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Customizing GH2 for PS2 on Win7 64 bit?

 
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Desertman123  





Joined: 29 Jul 2007
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PostPosted: Sat May 18, 2013 4:14 pm    Post subject: Customizing GH2 for PS2 on Win7 64 bit? Reply with quote

Since I have a PS2 with a 250gb HDD in it, I figured I might as well start making custom setlists again. I originally did all my customs on a decent laptop running 32 bit XP with Ghex and a few other programs, but upon installing GHex on my desktop, I found out quickly it doesn't like Windows 7, let alone 64 bit. I read somewhere that it required a XP-only version of .NET framework. Is there any way I can combat this easily? Such as another program that's since been released that does what Ghex can easily? Or should I just suck it up and install a virtual machine for XP and use it with that?
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Fr0z3nD3m1s3  





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PostPosted: Sun May 19, 2013 12:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I had this same problem when I tried installing GHEX on my Windows 7 laptop. I tried many things, to which none of them worked. So, I just moved it to my Window's XP desktop and did all the charting for my laptop. Your best bet is probably to install a virtual machine, I've yet to find a solution myself.
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skylerinman  





Joined: 03 Oct 2007
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PostPosted: Thu May 23, 2013 3:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Desertman123, thank you once again for the network adapter you graciously sent me about 4 years ago.

And as for the issue, I've never had any trouble with GHeX with windows 7. But I did have trouble with windows 8, being that you had to manually go into the PC settings and check for the older .NET frameworks to be installed.
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LocalH  





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PostPosted: Sat Jun 01, 2013 8:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

One possible solution would be to set up a VM and run 32-bit XP. It would most certainly help with audio playback within GHEx, which I've never gotten to work on 64-bit 7.
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LocalH  





Joined: 30 Oct 2006
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 03, 2013 9:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Double posting to bump it, just to discuss a bit further since I just built a custom disc (with mostly schmutz and preb charts, lol), with some tips to make modern-day creation of GH2 custom discs a bit easier and more reliable.

I'm running on Win7 x64, on a machine with 10GB RAM (that part is somewhat irrelevant), without using an XP x86 VM. Being a 32-bit program, GHEx cannot make use of any more than 2GB of that RAM. This helps a lot as GHEx has a memory leak (IIRC, the issue is in the VGS conversion code) that can be lethal to your ARK if it runs out of memory (in this case, the 2GB) while writing to disc. The following tips are solely based on my own experience earlier tonight (plus from a few months back when I built yet another custom disc).

First things first - GHEx will appear to stop responding the instant you see the main window. Just wait a bit and it will become responsive. Adding archives works properly. Once you get to where you're replacing files, when you are replacing a .MID and you see the drop-down lists for each difficulty and guitar/bass/rhythm, if you click on any of the lists, GHEx will safely crash. It is not actually writing to the archive at that moment, so you won't have any work to do over again, but if you need to move charts between difficulties, you'll need to edit the chart outside of GHEx. This was particularly a pain in my ass when importing an old FoF version of "Super Mario Land Remix" that only had a chart on Hard lead - I had to change the track title in the .MID to PART GUITAR, load and save the chart with Feedback (which creates a .chart), and then edit the .chart file, changing "HardSingle" to "ExpertSingle".

While you're importing charts and their corresponding audio, keep an eye on the memory that GHEx is using, or your computer's free RAM, whichever applies to you. I stopped importing files once it got to using about 1.2GB of RAM for me, I probably could have gone further however but I didn't. My next tip will make it possible for you to experiment without having to redo too much work once you find the "tipping point" for your machine.

Every so often, I recommend removing the archive from GHEx, loading up Ark Expander, expanding the archive to a folder, and then rebuilding it. This serves a few functions:

1) Most importantly, this backs up your modification work. If you happen to have GHEx crash and fuck up your ARK, then you won't have to go any further back than your last ARK expansion. I learned this the hard way on the previous disc I did, when I was over halfway done, but I was working off an externally powered external hard drive connected to a laptop and the power went out for five seconds. Laptop stayed on, hard drive went off, ARK went boom.

2) This reorders all the files (not sure if Ark Expander uses the same file order as the original game disc or if it reads the arkorder.dtb file, really doesn't matter either way). This probably won't really matter unless you're running from optical disc on a marginal PS2. I run from HDD myself, but I just prefer for everything to be nice and neat instead of having all the MID and VGS files crammed at the end of the disc.

3) This allows you to replace other files (DTB, milo_ps2, etc) outside of GHex entirely, which is much, much faster. I had screwed something up on my most recent disc that was causing it to lock up right at the end of loading a song. I was able to go to the extracted ARK folder from the previous disc, copy most - but not all - of my DTB files, and plop them into the newer disc. If I'd had to copy the files one by one in GHEx I think I would have just given up. Instead, just replace such files as needed in-between expanding the ARK and recreating it. This is also how I very, very easily make two variants of a custom disc (which I've done with this one and the previous one, in my case one of them has a base H/X trackspeed of 1.8, and the other is set to 0.25 :P)

As I mentioned earlier, I'm pretty sure audio playback doesn't work at all. I don't even try it, as my method doesn't take too horribly long to build everything (I use Imgburn to build the final ISO, and install it to my PS2 HDD over the network, it'd be even faster to pull the drive and hook it up straight to my computer but the hassle of removing the network adapter makes me choose the network installation), so if something is out of sync I can easily fix things and rebuild. One of the charts on my most recent disc had ended up with too much silence in front of the actual song and I didn't notice it until I'd already built and installed the disc. Took me about 20 minutes total to fix, including trimming the silence, re-importing with GHEx, extracting and rebuilding the ARK, building the ISO, and installing.

