Ok, here's a fun trick for everyone who has a Japanese VMS.

I've written a program to dump the contents of the VMS firmware.
Unfortunately, it depends on certain instructions being present in
certain locations within the firmware itself, so it will probably only
work with a Japanese firmware. You're welcome to try with an American
or European VMS, but don't be surprised if it explodes into blue smoke
or something. ;-)

Anyway, here's the procedure:

* Get dumpbios.s from the vault, and assemble it. Upload the binary to
your VMS.
* Enter game mode on the VMS. A text "Working..." should appear on the
top of the display.
* At this point, reinsert the VMS into the controller. Since the
dumper program writes a lot of data to the FLASH, it's better to run on
DC power than on batteries.
* You should see a progress indicator moving slowly to the right. When
the indicator reaches the right edge of the screen, the dump is
finished. This takes approx 6 minutes.
* If the text "Error!!!" appears, the dump has failed. Remove the VMS
from the controller and press Mode to leave the dump program, then try
again.
* When the dump completes, the VMS will automatically leave game mode
and should appear in the File screen on the DC again.
* Now transfer the dumpbios game back to the computer again.
* Finally, get undumpbios.c from the vault, compile it, and run it on
the dumpbios binary you got back from the VMS. This program will
accept either a .VMS or a .DCI file.
* Now you should have a firmware dump in the file "vmbios.bin". You
can test it in the softvms emulator by starting it with the flags `-b
vmbios.bin'.

As always Jim, should you or your Dreamcast be injured or killed during
this mission, I will disavow all knowledge of your actions...


// Marcus