explorer" to enter to browse the content or your
original GC discs or DVDs. Supported file systems are FST
(GC File System) and ISO9660. Joliet encoding is not supported in
ISO mode.

- Enter "Cheat codes" to select, enable, disable and edit cheat codes

- Enter "Disc Explorer" to select a game from a MultiBoot disc

- Enter "Disc Explorer" and select a .VGC file if you want to reflash
your Viper GC without the need of the Parallel port programmer!

- Enter "Disc Explorer" and select a .DOL file if you want to run
a homebrew program! (You can put up to 1.4 GB of homebrew things on
a disc. We hope this will give some inspiration to emu authors
Our DOL loader is not perfect for now and works for around half of
the public homebrew programs. Here are some of the programs booting
successfully:
GC-Linux, Ascii Fighter, DVD Browser, CTR_GCS, CTR_SND, GBQ Gameboy
emulator, PSOLoader "It's working" demo, Maze, Nitrorally, Yeti 3D
3D engine, Chip8 emulator, Snowlords game, Terranigma, XRick and
probably many we missed!

- Enter "Disc Explorer" and select a .VGC file if you want to reflash
your Viper GC without the need of the Parallel port programmer!

- Enter "Disc Explorer" and select a .COD file if you want to add
cheat codes for a game without the need to enter it using the pad!

- Make sure that the "lid passthru" wires of the Viper GC are
installed correctly or the disc won't spin. ³

DIRECT BOOT LIMITATIONS

THE MEDIA

The GC drive in its default state only eats high-quality DVD-R and
a few MINI-DVD-R. But a couple of weeks ago, speedi from the afterdawn
forums found a nice way to tweak the laser so it reads almost any burned
media including some DVD+Rs. We recommend doing this laser tweak if you
have any problems reading your DVDs. We are no laser experts, in fact
we think it would be more appropriate to just lower the value of the
variable resistor instead of setting it to an absoulte given value,
but lots of people including us have been using this laser tweek for a
couple of weeks without any problem reported so far. For more info on
laser tweaking please read this forum post:
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/138930

You don't need to encrypt the disc or use a special burner firmware
to write the disc. Just burn your ISO/GCM (rename it to .ISO) with
Nero (or any other tool).


CHEAT CODES

If you want to use cheat codes, enter Cheat Codes menu,select a game,
check the codes you want to use, exit the cheat selector and enable
cheats.

To add new codes follow on-screen instructions. The codes are
compatible with decrypted AR codes. You can decrypt AR codes using
the great GCNCrypt by Parayste. Never enter the first code of a given
cheat code (validator code). You can also put .COD files on a DVD and
load cheat codes from there, each file corresponds to one game.

For now we've reserved 4kb in Viper GC Flash memory to store cheat
codes. If that's not enough we'll add some more space in next release.


TROOBLESHOOTING

- If the disc stops spinning in the menu it means that the drive can't
sync with your media, or that there are not enough data on your disc.
In direct boot mode the GC is very selective about the media it
takes. If you have any problem please try the swap trick. If you
still have problems try with different media/burner. Make sure your
laser is correctly tweaked!

- Audio Streaming: Some games use a special audio streaming mode
that can be compared to CDDA. For now, the ISO of the file needs to
be patched with 0rbital's great ViperTemporaryAudioFix 1.1+. If the
ISO is not patched you'll have noise instead of music. We will try to
fix this issue so no patching is required. But in case we do, YOUR
PATCHED ISOS WILL BE FULLY COMPATIBLE and still work with music!
(so forget what is written in the fixer nfo file). Don't run the fix
on ISOs that don't need fixing as it will only destroy them

- Most multi-discs games are working, just play with Disc 1 until
you're asked to change disc and make a save here. Then boot with
Disc 2 instead. We started working on code to allow disc-change,
and we'll integrate it in a new release.

All those problems could be fixed in a next update.

Before burning an image, makes sure it is 1459978240 bytes long else
you may need to use the swap trick method.

