This is a PM I was going to send to ElBarto, then I decided to post it here for publicity sake, if anyone has comments:
The latest SegaNet dumps from http://www.hidden-palace.org have something wrong for sure, they all share the same checksum (43497), and have a wrong size in the header (131072 instead of 262144), while all the dumps already in the database have a 262144 bytes size in the header and they all have different (and good) internal checksums.
The size thing could be an error from Sega, but how is that ALL Hidden Palace releases have a 131072 size in the header, when the correct one is 262144? I can understand a couple of them being smaller but not all from the same source. Moreover the dumps don't work when trimmed.
The checksum sharing is definitely an edit (copy/paste?) from Hidden Palace, they all have a (bad) 43497 checksum. After all Hidden Palace is another source which cannot be trusted (see Aero The Acrobat beta too, their beta dump was a 1-byte-edit compared to your recent PAL dump).
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Re: Hidden Palace SegaNet dumps \ Yakushi~Kabuto on 12th January 2008, 15:16 wrote:
Nice catch giga *reps*, I want to know what ElBarto will say now.
If you ever do a verification cvs (like NGEfreak's) I suggest you mark hidden palace dumps as unconfirmed/not verified. They aren't trustworthy people in my book, all their dumps (1-byte beta variations, etc...) are fishy, and this only makes their previously poor reputation even worse.
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Re: Hidden Palace SegaNet dumps \ gigadeath on 12th January 2008, 15:32 wrote:
There's like a 1% possibility that Hidden Palace is right, but the checksum thing is too big to believe. It smells like 2 weeks old rancid fish.
It's probable the dumps were made in good faith, but the dumping equipment wasn't the proper one needed for the task.
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Re: Hidden Palace SegaNet dumps \ Yakushi~Kabuto on 12th January 2008, 16:05 wrote:
I'm skeptical regarding their honnesty.There's like a 1% possibility that Hidden Palace is right, but the checksum thing is too big to believe. It smells like 2 weeks old rancid fish.
It's probable the dumps were made in good faith, but the dumping equipment wasn't the proper one needed for the task.
From the looks of it, it appears reasonable to think they have hacked various ROMs and pasted one of the real seganet dump header, but i need to find the evidence so can you link me to a couple of their seganet "dumps"? I'll find out very soon if that checksum is from another seganet dump./*edit*/
I can't seem to find that checksum (0xa9e9) in any other dump...
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Re: Hidden Palace SegaNet dumps \ gigadeath on 12th January 2008, 16:15 wrote:
I still don't believe someone would put up a site like that just to release fake dumps purposely.
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Re: Hidden Palace SegaNet dumps \ ElBarto on 13th January 2008, 16:42 wrote:
I already told DRX that his SegaNet dumps are weird, he told me that that was the dump from Sega directly. Seriously I don't know what to think. Maybe he's right, maybe not.
For the Aero Acrobat, I didn't compare my dump to their Beta dump, but the thing is I'm sure of mine
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Re: Hidden Palace SegaNet dumps \ gigadeath on 13th January 2008, 17:14 wrote:
His Aero dump is definitely bad, 1-byte difference compared to your dump, and that difference doesn't even make any sense, even coming from a supposed beta cart (it's after region in the header). But that can be a faulty cart, a faulty copier, dirty contacts, so I don't dispute his good faith.I already told DRX that his SegaNet dumps are weird, he told me that that was the dump from Sega directly. Seriously I don't know what to think. Maybe he's right, maybe not.
For the Aero Acrobat, I didn't compare my dump to their Beta dump, but the thing is I'm sure of mine
Anyway his Aero dump sure sets an untrusted precedent against his other dumps. If his SegaNet dumps are correct, then all the ones listed in Goodgen are wrong, and all of them are marked [!]. That doesn't mean they're correct (see Fantasia
), but at least I hope Cowering checked his sources.Either way, current SegaNet follow 2 standards, one of them being wrong.
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Re: Hidden Palace SegaNet dumps \ Yakushi~Kabuto on 13th January 2008, 17:28 wrote:
This is your dump against drx's dump.I already told DRX that his SegaNet dumps are weird, he told me that that was the dump from Sega directly. Seriously I don't know what to think. Maybe he's right, maybe not.
For the Aero Acrobat, I didn't compare my dump to their Beta dump, but the thing is I'm sure of mine
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Re: Hidden Palace SegaNet dumps \ Sir VG on 13th January 2008, 18:17 wrote:
1-byte beta variations are more of a flaw in the dumping method, rather than a flaw in the dumper.
Take for example "The Legend of Spyro - The Eternal Night" comparison between OMGba's dump and my redump. I also noticed that variation when I did the European version, when I dumped it between two different methods. The WRG-LoadMe dumping method produced the bad bit, while my normal GBA method (Flash2Advance software) produced the other version. (And the flaw occurred at the exact same bit even.)
...just saying.