Who made Xboo Communicator?

[Fighter19]

Hello there,

I was wondering about the following,
who made the Xboo Communicator (Linux)?
It seems to me, that WinterMute created that?

Given, that the Linux version still works like a charm on my system (x86_64 with LPT on-board and EPP selected in BIOS).
I would like to port it to a CLI+GUI application and get permission to reverse engineer it.
The resulting code would of course be contributed back with an open-source license,
with the original author being properly attributed.

Greetings,
Fighter19

[WinterMute]

I'm kind of shocked that the existing binary works at all on an x86_64 machine tbh. There was a point when the parallel port bit banging stopped working on windows which I suspected was down to the cpu speed and it effectively exceeding the speed the GBA port would cope with. Obviously later machines just didn't come with parallel ports at all and the USB ones didn't, iirc, provide sufficient control to to the bit banging. I just never got back to looking at it again. The code does (rather surprisingly I feel) still compile but the actual parallel port bit banging is entirely x86 assembly which, I guess should be rewritten in C to be useful in modern times. I've verified this compiles with latest fltk (1.3.9) from https://www.fltk.org/

I've uploaded the source to https://github.com/devkitPro/xcomms. It uses a simple Makefile which, being honest, I wouldn't do for this kind of project now. I might have a look at updating it to use autotools (which, being honest I prefer to cmake for cross platform code but I often struggle with cmake for cross comping in general).

I look forward to seeing how it can be improved. PRs are of course more than welcome. I'm unsure of what license I'd like for this tbh, probably GPL or a dual license of some sort. Will figure it out though.

[Fighter19]

Amazing! Thank you very much!
You're saving me a lot of time with this.
Just the source being available is a great help in regards to documentation, already.

These are the improvements I'm looking to make:

• See if it can be ported to parport (my instinct tells me it should be possible, this should enable it to run on more than just x86-based systems and avoids having to be superuser)
• Add a CLI for simple integration within VSCode and other IDEs
• Allow for Marin Korth's Burst Upload (or similar) upload to be used
• Add an example, showing how to set up Burst Download or optionally Normal Download within own GBA application
• Possibly at other interfaces such as UART
• Far potential future: Add a gdbserver stub to the toolchain and allow muxing through xcomms, similar to usbhostfs_pc from the PSP toolchain

Personally, I prefer CMake over autotools, as I encounter the same problem, just the other way around.
(I confuse to this day, the "build" "host" and "target" flags and often encounter problems, when other people specify these).