I mainly just use GHEx for the conversion to MID and VGS. Yes, I know there are other tools for that, but I find GHEx better for my needs. Plus, Chart2Mid2Chart pukes on forced HOPOs and causes my machine to lag heavily when first launched (the HOPO issue is not a big deal, as if I only have a version of a chart with forced HOPOs, I load the .chart into a text editor and do a mass search-and-replace, changing "N 5 0" to "E *").

Also if anyone who is currently making customs for GH3 is reading this, please at least make a GH2 version with a "music_start" event (E key in dB) and a "play" track event (W key in dB). I went through and added the two of those to like 25-30 charts today. This keeps the guitarist from periodically removing his hands from the guitar mid-song. Minor point, but very annoying. I don't do GH3 customs, so I don't know if the presence of those two events causes any problems with GH3. If you prefer to do this via direct text editing of the .chart, put xxx = E "music_start" as the first event under [Events] (the "xxx" is the tick where the event hits, I recommend either 0 or the same as the first event other than this), and put xxx = E play as the first event underneath the desired difficulty (not sure if it has to be on all difficulties that are charted, or just one, I put it on Expert since I don't really care about lesser difficulties on my custom discs, since I'm also setting them up for autoplayer).

Whew, that was long. Anyway, hope this helps someone out there.
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Last edited by LocalH on Mon Jun 03, 2013 10:24 am; edited 1 time in total
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LocalH  





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PostPosted: Mon Jun 03, 2013 9:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Edit: See below.
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Last edited by LocalH on Mon Jun 03, 2013 10:22 am; edited 1 time in total
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LocalH  





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PostPosted: Mon Jun 03, 2013 9:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Edit: Scorehero had a temporary bout of downtime right when I was trying to make this post, and apparently it went through a couple of times without giving me a notification of success. This post and the previous one can be deleted if desired.
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Desertman123  





Joined: 29 Jul 2007
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Location: Central FL

PostPosted: Mon Jun 10, 2013 2:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

LocalH, I really appreciate the help. I figured that using GHex in Win7 be too risky and annoying, so I just sucked it up and installed XP onto my old laptop. It's slow, but it works. The DVD drive broke, but all I have to do is hook up my PS2 hard drive through the IDE-USB adapter I have.

I would've liked to use Ghex on my main PC (i7 2600, 8GB of RAM and a fast HDD) since it would've made the whole process faster, but my laptop suffices.

And thanks for pointing out that memory leak. I imported two songs and ghex.exe is already using 650MB of RAM . Considering this laptop has 2GB of RAM, I can see that being a problem.. Although back in the day I used this same PC to make custom discs and it really wasn't an issue.
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LocalH  





Joined: 30 Oct 2006
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 10, 2013 5:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, I'm not sure why it seems to eat up memory faster nowadays, but just close and reopen GHEx when you start getting low on memory (back in the day I used to wait until I had about 90MB free, as fast as it's using memory now I'd suggest more like 150-200MB).

GHEx does seem faster overall, even with the minor bugs. Even on your older laptop, I still recommend using ARK Expander in conjunction with GHEx, just in case you get too close to the edge. I wouldn't necessarily rebuild the ARK each time you expand it (since you're on a slower machine that would be much slower at reorganizing the files when they're in the original ARK order). In fact, if you didn't do it to start with, I still recommend using GHEx to shrink your ARKs (unless you've imported more than one tier's worth of songs). It basically moves all the VGS files to the end of the ARK, replacing them with 1 second of silence in the process. I also recommend hanging on to an empty "shrunk" ARK for future custom discs.
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Desertman123  





Joined: 29 Jul 2007
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Location: Central FL

PostPosted: Mon Jun 17, 2013 9:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

LocalH wrote:
Yeah, I'm not sure why it seems to eat up memory faster nowadays, but just close and reopen GHEx when you start getting low on memory (back in the day I used to wait until I had about 90MB free, as fast as it's using memory now I'd suggest more like 150-200MB).

GHEx does seem faster overall, even with the minor bugs. Even on your older laptop, I still recommend using ARK Expander in conjunction with GHEx, just in case you get too close to the edge. I wouldn't necessarily rebuild the ARK each time you expand it (since you're on a slower machine that would be much slower at reorganizing the files when they're in the original ARK order). In fact, if you didn't do it to start with, I still recommend using GHEx to shrink your ARKs (unless you've imported more than one tier's worth of songs). It basically moves all the VGS files to the end of the ARK, replacing them with 1 second of silence in the process. I also recommend hanging on to an empty "shrunk" ARK for future custom discs.


Ghex is working just how I remember it on my laptop, and yeah I just use ARK Expander for everything but songs so it's working well. I only changed a handful of songs and was too eager to try customs again so I compiled it and slapped it onto my hard drive and it works well! Thanks for the help.

PS: I saw you in the wild on psx-scene the other day. I think it was in a thread about OPL.
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LocalH  





Joined: 30 Oct 2006
Posts: 1400
Location: MiloHax

PostPosted: Tue Jun 18, 2013 4:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I remember you, you asked about cover art on the internal HDD. Protip: If you use my custom savefile guide (which is geared towards NTSC, I never used a PAL version so I dunno what's different) then you can have separate cover art for each custom disc as well :P
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