NES & SNES roms from SSBB USA

[aceofstax]

Hi,

This post is primarily about the NES roms. If you're reading for info on SNES roms, skip to the end of this post.

I used the SSBB information on the wiki to aid in extracting these ROMs, but ran into a bit of trouble. I also noticed that it seems the information is slightly incomplete. Specifically, the .dol files containing the roms are only half trimmed. After isolating the 16 byte NES header and removing the data just before it in HxD, a lot of these roms are not known NES rom file sizes and will not be recognized by no-intro. To be recognized properly, the excess data after the NES rom must be trimmed too.

Given that I'm a total noob on this stuff, I figured a discussion would be more appropriate than a wiki edit. So here's what I found.

These are the no-intro filenames of the ROMs found on SSBB for USA (RBSE01), as well as the file lengths in bytes:

• Donkey Kong (World) (Rev 1).nes [24592]
• Kirby's Adventure (USA) (Rev 1).nes [786448]
• Legend of Zelda, The (USA) (Rev 1) (Virtual Console).nes [131088]
• Super Mario Bros. (World).nes [40976]
• Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) (Rev 1) (Virtual Console).nes [262160]

Two of the ROMs I managed to find the file lengths by both comparing to known file lengths of roms of the same game from different regions or sources, but the checksum does not match. I could not get no-intro to identify them no matter what I tried. However, I do think I have the right data for the ROM included on disc. I was also able to reinforce my belief I have the right file length by learning about iNES headers.

Ice Climber.nes header:
4E 45 53 1A 01 01

Kid Icarus.nes header:
4E 45 53 1A 08 00

Every NES header seems to start with 4E 45 53 1A.
The bolded pairs just following that are relevant for finding the ROM file length.

In the case of Ice Climber (01 01), the file length would be:
16 + (16384 * 1) + (8192 * 1) = 24592

And for Kid Icarus (08 00):
16 + (16384 * 8) + (8192 * 0) = 131088

This pattern works with the rest of the ROMs too. However. people not used to hexidecimal should make sure to convert 10 in hex to decimal before doing the math. This is relevant for correctly calculating the length of Super Mario Bros 2.

SNES roms:
Could not get the python2 script to work, so I used a fork that was python3 compatible. This python3 compatible fork generally seems more ideal for legal rom hunters given that game-extraction-toolbox (gextoolbox) requires it. Downloaded the fork's repo as .zip, extracted to folder, then put the SNES related files in that folder with the scripts. Simply copying snesrestore.py and brrencode3.py to the directory where I had the SNES files from the Wii disc did not work. Copying relevant SNES files to py3 vcromclaim fork folder was the fastest way to get it going without obvious errors.

None of the roms I "restored" matched anything in current no-intro dats.

I'm not sure if this python3 compatible fork is creating the same files as in the python2 script, so here are the sizes and checksums of the SNES files after using snesrestore.py on each pair of files:

• F-Zero [JACE].sfc (524288 bytes, CRC32 = 5e35f49c)
• Super Mario World [JAAE].sfc (524288 bytes, CRC32 = 5d3c0fae)
• Super Metroid [JAVE].sfc (3145728 bytes, CRC32 = ba3ef6e0)

Hope this helps. I just recently discovered RED-Project and really like the idea behind it. I was originally trying to use vaiski's romextract scripts for SSBB (which I used for PZLE01), but his scripts for SSBB are for the european version. I noticed while looking at his SSBB script just now that the roms for Ice Climber and Kid Icarus are also "unverified" in that region (curiously, SMB2 is also unverified in EU region). So it seems it's not just me, nor just the US version. His script for the EU version indicates the extracted SNES titles are all unverified too.