As the current maintainer of the TAS community branch of the Gens emulator, it has recently come to my attention that the no-intro tool renames Genesis/Megadrive rom files to use the .MD extension.
This is bad because .MD corresponds to a specific file format where all the even bytes of the ROM image are in the first half of the file, and all the odd bytes are in the latter half. While .MD no longer seems to be in common use, any emulator that still supports it properly will choke on a no-intro renamed .MD file. Please change the tool to rename .BIN files to .GEN instead.
More information on Megadrive ROM file formats is available at http://www.zophar.net/tech/files/Genesis_ROM_Format.txt
Thank you.
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Re: Megadrive no-intro set uses wrong file extension \ Blade Arts on 9th May 2008, 11:20 wrote:
No-Intro uses the most natural extention and most accurate ROM format. It may conflict with previously established standards but No-Intro uses its own convention and standards. So it's not a mistake, just a different standard. Emulators such as KEGA Fusion and MESS have integrated No-Intro's new standard.
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Re: Megadrive no-intro set uses wrong file extension \ ElBarto on 9th May 2008, 14:32 wrote:
For me (and others) only a plain dump is correct (no smd, interleaved etc format), even the current format is unaccuratte cause the roms have to be byteswapped.As the current maintainer of the TAS community branch of the Gens emulator, it has recently come to my attention that the no-intro tool renames Genesis/Megadrive rom files to use the .MD extension.
This is bad because .MD corresponds to a specific file format where all the even bytes of the ROM image are in the first half of the file, and all the odd bytes are in the latter half. While .MD no longer seems to be in common use, any emulator that still supports it properly will choke on a no-intro renamed .MD file. Please change the tool to rename .BIN files to .GEN instead.
More information on Megadrive ROM file formats is available at http://www.zophar.net/tech/files/Genesis_ROM_Format.txt
Thank you.
But none of the current emulator support this so all no-intro roms are plain dump swapped, the extention is not the problem.
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Re: Megadrive no-intro set uses wrong file extension \ Upthorn on 10th May 2008, 01:02 wrote:
The extension is an issue because .MD indicates that the files are not plain dumps, and any emulator that supports the real .MD format will either have to have substantial revisions in order to autodetect, or simply won't work with the no-intro set because of it. If you used the .bin or .gen extension instead, there would be no such issue. Alternately, you could make a totally new extension such as .MGD, .MDR, or .MDV as another way of resolving the issue.
I'd like to clarify that I don't think that .GEN is the best extension for the rom files, I just thought I should inform you that your current set might have issues with some emulators because of the extension you chose.
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Re: Megadrive no-intro set uses wrong file extension \ powerpuff on 10th May 2008, 22:03 wrote:
Maybe the extension naming is an issue that should discuted, and I think conventionalized. There is no logic in the current extensions names, most of them come from the scene.
For example :
* No-Intro chose for Sega Mega Drive/Genesis extension name ".md", according to the system name in its native contry.
But for the Sega Master System set the extension name is ".sms", including th compagny name in the extension.
So why Sega Mega Drive extension name isn't ".smd" too?
* Nintendo Famicom/NES extention name is ".nes", using its western name almost than its native, whereas ".sfc" is used for the Nintendo Super Famicom/Super Nintendo set.
No logic in all of this!
Either the extension names should be conventionalized accoding a same logic, either not and keep the extension names just as they are, maybe only choosing the best from what is already existing.
But if it's so, why No-Intro would use ".md" for Sega Mega Drive set since it's only a ".bin" renamed and most of the emulators can't recognize them?
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Re: Megadrive no-intro set uses wrong file extension \ ElBarto on 11th May 2008, 10:17 wrote:
The No-Intro convention say that .bin is not a valid extention, we choose .md cause .smd stand for Super Magic Drive (an old dumper for Mega Drive).
.gen is not ok for me cause Genesis is not the original name (only us).
On current emulator when the rom file loader extention is .smd the emulator assume that the file format is .smd (interleaved rom file format) so we can't use .smd, I didn't know that there were a .md file format too.
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Re: Megadrive no-intro set uses wrong file extension \ Yakushi~Kabuto on 11th May 2008, 12:42 wrote:
powerpuff is making a good point, extensions should be uniformized in the future.
nds -> ds
sms -> ms
nes -> fc
There is also the possibility of developing a new standard with extensions taken from the PCB codes à la MAME.
But currently we have more important matters that are stalled, the main staff is lazy and/or lowly responsive so it's pretty hard to introduce new things in the convention.
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Re: Megadrive no-intro set uses wrong file extension \ layzee on 11th May 2008, 13:11 wrote:
Shouldn't that be .m3 since the Sega Master System was originally known as the Sega Mark III in Japan.sms -> ms