Hacking Eartbound Beginings VC ROM dumping?

VinsCool · Aug 29, 2015

Hiccup said:
So you are saying the ROM used in the Mother 2 Wii U VC USA is exactly the same as the USA cart ROM? Does it patch it in anyway?

Well, according to him, it's the same thing.

I can also confirm the same about Donkey Kong 64 VC.

The rom is exactly the same, bytes by bytes, of the dump known as "Donkey Kong 64 (U) [!].z64"

AfroJackX · Sep 1, 2015

NikolaMiljevic said:
Still, if the playable rom gets dumped, please PM it to me :x

I second this if it is possible. I think it would also be interesting to compare the english proto with the wii u vc release.

The Real Jdbye · Sep 1, 2015

VinsCool said:
Well, according to him, it's the same thing.

I can also confirm the same about Donkey Kong 64 VC.

The rom is exactly the same, bytes by bytes, of the dump known as "Donkey Kong 64 (U) [!].z64"

Heh, wouldn't it be funny if Nintendo downloaded that same exact dump online and packaged it as a VC game

gamesquest1 · Sep 1, 2015

The Real Jdbye said:
Heh, wouldn't it be funny if Nintendo downloaded that same exact dump online and packaged it as a VC game

reminds me of this story
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2008/07/21/ubisoft-uses-reloaded-crack-as-patch/1

ubergeek77 · Sep 2, 2015

So I'm trying to dump one of my GBA VC games, but I can't seem to find a match for it (cross-checking it against the real ROM). I've tried a few arbitrarily-picked sets of 4-5 bytes, but I haven't seen any similarities so far. I've even crawled the memory viewer in ANSI mode just to get a better look at things. I know I'm in the VC title, because I'm seing things like "EmuTask" and a bunch of buttons like UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, etc.

Can anyone help me find the address for this game? There were a few changes made to it for the eShop release that the original didn't have.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I tried dumping the contents of the FSA tab too. There are only two files there, alldata.bin and alldata.psb.m, but unfortunately I couldn't find anything in those either. Maybe I'm missing something?

gamesquest1 · Sep 2, 2015

ubergeek77 said:
So I'm trying to dump one of my GBA VC games, but I can't seem to find a match for it (cross-checking it against the real ROM). I've tried a few arbitrarily-picked sets of 4-5 bytes, but I haven't seen any similarities so far. I've even crawled the memory viewer in ANSI mode just to get a better look at things. I know I'm in the VC title, because I'm seing things like "EmuTask" and a bunch of buttons like UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, etc.

Can anyone help me find the address for this game? There were a few changes made to it for the eShop release that the original didn't have.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I tried dumping the contents of the FSA tab too. There are only two files there, alldata.bin and alldata.psb.m, but unfortunately I couldn't find anything in those either. Maybe I'm missing something?

you should be able to find the rom in memory quite easy by searching for the rom header eg "FIREEMBLEM8.BE8J"

just get a copy of the same game your searching for and check the header, then you can search for it in your ram dump

ubergeek77 · Sep 2, 2015

gamesquest1 said:
you should be able to find the rom in memory quite easy by searching for the rom header eg "FIREEMBLEM8.BE8J"

just get a copy of the same game your searching for and check the header, then you can search for it in your ram dump

Alright, so the game is MegaMan Battle Network 3, and by searching the dump for "EXE3" (in hex), I get a few results (I was a bit foolish and kept searching for the word 'MEGA' at first, but they went with the Japanese name for the eShop release which is why I didn't find anything at first). How do I know where the ROM starts and where it ends? The first result is around 0x32C12940.

gamesquest1 · Sep 2, 2015

ubergeek77 said:
Alright, so the game is MegaMan Battle Network 3, and by searching the dump for "EXE3" (in hex), I get a few results (I was a bit foolish and kept searching for the word 'MEGA' at first, but they went with the Japanese name for the eShop release which is why I didn't find anything at first). How do I know where the ROM starts and where it ends? The first result is around 0x32C12940.

so does any of the offsets show
"MEGA_EXE3_BLA3XE" so if the offset 0x32C12940 was showing the whole rom title then the whole rom would most likely be from 0x32C1289C to 0x3341289C

ubergeek77 · Sep 2, 2015

gamesquest1 said:
so does any of the offsets show
"MEGA_EXE3_BLA3XE" so if the offset 0x32C12940 was showing the whole rom title then the whole rom would most likely be from 0x32C1289C to 0x3341289C

No, the only thing I'm getting is a match for "GbaRockmanEXE3Black_US." And if I go down a few lines, I can see words (like 'title_menu_motion') that make me feel like I haven't found the ROM yet.

