Patched Rom Hashes?

[hking0036]

On the dat-o-matic there's info for Mega Man Battle Network 3 Blue (USA) (Virtual Console) since last september, however there's been a full set of patches available for all 6 and Battle Chip Challenge for both US and EU regions for some time now, and I'd like to submit the hashes for these but I don't know if it's not kosher to submit the hash of a rom patched with a patch instead of directly dumped from the Wii U. I've been in contact with the original dumpers trying to see if the info matches exactly, so if something comes of that it should be great. For the most part, I think the patches are just made from the VC rom without any modifications, and to their credit the patched version of Battle Network 3 Blue matches the hash in the dat-o-matic. Any advice? I have the info all laid out and ready to go, but I don't really want to unless I can get a yes/no.

Also, on a semi-related note, I have a few (different) decrypted wii u vc dumps here, but I don't know where the rom is stored in the info, so if anyone can give me a heads up on that I'd appreciate it.

[Hiccup]

you should find some info on where the ROMs are stored in the various "VC injecting" tutorials on the web. e.g. nes is stored in the RPX, I think.

[hking0036]

you should find some info on where the ROMs are stored in the various "VC injecting" tutorials on the web. e.g. nes is stored in the RPX, I think.

I have a pretty good hunch for the GBA stuff, the rpx for them is usually ~1.5MB so it's too small for them to be embedded in. There's a varying size (usually 30-50mb) alldata.bin in the /content folder that seems like the only likely candidate but I don't know where the rom starts and ends inside of that because searching for bytes in a normal rom doesn't give me anything useful. I'll take a look at the inject stuff though, I hadn't thought about that, thanks for the heads up.

here's an example:



Any ideas about the patched roms either?

Edit: Got a little bit more info, the roms dumped from wii u vc (specifically I asked from the people who dumped battle net) were dumped direct from memory using tcpgecko. I can connect to the wii u while it's running, the problem is I don't know where in RAM the rom is. I dumped about a gb of ram and then found something interesting:

Original:


from RAM Dump:


notice the string, it's a little garbled on the vc dump but when you go down the ram dump starts to match the rom more and more. I dumped 4MB of that space from there but it doesn't produce a functioning rom, something's wrong with it I don't really know. I'm not pretending to be smart here, it's just that seeing this stuff has been driving my curiosity up the wall and I really want to know what's going on. Any advice anyone can give me would be very appreciated.

Edit: I tried doing another dump with a different game (Mega Man & Bass) and it comes out header-intact, checks out with GBATA so I'm going to try redumping RAM on F-Zero and see what happens. MM&B Doesn't boot in mGBA still, but I don't know if that's because of a bad rom dump or because it has VC Specific functions like MMBN5 did; the problem with that theory becomes that it constantly reboots unlike the MMBN5 patches which stick on a white screen. I'll probably attempt an SMA4 rom dump because I have a known good VC version.

Edit 2: I've tried dumping SMA4 a number of times and each time the checksum is different, so something has gone wrong Part of the header holds up, the Name is correct, but the Serial seems to be for the JP version of it, and the Save Type is labelled as 'none'.

[KingMike]

Just from a quick glace at the photos, the dumped data looks byteswapped, if you ignore the first byte.
How about using a program to swap each pair of bytes?

[hking0036]

Just from a quick glace at the photos, the dumped data looks byteswapped, if you ignore the first byte.
How about using a program to swap each pair of bytes?

I'll give it a shot. the first byte is probably leftovers (almost definitely, from the experience I've had reading gba in hex tonight it seems that every header starts with 2E) from the stuff before that, so if byteswapping can fix that then I can just pad the end with one byte of 00. I'm just really curious about all these wii u vc roms, but all my attempts have been a mess so far

[Hiccup]

Yep, ROMs in the memory are byteswapped. To get the ROM out of the files, use ajd4096's inject_gba (misleading name, as it can extract gba too).

[hking0036]

Yep, ROMs in the memory are byteswapped.

I wish I had known that earlier, I just installed and dumped a rom stupidly quick (aside from the fact it bundled an old version of easygui with a syntax error, but I just googled that and fixed it). I feel really stupid, now. Thanks for all the help, though, both here and on tcrf.

Dumped a few VC and none of them match the original, but Super Mario Advace 4 matches the VC release. Looking at them in HxD there's some variations like with the others I found. I'll get hashes of them and submit them when I get the chance.

Now I just go back to the original question, is it okay to submit hashes of patched roms for the battle networks?

[Hiccup]

I'd say yes. I posted the others, and they seem to have been accepted

[hking0036]

I'd say yes. I posted the others, and they seem to have been accepted

Okay, I'll go ahead and post them then.

Edit: got to verify about half anyways now so it works out.

[Hiccup]

Here is another tool: wheatevo's wiiu-vc-extractor
has support for NES, SNES and GBA. GBA support is based on inject_gba.
NES could be done before manually with a hex editor, but this makes it much quicker.

BTW, could you look into the format that DS VCs use? The fact that it is in a different format to normal ROMs makes it hard to compare with normal ROMs. The format seems to be only slightly different though, as it can be read by every .NDS-reading program I've tried.

[hking0036]

I can take a look, but I'm no genius myself and admittedly a lot of the reason I was so motivated to figure out the GBA was because of how much I like the GBA plus the fact nobody had touched it. That said, I'll try to find some DS dumps and take a peek. I don't know what you mean by "different format" though. The byteswapped versions of GBA roms could still be read by stuff like GBATA or mGBA, they just wouldn't start because they had bad data so I don't know if that means a whole lot.

[hking0036]

The tool seems to align SNES in a strange way according to an issue, I don't know how that will affect the hashes.

I'm going to try doing those with the wii u first.
They don't seem to be scrambled at all and they get put in the very beginning of the RAM, kind of nice after doing GBA foolery.