[3ds port]Rtc doesn't work properly in fire red rom hacks.

[Kirit29]

I've tried to get rtc to work in gba rom hacks of fire red for years now. But the in-game time doesn't sync up with the system time. I've tried overrides, hex editing the rom. No dice. I know fire red doesnt have rtc natively but there must be a way to emulate it properly with rom hacks, because gpsp on 3ds does it. I would love to use mgba over gpsp. Mainly because gpsp has a majorly annoying bug with dynarec that causes crashing randomly. Your emu is so much more stable.

[Kirit29]

If you want i can link you a patch of a rom hack that implements this feature. If thats alright.

[endrift]

Use a dev build.

Some ROM hacks won't work because FireRed doesn't have an RTC and they're trying to use hardware that 99% of cartridges don't have. It's basically impossible to detect which ROM hacks will use the RTC ahead of time to enable it.

[Kirit29]

Ok I will try that. Sucks that it's nigh impossible. Just out of curiosity do you know how gpsp does it?

[endrift]

Since gpSP doesn't care about accuracy it might just have the hardware "attached" at all times. I can probably add an option to do that, but I don't want it on by default since it could conceivably break other games.

The dev builds have a hack that tries to tell if it's a ROM hack of FireRed. It's reasonably good but not perfect.

[Kirit29]

Cool. If your willing to implement that it would be awesome. Not just for me but for alot of people i know. But only if your willing of course!

[Kirit29]

Hmm.The dev build seems to crash every time i load a rom. Any ideas?

[endrift]

No clue. Which 3DS (old vs new) and 3DSX vs CIA? Also, do you have any special characters (e.g. accent marks, Japanese characters, etc) in your filenames or paths?

[Kirit29]

I'm using new3ds cia build
with no special characters used. They are all firered rom hacks. They all booted before i updated to the dev build tho. Would you like the arm11 crash dump?

[endrift]

Do regular ROMs work? And sure, if you can tell me which specific build it is.

[Kirit29]

Yes regular roms do work. Im using build Revision 5009-ed21eeb which i think is the latest commit.

crash_dump_00000055.zip

[endrift]

OK crash fixed, it'll be posted on the site in ~20 minutes (I hope).

[endrift]

Any updates on this with new builds?

[Kirit29]

Srry life got in the way. Anyway. The commits you made four days ago fixed the crashing. But the rtc still wasn't emulated properly in my rom hacks. Haven't tried the recent builds yet due to job responsibilities tho.

[Kirit29]

Ok newest builds dont fix rom hacks rtc. Are you willing to try that "hardware is always attached thing" that gpsp might be doing?

[endrift]

First tell me the names of the ROM hacks you're trying out to see if there's anything less drastic I can do

[Kirit29]

ok here they are pokemon adventures red's chapter beta 13 part 1 - https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=392522 Pokemon Normal version - https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=285739 Pokemon Cloud white 1,2,&3 http://pokemoncloudwhite.com/ those are the one i play now I'm very grateful for your help!

[Kirit29]

Any update on this?

[endrift]

Forgot to look at it, sorry. Won't have a chance until tonight.

[endrift]

Ok, so I made some accuracy improvements to the RTC code--turns out it was buggy. But it's still not working because the RTC code in the FireRed ROM hacks is busted too--it doesn't adjust the GPIO pin direction properly meaning it wouldn't work on a real cartridge. The ROM hacks need to be updated.

[endrift]

Try this patch on Red's Chapter and the latest build of mGBA (https://s3.amazonaws.com/mgba/build/mGBA-build-2018-02-04-3ds-5026-1a6b47a29fd13716f71385abc87d00a052b46ea1.7z or newer).

[Kirit29]

That did the trick!! It is is working perfectly!

[Kirit29]

will it work on other rom hacks or is it a per game patch thing.

[endrift]

The offsets may be different for other ROM hacks so it'd need a custom patch per.

[endrift]

Closing because it's as fixed as it can get on the mGBA side.