UNIF mappers

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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rainwarrior
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by rainwarrior »

koitsu wrote:The file format has been officially abandoned + all information about it requested to be deleted by the file format author himself. If you don't believe me I can dig up the Email I was sent and quote it here (I've done this several times already in the past).
Everyone believes you. You don't need to post personal e-mails to prove it. Demonstrating that the author has abandoned it will not change how anyone feels about UNIF. We already know. It's quite frankly a rather unimportant detail.

The emergence of iNES 2 as a replacement is a much more important detail. We have the means to start assigning the remaining UNIF-only boards and moving on to that, but doing this requires taking an interest in UNIF and doing the hard work to make it happen, and improving the documentation will help with this. Simply telling people not to use or implement UNIF is especially pointless when there isn't an alternative yet. There's a process in place to get it done, but it's not done yet. Even if we did have iNES 2 assignment and available .NES rips, it's still their call whether they want to support UNIF in their emulator.
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Myask
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by Myask »

koitsu wrote:The file format has been abandoned […] by the file format author himself.
And yet this author (Tennessee) asked someone else(proxy) to maintain it two years ago, who pushed a[n admittedly minor] commit to the project less than a month before Koitsu pushed his "UNIF is dead" wiki-edit. So it doesn't look dead to me.

I like the idea of Interchange File Format[-style] chunk-based files better than bitblobs, too.
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by tepples »

Myask wrote:I like the idea of Interchange File Format[-style] chunk-based files better than bitblobs, too.
But how do you patch a file in such a chunked format with well-known binary patch tools, especially if the data you're patching is not guaranteed to be at a fixed offset in the file? You'd have to make patch tools that understand the particular chunked format, and unless all platforms switch their ROM image formats to the same, you'll end up needing one patcher per emulated platform instead of just one for IPS and one for xdelta3.
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koitsu
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by koitsu »

Myask wrote:
koitsu wrote:The file format has been abandoned […] by the file format author himself.
And yet this author (Tennessee) asked someone else(proxy) to maintain it two years ago, who pushed a[n admittedly minor] commit to the project less than a month before Koitsu pushed his "UNIF is dead" wiki-edit. So it doesn't look dead to me.

I like the idea of Interchange File Format[-style] chunk-based files better than bitblobs, too.
I'm not going to cry over spilt milk, but I don't appreciate your use of the word "pushed" here. Maybe someone (i.e. not me) should contact him and ask him for clarification? I'm trying to honour the request I was given years ago. Here's the original Email, with relevant (to the discussion) headers and all:

Code: Select all

Received: from ey-out-2122.google.com (ey-out-2122.google.com [74.125.78.27])
        by mx01.sc1.parodius.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9557F9581A
        for <XXXXX@parodius.com>; Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:53:29 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <36e787f90812151853n8c9aa07l578298233442262c@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:53:27 -0500
From: "Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux" <XXXXX@gmail.com>
To: XXXXX@parodius.com
Subject: My account on www.parodius.com/~veilleux

Hi Jeremy,

Long time no see :)

I am now 26, and 10 years ago, I was a douchebag teenager who thought he
knew everything. I was not completely lacking talent, but I was certainly
very arrogant. Now I'm an electrical engineer, about to get married, and I
have, let's say, a more professional outlook on life :) I would like you to
completely terminate my site at http://www.parodius.com/~veilleux.
Please delete it all, it is completely unlike who I am now, and it burns me
that people would associate me with the stupid comments that are on there. I
would really appreciate it. Plus UNIF was dead right from the get-go. I
would thus really appreciate if you could deal with that. I can't log-on to
parodius to do it myself :(

Over the past few years, I have been deeply involved in the SONIA project at
ETS (http://sonia.etsmtl.ca), participating to 5 engineering competitions in
San Diego doing an internship at Sun Labs in Menlo Park. I'll be starting my
Masters of Electrical Engineering in three weeks. Very different from my NES
stuff :) I have a blog at http://www.tentech.ca if you're ever interested in
what I'm doing nowadays :)

Thanks in advance for getting rid of the UNIF website.

Best regards,

Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux
It looks pretty fucking dead to me ("Plus UNIF was dead right from the get-go"). I rest my case.
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rainwarrior
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by rainwarrior »

koitsu wrote:Maybe someone should contact him and ask him for clarification? I'm trying to honour the request I was given years ago.
You did honour the request by taking down the website. There's no reason to ask him to clarify anything. He abandoned the format, and didn't want anyone coming to him for help with it, and that part's done.

Nobody disputes this, koitsu. I don't understand why you keep posting this personal e-mail. Tenessee Carmel-Veilleux has (and wants) nothing to do with UNIF anymore. His opinion of UNIF is irrelevant. He deliberately gave up his stake in it.

