Nintendo "Gigaleak"

[strat]

As far as the leaked N64 code goes it's mostly binary obj files. It looks like the iQue company (afaik the source of the leaked files) was only supplied enough code to edit the Chinese language into the games. However, what uncompiled code does exist has an exact matching counterpart in the RE'd Mario 64 project. As I figured, the RE devs created more exact names for the variables, subroutines and constants (in some cases the Nintendo programmer just used hardcoded values, though at a glance their naming convention is still adequately descriptive).

So pretty interesting but the SNES stuff is obviously the meat n potatoes here.

[dink]

It's a pity that it doesn't include the master disks of FDS titles. That would take care of the purification problem with FDS disks, as there's no sure-fire way to know if a disk image is in the factory state or not.

It would be nice to get a fresh set of FDS disk images, BUT:
The images Nintendo have been releasing for Virtual Console have been modded, mostly in the disk loader routines. These VC dumps don't always work great in most emulators (or on a real FDS+Famicom). For example: Hikari Shinwa (Kid Icarus) VC release. When I get halfway to 3/4 through a game, the game starts acting weird after a new level load - items in inventory will grow to astronomic values, the score will "animate" to insanely strange numbers.. and so on. or just crash/lock up solid. At first I thought it was a bug in my emulator, but I reproduced it in Mesen, FCEUX and a friend reproduced the problem on his real FDS+FC.
All I'm saying is: be wary of FDS titles that have "VC" or "Virtual Console" in the filename.

A simple test can prove that Nintendo nop'd out a bunch of code.
Load Hikari Shinwa (Virtual Console) in a hex editor, then load a known-good non-Virtual Console fds image of it.
In this image, the left side is the VC release from Nintendo, on the right is a known-good dump.

Question: Why did Nintendo do this? Is it to get around a bug in their FDS-emulator loading routines? Or to purposely break usage in other emu's? Other games have fewer changes, a few have none at all. It's strange.

best regards,
- dink

[Pokun]

Interesting but worrying. Is Hikaru Shinwa even playable on VC after that point? I remember playing it on emulators long ago and graphics started to become all glitchy in the sky world (which is about 3/4 of the game). I thought it was the emulator that was inaccurate, but then I heard it was a bad dump. My real disk doesn't do this of course (but it's tainted with my name in the high-score since I beat it, and it can't be deleted in the game AFAIK).

I was delighted to know that Nintendo kept the master ROMs, as many companies often don't keep their old games. I Hope Nintendo really has the untouched FDS master disk images somewhere safe though. It's really strange that they didn't use them for VC as is.

[NewRisingSun]

The .QD images in the NES Mini and Switch Online are pristine. The .QD images for the Virtual Console are not. You can tell because the .QD disk image format retains the CRC values. The NES Mini and Switch Online .QD image files' CRC values are correct. The CRC values in the Virtual Console .QD image files are not correct, because Nintendo performed the modifications without adjusting the CRC values.

NintendulatorNRS faithfully emulates the CRC error when loading such .QD files. As a result, the VC .QD files will produce error 27, while the NES Mini and Switch Online .QD files will work.

[Pokun]

I see, that sounds like Nintendo still do have the QD files, and that the modifications were just done as a quick and dirty workaround for the emulator's shortcomings at the time. The predecessors to the VC is the Card-e Classic NES, GBA Famicom/NES Mini/Classics series and the Doubutsu no Mori Famicom/NES emulators (which includes FDS games in Japanese versions), but those games were also modified to remove 2-player modes and whatnot, so they are hardly pristine.

[Great Hierophant]

These days Nintendo will patch out things like strobing effects on the Switch emulations of these games on the fly, they no longer modify ROMs or FDS/QD images, which is a good thing. Of course, try telling those know-nothings at No-intro that.

[skaman]

The stuff that I'd like to see is the complete Satellaview library.

Maybe there's an alien society or secret government spy agency that captured and preserved all of the broadcasts.

[calima]

Is there anything good beyond BS Zelda and Super Famicom Wars, which we already have?

[Pokun]

Fire Emblem, Dragon Quest, F-Zero, Harvest Moon among probably many others. Also there are a lot of things not known how the sound link stuff works.

Besides Satellaview there are prototypes like Tosho Iwai's Sound Factory/Fantasy that we wants to see.

[calima]

I looked up what BS Harvest Moon was, and it was rather disappointing. An early limited demo with some Japanese voice over commentary. I presume the other titles you listed are similar. I could see historians being interested yes, but not gamers.

[Bregalad]

It hasn't been taken down yet.

OK but I still don't see anything non-Nintendo in there. I don't see any material related to Castlevania.

[Gilbert]

Sound Factory/Fantasy

This will be quite interesting, if someone would compare how different it was from the released SimTunes.
I suspect a number of Nintendo themed stages(especially Mario related ones) has to be removed in the final product.

P.S. Otocky for the FDS was great.

[Memblers]

It hasn't been taken down yet.

OK but I still don't see anything non-Nintendo in there. I don't see any material related to Castlevania.

From what I've heard (could be wrong), there was an email database in the leak, people were working on decrypting files attached to the emails, and that's where a CV4 prototype had turned up.

[Pokun]

I looked up what BS Harvest Moon was, and it was rather disappointing. An early limited demo with some Japanese voice over commentary. I presume the other titles you listed are similar. I could see historians being interested yes, but not gamers.

I don't think so. The F-Zero ones are quite interesting. There are videos of them, but as they played copyrighted music (like a radio when playing) it has been partly silenced. The commentary are not silenced though.

There are also other games like Marvelous, Excitebike, Super Mario USA and many more.
And there are non-SoundLink, fully functional as-is games that might not have been preserved yet because they are only available on 8M Memory Pack flash cartridges if the original owner downloaded and kept them.

[DevenNES]

I read something about IQue Verilog in this second round.