Emulation PocketNES Menu Maker database format (pnesmmw.mdb)

[patters]

I've been looking to have my PocketNES build script leverage the PocketNES Menu Maker database, but I can't make sense of the crc32 checksums. None of the values seem to match the ROM crc32 values. Have they been salted perhaps? @Titney - I see you used to maintain this database - am I missing something obvious?

 

[Titney]

I've been looking to have my PocketNES build script leverage the PocketNES Menu Maker database, but I can't make sense of the crc32 checksums. None of the values seem to match the ROM crc32 values. Have they been salted perhaps? @Titney - I see you used to maintain this database - am I missing something obvious?

Just to be clear, you're talking about the crc32 values in the pnesmmw.mdb file in https://web.archive.org/web/20060710065440/http://www.pocketnes.org/tools/pnesmmw12a.zip right?

I found an old list that includes crc32 that matches up with the pnesmmw.mdb here: https://web.archive.org/web/20061210192250/http://www.pocketnes.org/tools/nesmappers_nestoy.txt
And that list says it's created from the GoodNES rom set with NESToy:
https://www.zophar.net/utilities/nesaud/nestoy.html

It might be a rom header vs no rom header issue. What rom set are you working from? Back then we used the GoodNES set (should be easy to find with google) but something more current like the No-Intro set might be different from GoodNES when it comes to headers.

 

[Localhorst86]

This is most certainly an issue with currently available romsets usually being no-intro. Since iNES headers are simply not part of the original game data, no-intro does not include these headers wheras GoodNES does/did (not sure if GoodNES is even still maintained at all), resulting in a different checksum.

Not sure if PocketNES will run with headerless roms, I have found this website when looking to see if it is possible to rebuild the iNES headers for the no-intro roms:

https://dbwbp.com/index.php/miscmenu

If PocketNES doesn't run headerless no-intro roms, you might want to try rebuilding the headers.

 

[patters]

Right - got it. Thanks both. The crc32 values in the pnesmmw.mdb database exclude the rom header. My roms are my own collection from ages ago which were GoodNES verified, plus I had tried no-intro ones and I still hadn't been getting matches. This explains it