is there anything that can play these?

W

whocrazy

New member
Hi there. I have 2 dumps, the first is rocky for the gameboy advanced, and the second is topgun combat zones, also for the GBA.
These games have a curious problem, the start button won't work, the main screen comes up, but if I try pressing start, nothing happens.
I've tried both visual boy advance and no$GBA and I'm still having the same problem. I even when to the vba-m website and downloaded all the svn compiled releases.
Is there any emulator out there that will play these games?
Thanks.
 
I'm positive, all my controls are set up correctly. rocky and topgun are the only 2 games that have this problem... so far.
 
Hi guys. I'm awfully sorry, but I've no idea how to use this program. I download it, unzip it to a folder and then run it, but what do I do next? some of the pulldown menus are disabled, and there is no documentation with the program included. I just want to know if the rom I have is a bad dump
 
I actually think that the emulators simply can't handle both games without a hack or both games have som sort of bug since their original incarnations. I've checked the ones from no-intro with VBA and both simply get "frozen" (more like they simply cannot advance from a certain menu). In the case of Rocky, both the US and Europe versions don't work at the same point, which in theory rules out bad dumping since both were dumped by different groups.
Here are the CRC32 of the games if you want to compare them with yours. They are from the no-intro dats, which means they are as clean as they get:
Rocky (us) C8F4FF1B
Rocky (eu) D2E55FB5
Top Gun - Combat Zones (us) DFC88D3E

If you really want to play them, perhaps you should try other emulators to see if one can handle them.
 
Yes I have. The problem remains. It is better exemplified with what happens in Top Gun - Combat Zones: after the game is started, you basically have to press the buttons to change between screens or you can wait, and after you select a language, you must choose and option to start the game. And here is the problem. No matter what you do, you won't be able to do anything with any of the options or the buttons. The only thing that you can do is move the cursor between the options, but you are unable to start the game in any way. That's why I believe it's possible that the games had that kind of problem since the beginning, as it seems unlikely that any emulator can pass from that point. Who knows, perhaps boycott or another migh be able to pass that point. Since neither this nor Rocky were popular games to begin with, perhaps no one really cared about playing them in an emulator, or perhaps the first releases were hacked in someway and nobody complained until now.
 
How strange. Gameboy Advance emulators are actually pretty good these days, I'm suprised they are not working. :p Another question...no$gba was tried, so I doubt this is the problem, but have you tried using an emulator that supports the GBA BIOS? I know VisualBoy Advance can use the BIOS...no$gba may be able to, but I can't honestly remember.
 
Yes I've tried both VBA and no$GBA with bios enabled, and yes, I've got a bios file and have set no$gba and VBA to use it, still no luck though.
 
My second guess was right. I've confirmed (more or less) that Rocky is unplayable with the "clean" rom. You must use the original release that is "hacked". The specific issue is with the EEPROM, it seems. If I recall correctly, this also happened with other games, but most of use didn't really care. I believe that you have the "perfect" dump of the rom, which means you can't actually play it on emulators unless you modify something (what exactly, I don't know, I've never bothered to play those games). The CRC32 of the working Rocky rom that I've tested is E1702B0A. This is a semi-fixed version, as it only removes the intro added of the original release (0741 by Venom).

I'm assuming Top Gun must have a similar issue. Get the first relased dumps and you will be able to play them. You could actually hack them yourself, but it's been a long time since I did that and I don't remember how exactly and can't tell you how. There is a tool developed by no-intro which might help you. But honestly, it's easier if you get the hacked dumps.
 
gutzsant said:
My second guess was right. I've confirmed (more or less) that Rocky is unplayable with the "clean" rom. You must use the original release that is "hacked". The specific issue is with the EEPROM, it seems.
Click to expand...

In that case, it's possible that save patching it will help. You could also try a tool like GBATA instead of redownloading the ROM (trying to find this scene release I mean).
 
I can confirm both of these roms don't work with Visualboy Advance using the US versions. You'll want to get the GoodGBA romsets, not No-Intro, as both of these have 'fixed' [f1] versions. You'll want "Rocky (U) (M5) [f1][hIR00].gba" and "Top Gun - Combat Zones (U) [f1]" and they'll both work fine.
 
BIrvine said:
I can confirm both of these roms don't work with Visualboy Advance using the US versions. You'll want to get the GoodGBA romsets, not No-Intro, as both of these have 'fixed' [f1] versions. You'll want "Rocky (U) (M5) [f1][hIR00].gba" and "Top Gun - Combat Zones (U) [f1]" and they'll both work fine.
Click to expand...


Am I the only one bothered by the fact that you need fixed versions of the roms for them to work? Makes me feel that GBA emulation isn't accurate enough. I mean, if it's an SRAM issue, they should have made a small GBA header stating SRAM size or anything else that may differ from cart to cart. :regret:
 
Hi guys. if I were to transfer these 2 dumps over to the real thing, would they work? I tried using gbata, but the remove intro option was disabled, as well as the fix header option, I also tried the sram patcher, but that didn't work either. Unless there's a more recent version of gbata than the one I found through google.
so I guess we'll have to wait for GBA emulation to get better.
 
I know with the EFA Flash card, they'll probably work. I can't vouch for these specific games, but I know others with similar issues in VisualBoy Advance worked fine with real hardware. As mentioned before, try finding the fixed versions.
 
Reaper man said:
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that you need fixed versions of the roms for them to work? Makes me feel that GBA emulation isn't accurate enough.
Click to expand...
I agree. You're not 'fixing' the ROMs, you're breaking the ROMs. At some point, emulators will get more accurate and the 'fixed' ROMs may well stop working, but the ROMs (and use of older emulators) will be widespread enough that users will encounter problems and blame the emulator. Reminds me of older, broken versions of Internet Explorer giving us the nightmare that is 'quirks mode'.

Ideally, the ROMs shouldn't be modified at all, it's the job of emulators to be modified in order to work properly with the original ROMs. Doing things any other way is an ugly hack that will come back to bite us eventually.
 
It's not a SRAM issue but an EEPROM issue. I believe that both games have this error in the actual cartridges, but the real hardware somehow manages to work despite that failure. In fact, several real cartridges had issues with the EEPROM, the most famous being Super Street Fighter II: Turbo Revival. Since Rocky and Top Gun weren't popular games, probably no GBA programmer bothered to make a specific fix for these games, since it's not a common problem and they weren't popular like Boktai or Pokemon anyway.

And whocrazy, Since this is an EEPROM issue, I think that you would need to apply a patch to make them work. IMHO, it's easier to look for the hacked dumps. Is there a hacker around here that can help whocrazy?
 
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