Hacking Rom trimmer

[hbk2015]

Ive just ordered a R4, and 1gb Kingston card. Im quite new to all this, and Ive heard a couple of ppl talking bout rom trimmer, I was just wondering what this was, and what the point of using it was? thanx.

 

[4saken]

A rom trimmer removes the empty space inside a backed up game (the rom), so it will save space

 

[Densen]

To expand on that, when roms are dumped, the complete size of the game's cart is copied, even if only a portion of that cart has game data in it. So a rom might be 32mb but the game only really uses 26mb. The rom trimmer will find the unused space and remove it, without touching the actual game data.

I hope that makes sense

 

[Philosophy]

Are there any downsides to rom trimming? I'd like to cram more stuff on a card, but don't want to compromise performance. (probably a newb question)

 

[Rayout]

No, trimming won't affect the gameplay at all (at least not with the Supercard trim-rom). All it should do is remove all the "filler" data that normally fills the rest of the space on a regular game cart.

You might accidentally trim out game data if you did it normally like people had to do at the start of the NDS scene but the provided software shouldn't do anything nasty like that.

Edited for grammar...D*mn you commas!

 

[rippon]

Really, it should be "D*mn you, commas!", because the commas are the subject, like you would say "this is my friend, Steve" or "please, feel free to fornicate with my sister, Gloria", or "please damn my smelly hillbilly father, Stinky Whistleteets".

Or smth... I just wanted to be funny

Also sorry about the off topic post

 

[leetdude_007]

I think you can trim roms for those *new* slot-1 devices. I personally would only trim roms that don't have download play or if download play doesn't work. Sorry for the sloppy response.

 

[Rayout]

Really, it should be "D*mn you, commas!", because the commas are the subject, like you would say "this is my friend, Steve" or "please, feel free to fornicate with my sister, Gloria", or "please damn my smelly hillbilly father, Stinky Whistleteets".

Or smth... I just wanted to be funny

 Also sorry about the off topic post

Reverse grammar nazi'd ;(

 

[Philosophy]

Thanks Rayout and thaigrocer for the answers. Trying to get 15+ on my card to have a nice variety. I decided to say screw it and go cheap online for my sd versus best buy, so I have a 1gig Kingston coming on Thurs. A bit off topic, but how many roms on average have yall been able to get on a 1gig? And if anyone who hasent' trimmed vs. trimming can answer would be cool.

 

[Katalyst]

Thanks Rayout and thaigrocer for the answers. Trying to get 15+ on my card to have a nice variety. I decided to say screw it and go cheap online for my sd versus best buy, so I have a 1gig Kingston coming on Thurs. A bit off topic, but how many roms on average have yall been able to get on a 1gig? And if anyone who hasent' trimmed vs. trimming can answer would be cool.

Well, I'm currently in the process of putting a few roms on my card right now for when my R4 ships this week (I've got a Kingston 1GB as well) and so far, I've got 17 roms on there (trimmed) and I've still got about 276MB free. Really depends on what the size of the games you're putting on there are, but if you're trying to fit a lot, I'd definitely say to trim them first. There's apparently no disadvantage to doing it, and like I was telling someone in another thread, Pokemon - Diamond (128MB) got trimmed to 58.5MB and FFIII (128MB) got trimmed to 97.9MB. So a lot of games actually do wind up having useless padding space.

 

[Philosophy]

Cool. Leave a little space for the save files and I'm good. Thanks

 

[Deleted User]

I think there's a disadvantage for trimming Mario vs Donkey Kong 2. I remember reading somewhere that the game uses that "empty space" when you download levels or something like that.

 

[ZAFDeltaForce]

Once, I trimmed REDS with the ROM Trimmer provided by the R4 and it gave me white screens... Maybe REDS won't work trimmed?

 

[hydouken]

what option should I chose when trimming a ROM? Isnt there 3 options to choose from?

 

[Katalyst]

what option should I chose when trimming a ROM? Isnt there 3 options to choose from?

Nah. Just download the ROM trim tool from the site (link). You just specify the rom path and filename as well as the output path and filename (a default one with _trim appended to it will be automatically generated) and trim.

 

[HayateSlash]

i'm pretty new to DS scene too and so, its 100% safe in terms of usage? i mean

any chances to get a rom corrupted using a trimmer tool?

idiot question as usual for me lol


thx

 

[hmvh1]

this their anyway to create a script that will do a batch trim on all my roms at the same time.

 

[Kyuzumaki]

Yes found this http://forums.ds-xtreme.com/showthread.php?t=1050 on the ds-xtreme forums. (All credit for software goes to ShortFuse)

To use the software with an R4:

1: Create a folder [flash drive letter]:\apps\ (this mimics the ds-x structure)
2: Place your roms in there! Now you can use the tool to manage your roms.

The trimming algorithm is more fullproof than the one the R4 trimmer uses so it won't give you white screens.

The code has been posted for anyone whos interested. I'm thinking of creating a new tool similar to this but with the idea of being more generic instead of only catering for a single cart.

CODE/*
* NDS Trimmer (ndstrim) v1.0
*  written by ShortFuse
*/
#include
#include
using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
ÂÂÂÂif (argc != 3)
 cout

 

[nico402]

thanks 4 the code! i was going to start writing one by myself!

 

[phoood]

On average, I have around 20 to 25 roms on a 1gb microsd (with trimming on my supercard).

And It's my guess that trimming won't let you use the rom to its full potential on slot 1 devices, since you'd be editing the file and it wouldn't be a 1:1 copy anymore.