FireFly's Interview

 

Firefly's site is here.

 

Hooka: When did you get your gp32?

 

Firefly: Thanks to a Korean guy named "Valken Lee" I was able to order my GP32 with the games "Little Wizard" and "Rally Pop" in January 2002 from http://www.gamecd.co.kr for 310400 won (= US 239$). At that time there was not much choice where to buy one, mostly Korean shops. I think Liksang started to sell GP32 handhelds a few months later if my memory serves well.

 

Hooka: What convinced you to get one?

 

Firefly: It is always useful to actually have access to the system if you are developing an emulator for it.

 

Hooka: You made a clone of Snake called GpSnake, what happened to it?

 

Firefly: It was written during the early stages of development of GeePee32 for testing purposes only.

 

Hooka: Why are there downloads of the private geepee32 in addition to the public release on your website?

 

Firefly: The "private" versions were intended for #gp32dev members as opposed to the "public" versions which were for everyone. However, anyone could download the "private" versions from my homepage, which made the whole private/public thing kind of useless. That is why I removed the private/public branding in later versions of GeePee32.

 

Hooka: You decided not to update your site with the new geepee32 why is that?

 

Firefly: The idea was to move the GeePee32 content on http://user.skynet.be/firefly to its own domain, http://www.geepee32.com.

 

Hooka: How did the sponsorship by Lik-Sang come around?

 

Firefly: They contacted me in the summer of 2003 asking if I could include Liksang advertising in GeePee32 in exchange for a domain with hosting (http://www.geepee32.com) and some dough. I agreed to do this for the kick, not for the money or the domain... really :)

 

Hooka: What are your feelings on this sponsorship?

 

Firefly: No comment.

 

Hooka: What happened to the new site www.geepee32.com? It seems to be gone now...

 

Firefly: The domain expired. I might buy it back when it is available again.

 

Hooka: Whatever happened to GP32 NSE? I remember it being online on gp32x but it's gone now and there is no download on your website.

 

Firefly: I was having some technical problems with the Namespace Extension (NSE) components for Delphi that I was using which made it nearly impossible to get the true Windows drive look and feel that I wanted. The numerous problems with the NSE eventually evolved into the idea of letting the GP32 appear as a "Mass Storage Device" to Windows so another project was born.

 

Hooka: What prompted you to make a GP32 USB Driver with the Windows 2003 DDK?

 

Firefly: The original Windows 2000 DDK based GP32 driver, which is actually the "bulkusb" sample driver, provided by Gamepark gave me a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) during the development of the GP32 NSE. The reason why my NSE got a BSOD and Gamepark's PC-Link did not was because I used so called "overlapped I/O" and Gamepark did not, they did their USB communication in a separate thread and killed it whenever it got stuck somewhere during either a read or write. Luckily for me Microsoft fixed their "bulkusb" driver in the Windows XP/2003 DDK so the BSOD problem was gone. It has recently come to my attention that the Windows 2000/XP driver available for download on http://www.gamepark.co.kr is the one I built, lol :)

 

Hooka: Was it a brand new driver or a port of the official Gamepark USB Driver?

 

Firefly: The "bulkusb" driver included with the Windows DDK is actually the GP32 USB driver so it is more of a brand new driver than a port.

 

Hooka: Are there any purposes for MakeSMC other than for use with geepee32?

 

Firefly: People are free to use it for whatever they want, but it was designed to make SMC files for use on GeePee32.

 

Hooka: Why did you decide to make a GP32 Package Extractor?

 

Firefly: Because it was not possible and I need to unpack some of the packages.

 

Hooka: What is a GPT package?

 

Firefly: It contains a "patch", which are a bunch of files that will upgrade your game from version "A" to version "B". There were some released for Tomak, Dyhard and maybe other games too.

 

Hooka: Smart move on not releasing the SecuMax Encryption/Decryption tool, but why did you make it in the first place?

 

Firefly: My idea was to register http://www.gp32warez.com and start selling illegal re-encrypted GP32 games... just kidding :)

 

Hooka: Do you have any plans on updating the GP32 Game Patcher if there are new games released for the gp32?

 

Firefly: Not really, it is a lot of work to add new games and new codes.

 

Hooka: How does the GP32 Game Patcher work is it something along the line of a .fxe that locks certain values into the memory and runs the game?