To know what's your GC Version code (2 digit number) go into Config
Menu, then Version Info, 2nd page. First digit corresponds to GC
mobo version, 2nd digit corresponds to drive version.

IF YOU MAKE BACKUPS, DON'T USE ANY "WIPE" TOOLS TO SAVE SPACE. Unless
you know it's REALLY working. Most of thoses tools only work because
the current pso loaders patch libraries routines to emulate DVD. But
on REAL HARDWARE, each file/fst has to be aligned on a 4-byte boundary!
Else nothing will work. Audio Files (for audio streaming) even need
to be aligned on a 32kb-boundary ! So forget current "WIPE" tools until
they are fixed. But note that Garbage is NOT NEEDED by the GC. The
files must be correctly aligned that's it. So if your "WIPE" tool is
not changing the image size (meaning there's no relocation) then it's
probably fine. Use FSTFIX by LOONYCUBE to fix bad rips.


TECHNICAL INFO

We'll release a command-line MultiBoot Disc maker next week if nobody
releases a better one before we do Here are the specs for Multiboot
discs. Note that every image should be aligned on a 32kb boundary.
At offset 0x00: 43 4F 42 52-41 4D 42 31
0x40: Position of the 1st image in bytes (Big endian)
0x44: Position of the 2nd image in bytes (Big endian)
....: ...etc...
....: 00 00 00 00

The MultiBoot feature is stealth for the GC so it's 100% compatible
with homebrew images. If you want to put several backups on one disc
you'll have to remove the garbage at first.
The maximum size of a MultiBoot disc is 1459978240 bytes.


THE RUMORS & EVENTS

Lately there has been a few events we'd like to comment. First,
congratulation to Utopia for the deobfuscation work you did and the
release of Anaconda. We like your style Except maybe for the
"Mentalcube [...] did a well job while choosing the neccessary patches"
we find that "choosing" is not exactly the right term, as this patch
is the results of tousands of lines of firmware code and several months
of hacking and debugging. And thanks for the obfuscation tips
Anaconda led to a lot of stuff from the best (GCOS) to the worst
(people selling our code without authorisation). Anaconda code is
a 1:1 rip of our code, except for the loading part running on the GC
CPU that was rewritten by Utopia (they made it clear but some people
just didn't get it).

Now about GCOS. We like what you're doing, even if up until now you're
using our code without authorisation. But we're releasing Cobra 0.4
drivecodes under GPL license so it matches the license of other files
you're using. Feel free to use, abuse it and improve it!
Cobra 1.0 drivecode might follow in the future, but for now we chose
closed source.

It appears that one of our beta-testers leaked a beta of Cobra 1.0 one
month ago. We'll do all beta testing by ourselves now. We find it's an
amazing coincidence that a swapless chip was announced two weeks after
the leak. Please don't support thieves.

Oh and about Idle-bug, it was a BUG, yes a BUG of our old cobra
code in the way we were handling a protection. The bug is now fixed
and now the laser won't go out of the data area anymore, causing idle
DREs when it couldn't focus.


THE FUTURE

There's MUCH more to come, you'll see soon
And our low-level hackers are currently working on the disc calibration
code to improve Direct Boot Media compatibility. We'll mess with that
only when we are certain that the code won't hurt your console!


CLOSING WORDS

Special thanks to E*Flash for his help, RoM for the early units,
Melan for the /48 GC and to everybody that tried Cobra V0.4, posted
constructive feedback. Thanks a lot for your patience. You'll never
wait that long anymore for future release, this was a very special
milestone

You are free to redistribute this package as long as it's not changed,
patched, ported, or whatever.

Our code is free of any copyrighted code from third party.
It is also free of any GPL licensed code, we have strong respect for
other people's hard work. We only ask you to show similar respect
toward our work. To put it in other words, if you are in the "right"
side, draw the line between learning and stealing. Thank you.

Enjoy!