Hi everyone,
recently I took a look at decrypted Chihiro ROMs, which you can copy onto a SSD (and/or CF / NetBoot??) and play them. I saw that a nice gentleman over at Neo-Arcadia already has all the known ROMs uploaded in a playable format ... you guys probably know this post.
So I wondered how he created those? Where did he get them? How could I make myself such ROMs, in case he has to pull down the links in the future?
I found 2 tutorials with 2 seperate sets of tools to create these decrypted Chihiro ROMs and tried it myself with "Crazy Taxi: High Roller" to see if I can replicate his ROM. I did a checksum compare and to my own surprise they didn't match! I also tried the other tutorial with the other set of tools, to see if those somehow mess with the files in any way, but it matched the output of my first attempt, so I took a look at the differences with HxD and saw the differences, which are:
NOTE: The file above is the ROM from Neo-Arcadia, the lower is my created file !!
Also here are the differences in listed form:
Now some of you might ask themselfs, why I'd care? The games run right? And the differences don't seem to affect the game files in anyway, so wth?
Some of you might be familiar with preservation projects like Redump, Trurip, No-Intro, etc. where people catalogue hashes of "perfect" dumps. "Perfect" as in "as-good-as-it-can-get", which means they rely on people to dump their games and post checksums of it, which get catalogued in a huge database that people can download and create up-to-date ROM sets for themselfs, so they can be sure that the ROMs are no bad dumps etc.
And should one ROM turn out to be a bad dump, they update these databases with correct values from another dump which can proof to be more accurate than the previous.
So I wondered if there is also interest in this community here to create such a database for our purposes, which means a database with hashes for: De-/Encrypted dumps from CPS2, CPS3, Naomi 1, Naomi 2, Chihiro, etc. games ... basically every Arcade Hardware which is "supported" here. The ROMs would be listed in their original state (encrypted / not extracted / etc.) and in a form which is playable, or useable for us through all kinds of ways, like Multicarts or via NetBoot.
I'd like to create tutorials for extracting / decrypting all these ROMs together with the needed tools, so people can follow the instructions themself and compare it with the database file, that I'd take care about and release updates everytime someone has a new addition, or a different checksum comes up for a ROM which turns out to be a better / more proper dump / version.
A perfect ROM set if you want
That's why I created this thread here, to see if there is interest in general and if enough people are willing to feed such a database together with me, with the goal to have a "Arcade-Projects ROM Set" with perfectly crafted ROMs w/o errors or anything like that.
To have one spot where people can see "Ok, the ROM was created with THIS source and you extract/decrypt it with THESE tools and have to patch THESE bytes to make it work". So you know where the ROMs usualy come from, how they were created and in case something got patched, you have one place to check WHAT exactly got patched and why. I hate when you download ROMs which are marked as "patched" but you don't know what exactly got patched? Why did it get patched? Is it the latest version of the patch? Are there newer variants? ... all these questions can be eliminated with a database which holds all the information.
But it requires work ... several people have to follow the same steps for the same game, to see if we all get the same results ... usualy 3-4-5 people are enough to be 100% sure that the ROM won't get any better
I created a poll, where you can vote and tell me how interested you are in such a database
I hope we'll find enough people here to help get this thing going !
Kindest regards,
iCEQB
recently I took a look at decrypted Chihiro ROMs, which you can copy onto a SSD (and/or CF / NetBoot??) and play them. I saw that a nice gentleman over at Neo-Arcadia already has all the known ROMs uploaded in a playable format ... you guys probably know this post.
So I wondered how he created those? Where did he get them? How could I make myself such ROMs, in case he has to pull down the links in the future?
I found 2 tutorials with 2 seperate sets of tools to create these decrypted Chihiro ROMs and tried it myself with "Crazy Taxi: High Roller" to see if I can replicate his ROM. I did a checksum compare and to my own surprise they didn't match! I also tried the other tutorial with the other set of tools, to see if those somehow mess with the files in any way, but it matched the output of my first attempt, so I took a look at the differences with HxD and saw the differences, which are:
NOTE: The file above is the ROM from Neo-Arcadia, the lower is my created file !!
Also here are the differences in listed form:
Code:
00004000: 00 01
0001502E: 01 00
00015094: 20 00
00015095: 20 00
00015096: 20 00
00015097: 20 00
00015098: 20 00
00015099: 20 00
0001509A: 20 00
0001509B: 20 00
0001509C: 20 00
0001509D: 20 00
0001509E: 20 00
0001509F: 20 00Some of you might be familiar with preservation projects like Redump, Trurip, No-Intro, etc. where people catalogue hashes of "perfect" dumps. "Perfect" as in "as-good-as-it-can-get", which means they rely on people to dump their games and post checksums of it, which get catalogued in a huge database that people can download and create up-to-date ROM sets for themselfs, so they can be sure that the ROMs are no bad dumps etc.
And should one ROM turn out to be a bad dump, they update these databases with correct values from another dump which can proof to be more accurate than the previous.
So I wondered if there is also interest in this community here to create such a database for our purposes, which means a database with hashes for: De-/Encrypted dumps from CPS2, CPS3, Naomi 1, Naomi 2, Chihiro, etc. games ... basically every Arcade Hardware which is "supported" here. The ROMs would be listed in their original state (encrypted / not extracted / etc.) and in a form which is playable, or useable for us through all kinds of ways, like Multicarts or via NetBoot.
I'd like to create tutorials for extracting / decrypting all these ROMs together with the needed tools, so people can follow the instructions themself and compare it with the database file, that I'd take care about and release updates everytime someone has a new addition, or a different checksum comes up for a ROM which turns out to be a better / more proper dump / version.
A perfect ROM set if you want
That's why I created this thread here, to see if there is interest in general and if enough people are willing to feed such a database together with me, with the goal to have a "Arcade-Projects ROM Set" with perfectly crafted ROMs w/o errors or anything like that.
To have one spot where people can see "Ok, the ROM was created with THIS source and you extract/decrypt it with THESE tools and have to patch THESE bytes to make it work". So you know where the ROMs usualy come from, how they were created and in case something got patched, you have one place to check WHAT exactly got patched and why. I hate when you download ROMs which are marked as "patched" but you don't know what exactly got patched? Why did it get patched? Is it the latest version of the patch? Are there newer variants? ... all these questions can be eliminated with a database which holds all the information.
But it requires work ... several people have to follow the same steps for the same game, to see if we all get the same results ... usualy 3-4-5 people are enough to be 100% sure that the ROM won't get any better
I created a poll, where you can vote and tell me how interested you are in such a database
I hope we'll find enough people here to help get this thing going !
Kindest regards,
iCEQB
