Issues with NES Roms - Missing headers

[Dazz]

Hey Guys,

I'm Dazz, one of the Admins of the HyperSpin-fe front end project. We base all of our ROM lists off of the No-Intro project so we know we are only using the best ROMs available. It appears that we've found a couple issues with the No-Intro ROMsets for NES.

We've tested the following ROMs in several emulators and none of the following ROMs appear to be working when using the newest No-Intro DATs. All of the following ROMs return Invalid file when running through Nestopia and FCE. Unfortunately we can't determine if this is an issue with the emulators or if we have possible incorrect CRC's in the No-Intro DATs that's causing this. Perhaps someone more familiar with this might be able to look into this and help us figure out where the problem lies.

Addams Family, The - Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt (Europe).nes
Adventures of Lolo (USA).nes
Akira (Japan).nes
Arch Rivals - A Basketbrawl! (Europe).nes
Arkanoid II (Japan).nes
B-Wings (Japan).nes
Ballblazer (Japan).nes
Bases Loaded (USA) (Rev B).nes
Bases Loaded (USA).nes
Battleship (USA).nes
Bible Adventures (USA) (v1.4) (Unl).nes
Big Nose Freaks Out (USA) (Unl).nes
Bigfoot (Europe).nes
Bigfoot (USA).nes
Blackjack (USA) (Unl).nes
Booby Kids (Japan).nes
Boulder Dash (USA).nes
Boy and His Blob, A - Trouble on Blobolonia (USA).nes
Captain Skyhawk (USA) (Rev A).nes
Caveman Games (USA).nes
Field Combat (Japan).nes
Fox's Peter Pan & the Pirates - The Revenge of Captain Hook (USA).nes
Futebol (Brazil) (Unl).nes
Galaxian (Japan).nes
Game Master Kid (Unknown) (Proto) (RAM) (Unl).bin
Game Master Kid (Unknown) (Proto) (Unl).bin
Hidden Chinese Chess - An Qi (Asia) (NTSC) (Unl).nes
King Neptune's Adventure (USA) (Unl).nes
Magic Johnson's Fast Break (USA).nes
Othello (Australia) (Unl).nes
Prince of Persia (Spain).nes
Puzzle (USA) (Unl).nes
Sidewinder (Australia) (Unl).nes


Thanks!

Dazz

[Dazz]

One of our ROM guys just checked out LOLO.

http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/forum/showt ... post108858

This is from his most recent findings:

[QUOTE=jhabers;]OK the header is definetly missing from the LOLO in the most recent no-intro set (Header is in bold)

4E 45 53 1A 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
20 AE D9 A5 00 29 E7 09 10 85 00 8D 00 20 20 B8
D9 20 29 80 A9 01 85 43 A2 28 20 97 D9 20 BC 80

This header is however present in older sets.

Question is if no-intro meant to take the header out or not or was this a mistake?[/QUOTE]

[nogarth]

what i found looking at this was the Lolo that didnt work had a CRC for the file of 71BF075F which matched the dat but in nestopia it failed to load. reading it in neshead it had mapper 14-Unknown and the header info was not visable either. But at rom from the dat colection of 20101227 worked fine and that had a crc of c5e68008 using the ines header.

[MikeHaggar]

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1660

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1311

[arromdee]

The Galaxian problem probably isn't a missing header--it's described here:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1916

Basically, Galaxian is too small for the ines header format and any emulator that depends on the header will only run the overdumped version, not the correct one.

[BigFred]

Yep, Nestopia and MESS will run it now though.

[nogarth]

We managed to sort the issue out. The latest set we recived passed the dat check but when viewing the hex of the roms and understanding the ines header.xml the games we had issues with didn't have the header code so nestopia and all others thought it was a bad rom.

[etabeta]

Yep, Nestopia and MESS will run it now though.

MESS does not run it in iNES format, though, unless you duplicate the PRG data. it's a limitation of the iNES format (PRG must be in 16k chunks), and as such no working iNES header can be created for Galaxian without modifying the dump.

the game can be loaded otoh as separate prg/chr files...

not sure about nestopia...

[BigFred]

hello etabeta - can you please explain how the spilt dumps are supposed to work? I didn't get it to work with nestopia. But if you say it works with MESS I will give it another try. Do you place prg and chr in a zip? And do these have to be named in a special way?

[etabeta]

hello etabeta - can you please explain how the spilt dumps are supposed to work? I didn't get it to work with nestopia. But if you say it works with MESS I will give it another try. Do you place prg and chr in a zip? And do these have to be named in a special way?

nestopia does not support split files to my knowledge, it only uses the internal xml to handle roms without the header (iirc).

for MESS, I will start from scratch assuming as less as possible previous knowledge of MAME/MESS.

1. you need the latest exe (possibly the svn build you find at http://bobz38.free.fr/mess_autobuild/index.php ) and latest xml lists ( http://git.redump.net/cgit.cgi/mess/plain/hash/ ). you can save nes.xml into the hash/ subfolder in the folder where you have unzipped MESS

2. once you have the basic setup mentioned, you need to put the files in a roms/nes/ subfolder inside the mess folder. You have two possible choices to store them (like always in MAME/MESS): either zipped in a setname.zip file or unzipped in a setname/ subfolder (with "setname"= the name found in nes.xml).
In this Galaxian example, MESS expects the romset to be named galaxian for Rev. A and galaxiana for the older version. Hence, you can either store the split 8k prg and chr files either in galaxian.zip (resp. galaxiana.zip), or unzipped in a subfolder roms/nes/galaxian/ (resp. roms/nes/galaxiana/)

if you zip them up, the filename does not matter, because files get loaded by crc; if you leave them unzipped in a subfolder, then your files must be named as in nes.xml...

I suggest you to have two zipfiles roms/nes/galaxian.zip and roms/nes/galaxiana.zip containing 8k prg and chr split files named as you like [1]

3. you open a prompt [2], go to the MESS folder and launch

mess nes -cart galaxian

and you're done (replace galaxian with galaxiana for the older rev)


let me know if you have any issue.




[1] actually you can also use cmpro to rebuild the files in the proper way, and even store all the files inside a single galaxian.zip file, given we fully support parent/clones like MAME... but these are advanced usage notes, so you can stick to my instructions above if you only want to do limited testing
[2] you can also handle the launching part from MESSUI, the version with fancy GUI, but I don't use it (I am on MacOSX and I'm a command line guy), so it's easier for me to give you the instructions from terminal

[C. V. Reynolds]

nestopia does not support split files to my knowledge, it only uses the internal xml to handle roms without the header (iirc).

I mentioned this before, but Nestopia actually will not run any file that does not have a header. It will use either internal or external xml databases to correct an incorrect header, but only if a header is attached to the file. It's a shame. I'd love if Nestopia would load headerless files. It is the jack-of-all-trades emulator for NES, after all. Maybe there might be an update coming for it? It's been a few years.