How did they create roms from carts and are they 100% accurate ? Did they use a board that hooked up to a pc from Genesis or did people copy info onto their Amstrad Mega PC or Sega TeraDrive ? Also, could any of the info been corrupted during copy ? There are many sites with many different uploaders of said roms. So are you actually playing "the actual cart" on your everdrive, or has the rom been altered ?
Always wondered how they did that too. Only thing i do know is that the roms labeled [!] are supposed to be the undisputed, GOOD dumps. When in doubt, those are the ones you should go after by default.
There are various ways, the most obvious is using a machine that simply reads all the memory on the cart. This doesn't always work though, the machine might suck (so you get the shitty [b] dumps) or the game might use a mapper which doesn't show all the memory at once. Without knowledge of the mapper the dump will be messed up (this is why no one could dump pier solar). They had to pretty much open the game and read it "by hand". No idea how that's done but it's complex and involves a lot of wires.
In the 90s they used copier-devices such as the Super Magic Drive.
http://segaretro.org/images/e/eb/SuperMagicDrive.jpg
Basically you put the copier on top of a mega drive, put a cart in the slot, hooked a floppy drive to the setup via parallel port and dumped the contents of the cart on a floppy disc in several Formats. There are other methods as well, but AFAIK this was one most common ones in the nineties. Though like Kamahl says, sometimes the copy wasn't 100% accurate and had to by "fixed" on a PC by hand.
http://segaretro.org/images/b/be/Supermagicdrive.jpg
^^^^^^^^^^^
That thing is damn sexy!!
I fucking loved that era, I had a Super Magic Drive myself with 24M ram, and my friend got a Super Wildcard DX from his christmas bonus that he earned with his paper route,
oh we played so many games, He'd be at my place, I'd be at his, we'd make a trip to our local warez distrubutor almost every weekend, buying games on 3,5 disks.
Then I traded in my Super Magic Drive for a 32M Smartbros, which is apparently one of the more rarer copiers out there, and i've gotten some nice offers for it over the years, but oh.. the memories!
Then my friend traded in his DX for a DXII, yeah good times.
I still remember playing Fatal Fury Special (the japanese version) on that very cold December evening, going home.. humming the themes as i rode my bike in the freezing cold.
playing the Mortal Kombat II Beta that allowed for fatalities during the match, or playing through Chrono Trigger.
or he'd be at my house, we'd play Sonic 2, 3, Streets of Rage II, Bare Knuckle III (which our pirate supplier managed to get his hands on after much asking from me)
aaaah 1991-1997
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2_4thCLJfo&gl=US
Quote:
Originally Posted by NeoVamp
^^ I appreciate your story and all, just wanted to say that i f'in HATE that song! And all songs like it that are ridiculously positive/happy. For that matter, R.E.M's "end of the world".
Now i've all about positive thinking but, that stuff is just obnoxious.
http://garnetstevens.files.wordpress...07/oscar50.jpgQuote:
Originally Posted by Saturn Fan
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/images/icons/talking.gif
Great post Phantar. So when this guy claims "it's like your playing the actual original cart of games" he is kind of wrong, because 5 out of 10 altered beast let's say roms from different sites by different uploaders could have misc errors or music off or graphic/colors off ? So some roms needed to be fixed when ripped from cart onto pc, then it isn't just like playing original cart. It's not emulation, but it's not exactly like playing cart either ? I guess now I'm going to redownload my favorite roms but this time with (!) in title.
6:00 to 6:20
This is crazy and answers me too.
Not exactly...
You see, the data is intact, it's integrity is there and things like colors and sound shouldn't be off in the slightest, the primary issue is that there have been issues with chunks of the data being read in the wrong order, which then had to be fixed for the game to even run without crashing.
It is exactly like playing carts, because you are playing the cart.
The only reason there's bad roms out there is because some copiers handled data differently,
thus resulting in sometimes incorrect dumps, however most of the time you never even noticed that they were "bad"
The word "emulation" shouldn't even be used here, those copiers were pretty much flashcarts before we had flashcarts.
"Though like Kamahl says, sometimes the copy wasn't 100% accurate and had to by "fixed" on a PC by hand."
"The only reason there's bad roms out there is because some copiers handled data differently,
thus resulting in sometimes incorrect dumps"
What was incorrect about the "bad dump roms" data specifically ?
Incorrect or missing headers, or stored in a different format then other copiers, or it would copy too much data, resulting in overdumps.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vector
sometimes a game would have a checksum, and if data was not correctly copied or too much then the checksum would be incorrect,
sometimes resulting in a red screen, so you'd figure out where the checksum was stored and alter it, then the rom would run just fine.
but.. it would not be a perfect copy, and we can make perfect copies, so why not make one?
