Hello.

My reply is a bit late, but better late than never. ;)

On 09 Jul 00, dglaude@... wrote:

> I think the folowing is possible:
> 1) Create a KERNEL minigame that will offer a way to select any file
> in the memory and write it into running space... then the kernel will
> jump into that running space (the swap space) and start to execute
> whatever was in this file!
> 2) Every minigame could be rewrited to work launched by this kernel
> (thus from a well known memory location).
> 3) Somehow the minigame should offer a way to jump back to the
> kernel to let one load another minigame.

IMHO this wouldn't work, for several reasons:

1. As soon as you have one gamefile on the VMU (= a file that starts at
memory location 0), the Dreamcast won't allow you to copy another gamefile
to that VMU, which makes the Kernel file useless.

2. Running a file within another file means that you would have to copy
that second file into the first one, which in turn means that the first
file has to already be big enough to hold it (since you can only do writes
within the area that the gamefile occupies). Due to the very limited
space on the VMU, this sounds like a BIG waste of memory.

3. The 'undocumented' write functions (that allow writing outside of the
gamefile area) vary from VMU to VMU, so using those also wouldn't be a
very good choice either.

So summing all that up, I doubt that a 'KERNEL' program is possible on a
VMU, except you waste a lot of memory and use special 'data' files that
the Kernel can then run. It will never work with 'normal' gamefiles (e.g.
that you have two standard gamefiles and a Kernel on the VMU and can
choose which one to play).

Apart from that, I do think that it would be comparably easy to 'merge'
several games into one big gamefile if you have all the source listings,
and just add a 'menu' to the beginning from which you can then choose the
game to play.

If any VMU programmers will like it to have their game to be merged with
others is another question, though... :)

Bye


Alessandro
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You get what anyone gets. You get a lifetime.