NES rom image info help?

[gestahl]

Hello all, I'm somewhat new to the emulation scene here so bear with me if this has been addressed before.

I am somewhat familiar with the rom image suffixes (O for overdump, H for hack, etc..) so I took particular care to avoid obtaining any roms with such suffixes. All of my roms ended in just (U) for USA or (U) !

However, when I open some of them and view the "image info" with my emulator Nestopia, it says certain roms have tags like "Final Fantasy [/o2-o3]" even though the name of the file was "Final Fantasy (U)"

What does this mean? Are some overdumps disguised as good roms?

[Disch]

> However, when I open some of them and view the "image info"
> with my emulator Nestopia, it says certain roms have tags
> like "Final Fantasy [/o2-o3]" even though the name of the
> file was "Final Fantasy (U)"

IIRC Nestopia uses a big-fat ROM database to auto-correct bad headered ROMs. This might just be the name of the listing NEStopia gave to the Final Fantasy ROM in its database.

The proper Final Fantasy ROM is exactly 256k in size (+ 16 bytes for the header). If your file is exactly 262,160 ($40010) bytes in size, it is not an overdump.

[MegaManJuno]

Unless you verify them yourself with a decent renamer utility, you can never really be 100% sure if you've got a good one or not, since not everyone names them the same. Even then, there are sometimes mistakes in the utilities too. For instance, I think a few dumps marked as bad in at least one of the GoodTools utilities are actually misnamed and are actually good dumps.

[Disch]

> For instance, I think a few dumps marked as bad in at
> least one of the GoodTools utilities are actually misnamed
> and are actually good dumps.

Not to mention GoodNES is completely stupid and ignores headers... and like something crazy like 30% of the iNES ROMs out there have bad headers. Even several "Verified Good dumps" ( [!] ) have bad headers.

[gestahl]

> The proper Final Fantasy ROM is exactly 256k in size (+ 16
> bytes for the header). If your file is exactly 262,160
> ($40010) bytes in size, it is not an overdump.


Thanks, that's good to know, that is the actual file size of that rom so I know that at least that specific one is good.

What if the best utility in your opinion to determine which roms I have are good and which are overdumps?

[The 9th Sage]

> I think a few dumps marked as bad in at
> least one of the GoodTools utilities are actually misnamed
> and are actually good dumps.

This is true. I found some weird discerpancy between NSRT and GoodSNES for renaming ROMs...I don't know if they just renamed this file or what, but for example...there was Illusion of Gaia (J) I think it was...but after playing it, it was a late beta version of Illusion of Gaia (U).

NSRT caught this...what I should do is check to see if GoodSNES thinks it's the US version or not. It does have different text and a different title screen than the 'real' US version, so even if NSRT didn't call it a beta version, it's obviously not the official US version..

Anyway, I've found a few that had hacked checksums (which shouldn't be considered good) in the GoodSNES set too....there was something else I think, but I can't remember what it was.