Removing (corrupted) header from a FDS dump

[twipley]

I'll try this out to see if the patch fixes it.

Well for testing purposes, I had made a "saved state" just before killing the boss leading to the graphics-corrupted sky world. So I went ahead and replaced the dump I had with the fixed file einstein95 sent me.

I loaded the saved state of the old FDS file with the new FDS file loaded. Upon entering the sky world, there still were glitches. So there I exited to the in-game menu without quitting, and relaunched the profile, which still produced graphical issues.

Would it be worthwhile to begin a clean game (with the new FDS file) and make my way up to the sky world? Just to see. Because I don't want to lose time for nothing climbing back up there. Last time it took me a few hours. I'll do it again if I must, but to me it's kind of a drudgery. I wouldn't do it if there was no chances for it to work better.

If it can help someone, here is the saved state just before entering the sky world.

[einstein95]

I loaded the saved state of the old FDS file with the new FDS file loaded. Upon entering the sky world, there still were glitches. So there I exited to the in-game menu without quitting, and relaunched the profile, which still produced graphical issues.

Easy fix, it turns out the .ups patch was still setting the side B file count to the pre-fix value.

[olimar]

You may still need to play it from the start.

[twipley]

the .ups patch was still setting the side B file count to the pre-fix value.

You may still need to play it from the start.

Oh yeah? Great news!

I'll test it again in the future when I have the time, to see if side-b file count is indeed fixed 100% and every area has their correct graphics!

Nice advances, guys! Something to point to all the ones out there saying headers are useless for FDS dumps...

md5: a6b32748f64796055ad1ab35dda5f5d1

[olimar]

It's not in the header, technically speaking ... they are still mostly useless
Anyway, I played up to where you did (I posted the .nst above) and the graphics were indeed fixed.

[twipley]

Anyway, I played up to where you did (I posted the .nst above) and the graphics were indeed fixed.

Yeah man, don't worry I've seen it! That was what led me to write the "good news!" line.

The testing I was writing about was referring to the testing of "every" area to see if graphics were okay. They should be, but when I relaunch this classic I will be on the look and thus will perform "extensive" testing, just to be sure for example the last world, was not broken in the process.

Cheers!

[olimar]

I played through the rest of it, it looks fine.

[twipley]

Nice to know; thanks for reporting! :)

EDIT: I am really happy with this. I had long questioned myself about these graphical bugs...

[KingMike]

Indeed. Using savestates in emulators with FDS games is a bit of a risk.
Some emulators might save the .fds file within the savestate, while others might load a .fds but use a filehash to associate it with a "working" copy in the emulator saves folder (to allow saving without overwriting the original disk).

I will not forget that after the time I was SOOO glad I was translating an FDS game by using a file splitter tool I wrote to edit the game outside the .fds file. I would've lost about a week's worth of progress just from a bad load state. But I was able to just reassemble the files to make a new ROM, so all I lost was some saved game progress.