So asking if they are 100% accurate is easy, Yes, but only if its been properly dumped.
It's just data, stored on a chip, so it can be copied just like you can copy stuff from an old floppy or newer USB stick.
It's all just digital date, its just that they didn't have a standard set back then, kind of like copying CD's, sometimes
you'd get a bin/cue, sometimes an IMG, sometimes a CCD, sometimes a Alcohol120 image, all of them would contain the game,
but sometimes much more, some would copy sub sector data, some would not, some programs would add their own data in the mix, somewhat branding the image.
or everything would be rearranged differently, resulting in files not being where they were supposed to be on the burned disc, resulting in dead Dreamcasts as the laser moved erratically up and down trying to load files that were normally very close together.
Thank you NeoVamp.
Like me I guess you burnt isos in 2001 or so where data was erratic on disc and newer ones where it's like gd rom, but has your DC become damaged because of it ? I know how, like you explained, but has it happened to you or anyone you directly know ? Because I had my DC for 13 years and it's fine after playing "bad data iso" and newer revivedc better isos. Everything wears out over time though regardless. I also never knew anyone who properly done Saturn swap trick and it was ruined because of it. Yeah I saw reports, but who knows how truthful they are like other (incorrect) myths like 32x not working on cdx.Quote:
or everything would be rearranged differently, resulting in files not being where they were supposed to be on the burned disc, resulting in dead Dreamcasts as the laser moved erratically up and down trying to load files that were normally very close together.
NeoVamp explained it pretty well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vector
When using Everdrive you are playing the rom in your Genesis as if the original cart that rom was ripped from was plugged into the cartslot.
And roms labeled [!] are generally regarded as the purest, most complete dump there is. Stick with those unless theres a particular revision of a game you want to check out(ex: Shinobi!).
Godzilla!
http://www.i-mockery.com/shorts/shin.../shinobi-9.gif
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vector
Actually No, When I got a Dreamcast I took the warning from the gamestores of not playing burned discs somewhat seriously,
seriously enough to actually research the validity behind those claims, so after I had digested all the information I decided I would not boot burned games.
I have however played around with burned emulation discs, like that NES emulator a bit, but only because it required very little laser reading action.
and eventually I moved on to modded xboxes, which ran all the files from HDD.
My move to the Xbox was mostly because I wanted to spare my DC, I've always been very careful with my consoles.
Okay so it didn't happen to you or anyone you know. Gotcha. Me either.
I don't think I even knew anyone who had a Dreamcast..Quote:
Originally Posted by Vector
Well.. I knew some guys, but none of them were pirates.
Damn now I wanna hook up my Dreamcast.
Yeah DC ftw. I'm in a sdiso kick right now with it.
I need to look into running iso's from SD card, I remember reading somewhere that they were working on an alternative to the (slowish) currently available method.
Cool. I just stick with the sdiso of Master System and Nintendo emulators that work pretty much perfect (Genesis one or SNES ones don't), Neo Geo games that run perfect, some homebrews and several of the actual DC games that run perfect off Dreamshell 4 RC 1. Not all homebrews or stuff works on RC 1. I don't bother putting any kind of games that runs slow or has some errors, on SD. What is the name of the alternative you speak of ? A whole new setup or like Dreamshell which uses same sd devices ?Quote:
Originally Posted by NeoVamp
Ah, the Smart Bros. I got one of those after it turned out the Multi Game Hunter I bought from a friend didn't have enough memory (16 meg, I think) for a lot of the games I wanted to play. Took forever to get it, I think over a year from when I first put in a preorder to when they finally got it in stock. Great for its time, but eventually emulators got good enough that it just didn't seem worth the hassle to spend 5-10 mins loading and swapping floppies.Quote:
Originally Posted by NeoVamp
Yeah that's when I shelved my copiers, these days I only collect them because of the nostalgia.
Flashcarts however, quite handy.
Rom quality all depends where you get your roms from, These days there's a lot of verified roms that're the real deal. What's funny is when you play an incomplete rom dump using information from another version of the same game, I've found stuff like that with mame dumps.
Most cartridge roms are quite dumpable. My eprom / flash burners are designed to work with standard programmable chips they're not designed for console stuff at all. I desoldered a maskrom from a nes cartridge, wired up an adapter to convert the nes maskrom to eprom pinout, plugged it into my eprom reader / writer, loaded the profile of an eprom that's the same size as the nes maskrom, dumped the image, added an emulator header, and the dumped image ran fine in an emulator.
fixed.Quote:
Originally Posted by NeoVamp
Congratulations with your belated correction Sir.Quote:
Originally Posted by Drakon