 

Firefly: When you select one or more codes/cheats and press [START], the GP32 firmware is copied from ROM to RAM and gets patched so that it will patch the code from the game in question when you load it.

 

Hooka: How many different versions are there of certain games (as far as you know)?

 

Firefly: There are at least 8 different versions of "Dyhard Infinity" which makes it very time consuming to add support to GP32 Game Patcher for every one of them.

 

Hooka: Why did you decide to port Heretic to the gp32?

 

Firefly: Someone was doing Doom at that time and I thought it would be cool if I did another game port, namely Heretic.

 

Hooka: Is the version of Heretic Craigix is (was, not really sure) working on based off of your port?

 

Firefly: Not that I know of.

 

Hooka: You tried to build WinCE 4.x for GP32 what made you think to do this?

 

Firefly: Yes, I indeed attempted to build a Windows CE 4.x version for the GP32 but the S3C2410, not the S3C2400 used in the GP32, Board Support Package (BSP) for Windows CE from Samsung was badly written so I never "started" any work on it. However, Microsoft recently released version 5.0 of their Windows CE Platform Builder software and it looks like they have put some work in cleaning up the S3C2410 BSP which means it will be less work to port it to the S3C2400. In fact, I have modified the included bootloader so that it recognizes the GP32 flashrom, can format a 64MB smartmedia card, and some other things. Unfortunately I do not have the necessary development/debugging hardware required to actually run anything on the GP32 itself. How the hell did I test it then? So far I have been running everything on GeePee32 :)

 

Hooka: How much work (approximately) would be needed to be done to get it to a working level?

 

Firefly: It largely depends on how skilled that person is with Windows CE and the GP32 hardware. There is also the issue of the limited amount of RAM available on the GP32. The "tiny kernel" version of Windows CE will most certainly fit in the 8MB address space, but you will probably need the 32/64MB RAM upgrade to run actual games and other software on it.

 

Hooka: Did you ever have WinCE actually running on the gp32 hardware?

 

Firefly: No.

 

Hooka: I heard once that you shared your GP32 USB Mass Storage source with Squidge to help him speed up GPDrive is this true?

 

Firefly: Yes, Squidge contacted me because the operating system and version compatibility for his GPDrive was (and still is?) very low. My code however, supported all operating systems and versions, such as Windows 98/Me/2000/XP, MacOS X, Linux, etc. I have no idea if he actually used any of my code.

 

Hooka: Are you still working on adding writing to GP32 USB Mass Storage?

 

Firefly: No. I lost almost 2 weeks on the SMC write problem which I was never able to fix so I decided to cancel the project.

 

Hooka: Why is a driver needed for using GP32 USB Mass Storage Driver with Windows 98 is it because windows 98 has now mass storage drivers built it?

 

Firefly: You need the driver for Windows 98 because it does not come with one out of the box.

 

Hooka: How come GeePee32 is listed as (IN)Active? Is it because you work on it on and off and don't feel like changing it all the time?

 

Firefly: Indeed, I work on it very rarely for a very short period of time, so not really worth changing the status and uploading the HTML.

 

Hooka: You have finished the GP32USB Driver and Make SMC, are you working towards finishing some of the still active projects on your site? (USB Mass Storage and GeePee32)

 

Firefly: Are there still projects listed as "active"? If so then I better change them to "inactive". However, there might be future updates to GeePee32 depending on my plans with Windows CE, but I would not get your hopes up too high.

 

Hooka: Are all your inactive projects totally abandoned or do you just not want to work on them now?

 

Firefly: My projects are never really abandoned unless I lost the source code of course. The problem is that I have so much things that I want to do and so little time. I *want* to work on them but there is *no time*.

 

Hooka: What do you see for the future of the gp32?

 

Firefly: Not much.

 

Hooka: What do you want to see in the future for the gp32?

 

Firefly: Maybe more memory, better hardware/software quality, better developer support, cool peripherals, etc.?

 

Hooka: What is your favorite commercial/homebrew gp32 app?

 

Firefly: Do I have to choose something? I guess "Astonishia Story R".

 

Hooka: Which came first the Firefly brand or your use of the nick?

 

Firefly: The nickname was first. I had never even heard of the TV series "Firefly" until it was already canceled. Not really one of my favorite shows, maybe watched 3 or 4 episodes. Better luck next time Whedon! :)

 

*Note: Top bar stolen from The Firefly Files and modified...

 

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