Bad Virtual Console dumps

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hking0036
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2016 4:54 pm

Bad Virtual Console dumps

Post by hking0036 »

Heyo. I decided to take a crack at the SNES VC because lately I've been looking at the GBA on Wii U and I keep seeing undocumented changes, so I've been trying to rack up as many dumps as I can. On a lark I decided to take a crack at the SNES and see what interesting stuff could be afoot, but this one has it's own qwirks - namely, after dumping them from the wii u ram the audio is totally boned. I don't know what could be causing it but the rom is obviously screwed up. Some are still fine, like earthbound or Dracula X, and all the Mega Man games seem to stay intact, but most other stuff falls apart after getting extracted. I'll do some redumps later but it's kind of late for me right now. I can say, I've dumped super metroid twice from different sources and they both produce the same result.

Taking a look at a PC extractor tool provides a dump but doesn't seem to cover the full spectrum of change, Dracula X produced an identical USA rom with it but coming out of the Wii U has a few changes inside.

I don't know the rules about posting roms around here because this is my first post, plus VC is in a bit of a weird spot because it's still available of purchase, so I just made a ton of patches and a few note .txts to look at if anyone is interested. I can get you all the GBA stuff too if you want to take a look (I have 27 SNES dumps from tonight, and 43 GBA dumps I've been accumulating, though only one is actually broken in any way).
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patch.zip
Collection of rom patches and a few txt files.
(937.76 KiB) Downloaded 221 times
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saturnu
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Aug 05, 2015 2:22 pm

Re: Bad Virtual Console dumps

Post by saturnu »

Recently i fixed the sound of Mario Picross 2 (SNES) with the toolset below, i was hoping for a better english translation but it's just the same rom as the JP version. ^^

https://github.com/Plombo/vcromclaim

* Can recreate a playable replica of the original ROM for SNES games where the original sound data has been removed from the ROM, by re-encoding the PCM sound data to BRR and restoring the BRR data to its original place in the ROM.
hking0036
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2016 4:54 pm

Re: Bad Virtual Console dumps

Post by hking0036 »

saturnu wrote:Recently i fixed the sound of Mario Picross 2 (SNES) with the toolset below, i was hoping for a better english translation but it's just the same rom as the JP version. ^^

https://github.com/Plombo/vcromclaim

* Can recreate a playable replica of the original ROM for SNES games where the original sound data has been removed from the ROM, by re-encoding the PCM sound data to BRR and restoring the BRR data to its original place in the ROM.
Interesting, thanks for the tip. All of these types VC roms have weird stuff like this, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense why, just Nintendo I guess. I'll take a look at that.

Edit: I took a look and it seems like that's for Wii not Wii U. That said, I tried it anyways but it wanted an external .pcm and I don't believe I have one of those unless they're included in the dump somehwere or in the rom I suppose.
Last edited by hking0036 on Thu Oct 13, 2016 1:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
AWJ
Posts: 433
Joined: Mon Nov 10, 2008 3:09 pm

Re: Bad Virtual Console dumps

Post by AWJ »

I would guess that the WiiU SNES emulator HLEs sound for performance reasons, or possibly to enhance it (e.g. to allow sound effects to play without BGM instruments cutting out) It's funny that only some games apparently have HLEed sound, though.
Revenant
Posts: 462
Joined: Sat Apr 25, 2015 1:47 pm
Location: FL

Re: Bad Virtual Console dumps

Post by Revenant »

The Virtual Console dumps that have bad/broken SPC music are supposed to have PCM recordings of the actual music alongside the ROM that get played in place of the original music. I don't know if it actually applies to all games or not (i.e. do the ROMs that don't have broken music still have PCM files anyway?)
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