I suppose it's worth noting that the RAM dump crashed at around 94% of the way done, but since the end of the dump is a ton of 00's anyway, I just assumed that the RAM dumper just went out of bounds or something, or tried to access a part of the RAM that hadn't been used yet.

gamesquest1 · Sep 2, 2015

ubergeek77 said:
No, the only thing I'm getting is a match for "GbaRockmanEXE3Black_US." And if I go down a few lines, I can see words (like 'title_menu_motion') that make me feel like I haven't found the ROM yet.

I suppose it's worth noting that the RAM dump crashed at around 94% of the way done, but since the end of the dump is a ton of 00's anyway, I just assumed that the RAM dumper just went out of bounds or something, or tried to access a part of the RAM that hadn't been used yet.

hmmm weird, it should be the US ROM in there. Japanese rom header is "ROCK_EXE3_BKA3XJ08" if that shows up at all on the 3DS GBA VC games they just used the original stock rom dumps so seems weird that they would do something else on the wiiu as all hints so far suggest they are using very similar methods for the VC games across 3DS/wiiu

and to keep this on topic of the OP nintendo use the TNES header for NES roms so anyone trying to find the earthbound rom from a ram dump sould probably be best searching for TNES to find the rom

ubergeek77 · Sep 2, 2015

gamesquest1 said:
hmmm weird, it should be the US ROM in there. Japanese rom header is "ROCK_EXE3_BKA3XJ08" if that shows up at all on the 3DS GBA VC games they just used the original stock rom dumps so seems weird that they would do something else on the wiiu as all hints so far suggest they are using very similar methods for the VC games across 3DS/wiiu

Well, the English version of Blue was based on the Japanese Black version, and as you can see, there is a '_US' at the end of it. It's strange, but maybe they changed the file name. After all, Donkey Kong and Earthbound are the only two examples we have, and those are both first-party games, whereas this one isn't.

But do you think the ROM isn't in the 0x01000000 to 0x05000000 block like the others were? That's the block I dumped.

Subötaï · Jul 17, 2016

I dumped the ROM. It is different by 1 byte from the prototype

VinsCool · Jul 17, 2016

Subötaï said:
I dumped the ROM. It is different by 1 byte from the prototype

Yep, I have confirmed this already.

However, dumping the patched ROM from RAM might contain more changes according to @ShadowOne333

Subötaï · Jul 17, 2016

VinsCool said:
Yep, I have confirmed this already.

However, dumping the patched ROM from RAM might contain more changes according to @ShadowOne333

I did this with a ram dump

VinsCool · Jul 17, 2016

Subötaï said:
I did this with a ram dump

Again, that statement was based on wht he told me a while ago while working on the Mother 2 rom. Apparently more patches are applied from RAM.

Anyway, just to confirm, I've dumped the rom directly from the RPX. So we got the exact same file

ShadowOne333 · Jul 17, 2016

The only difference should be the third byte (I think), which you require to set to 1A for emulators to read the ROM or it won't boot.

VinsCool · Jul 17, 2016

ShadowOne333 said:
The only difference should be the third byte (I think), which you require to set to 1A for emulators to read the ROM or it won't boot.

So the whole RAM patching only applies for SNES ROMs?

ShadowOne333 · Jul 17, 2016

VinsCool said:
So the whole RAM patching only applies for SNES ROMs?

Oh I didnt mean that.
I mean that the RAM patching is confirmed to be a thing for SNES ROMs, but I havent tried it for NES.

My guess is that NES games might also be patched on the fly since those ones use a similar RPX/RPL than SNES. Proof is the Widescreen modifications are found in SNES and NES RPX files in the same way. So it all depends on which games for the NES have known differences, and then compare both RAM and trimmed RPX dumps to confirm they are also modified on the fly.

Do you have both dumps for EBB?
What method did you use for the one dump you have?

VinsCool · Jul 17, 2016

ShadowOne333 said:
Oh I didnt mean that.
I mean that the RAM patching is confirmed to be a thing for SNES ROMs, but I havent tried it for NES.

My guess is that NES games might also be patched on the fly since those ones use a similar RPX/RPL than SNES. Proof is the Widescreen modifications are found in SNES and NES RPX files in the same way. So it all depends on which games for the NES have known differences, and then compare both RAM and trimmed RPX dumps to confirm they are also modified on the fly.

Do you have both dumps for EBB?
What method did you use for the one dump you have?

I proceeded by the RPX decompression method, they used the RAM dump.

bootsector · Sep 3, 2016

Where can I get a ROM extract from WiiU's Virtual Console Earthbound Beginnings?
Edit: NVM. Extracted it from the RPX and it's the same proto ROM available for ages (two bytes are the only difference)

Hacking Eartbound Beginings VC ROM dumping?

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