Asking him to clarify anything about UNIF at this point would be to go against the spirit of that request, too, but again there's no reason to because it's not his anymore.
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Zepper
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by Zepper »

I believe such discussion won't go so far... and I hope so. :)
Think about not losing the focus on iNES2 format.
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Myask
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by Myask »

(further-aside) "Pushed" is a neutral verb for to commits to both version-control code repositories, wikis, and other over-network-version-updates, as far as I know; and parallel construction is an element of good writing style. (/aside)
tokumaru wrote:Once you create something, it's out there, it has a life of its own, and there may be people relying on it.
koitsu wrote:We should respect the author's wishes.
...huh, I didn't know the NesDev wiki didn't have a big contributor licensing schema to prevent people from taking their ball(edits) and going home...unless the little warning of how things will be "mercilessly edited, etc." on the Edit page is deemed sufficient.
koitsu, paraphrased wrote:mindblowing that it keeps coming up
Feels like a Streisand Effect maybe?
tepples wrote: But how do you patch a file in such a chunked format with well-known binary patch tools, especially if the data you're patching is not guaranteed to be at a fixed offset in the file? You'd have to make patch tools that understand the particular chunked format, and unless all platforms switch their ROM image formats to the same, you'll end up needing one patcher per emulated platform instead of just one for IPS and one for xdelta3.
Point, which would alternately suggest using a directory/tar file instead of going halfway. On the other hand, this is avoidable by a couple of means: enforcing chunk order; providing a split/recombine tool; and as you say, having the file formats of separate consoles using one general format.

Or perhaps an author might not want their work patched, and chunk-shuffling would be an additional barrier (though less-so than code-shuffling).

Suggest splitting from koitsu's entry into the thread (post 149008) on; before is about documenting these mappers (which seems like a revisit of this recent topic) and then this is talking about "Is UNIF dead?" Pictures at 11.
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koitsu
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by koitsu »

Myask wrote:
koitsu, paraphrased wrote:mindblowing that it keeps coming up
Feels like a Streisand Effect maybe?
No, it's just a rehash/revamp of what I've already dealt with before. Looks like I obviously didn't learn, so I'll have to do something about that (my mistake) going forward.
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rainwarrior
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by rainwarrior »

koitsu, the whole purpose of this thread (until you interjected) was to gain information on the mappers that are still UNIF only. Please understand why this is universally a good thing to be discussing. Getting this buried knowledge uncovered is a stepping stone to finally getting them migrated to iNES 2.
Sik
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by Sik »

koitsu wrote:I'm not going to cry over spilt milk, but I don't appreciate your use of the word "pushed" here.
Pull = get the current state of the repository
Push = load your modifications into the repository
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by proxy »

As much as I hate UNIF as a file format, which means I'm actually somewhat glad it's supposed to be dead, I'm not sure I agree with eliminating something from the face of the earth just because the original author wants to (as long as no one is getting hurt).
I just noticed this thread and wanted to clarify the "status" of UNIF. In 2011, Tennessee contacted me and asked that I take over maintenance of the standard since early in development I had created libunif. As far as I know, the wishes of the original author is that he no longer isinterested in supporting UNIF, but instead would like me to take over. So here's the status as far as I'm concerned.

UNIF is a dead standard (I did however make a minor version bump in 2013 to change from ASCII to UTF-8) that there is little use in updating or supporting. However, the standard is and will continue to be hosted along with the libunif source on github (was originally code.google.com, but that shut down).

I doubt that there will be any updates to it in the future, but if someone chooses to support UNIF or is simply interested, it will be there as long as I am able to keep it there.
Last edited by proxy on Fri Aug 28, 2015 10:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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zeroone
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by zeroone »

proxy wrote:but instead would like me to take over
Any chance you could update the Wiki by supplying the details of each UNIF mapper?
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by proxy »

Any chance you could update the Wiki by supplying the details of each UNIF mapper?
That's a good question. That's probably something that I won't have the time to put into. I can of course refer you to information which is close though (and already on the wiki): http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Board_table

NesCartDB also has some good info here.

The main issue here is that there is a separation between the UNIF standard and the mapper hardware which needs to be described. Honestly, that's one of the major difficulties of the UNIF standard. The only thing is says about mappers really is "here's a string which represents the mapper chip". That's essentially too vague to be portable. Should a Megaman ROM have the string "UNROM" in there? should be it be the very specific "NES-UN-ROM-06", or should it be "UxROM" to say which class of chip it was (emulators after all tend to in practice implement all of the UxROM mappers with one piece of code).

I'd love to be able to say "here's the UNIF standard for mapper names", but it's just too much effort for something that probably won't be used :-(.

Personally, my recommendation would be to use the NesCartDB mapper chip name for the "PCB Class". In this case Mega Man would be "NES-UNROM" (seen here, http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=608).

But that's just what I would do, nothing "official"
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zeroone
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by zeroone »

I couldn't even track down many UNIF ROMs for testing purposes. Even if I added UNIF support to my emulator, it seems like very few would even be able to try it.
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bodkinz
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Re: UNIF mappers

Post by bodkinz »

Hope this helps.. would be a shame to see a format buried... just because it isn't used much... All those items we buy and throw away.. then later in life think... i wish i had kept that.....

anyway.... 56meg of unf/unif files

can dig up more if needed :D

https://mega.nz/#!op0RyRTB!HfPW2nr8Mk6Y ... 3YOCx4mXyU
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