Anyone able to run Super VCD Games 300 on PC?

Hey folks,

I'm trying to run these games for a long time. Searching over the internet since a few years. There isn't a single clue if anyone was able to rune these games.

It's a CD as like as video cd structure (with CDI, EXT, MPEGAV, SEGMENT, VCD folders ) with an extra NEWROM folder. The NEWROM folder has 300 .bin files which are some kind of processed NES roms. This CD comes with some old VCD player with game facility. The CD runs on thos VCD player but not on any emulator on PC. The cd title says 'NES_DISK V1'.

I've compared some .bin files with original NES roms in a hex editor. The result I see is really hopeful. Those bin files has fresh rom data without NES header and some data added before and after the rom data. I'm not a NES developer and I don't know how to modify or fix a NES file, so I may be wrong.

This topic has been discussed on many places but I did not find any solution anywhere. It's like a mystery. Can anyone solve the puzzle? I can send some of the rom files and I also have the name of those games so that you can compare to a fresh rom. I really want to play some games which I cannot find on the internet.

Cheers.
Sohan

That sounds pretty interesting. I'll take a look.

But is there anything interesting among these ROMs? I wouldn't be surprised if it was all standard multi-cart crap.

It looks like you can take the two-byte (big-endian) value at offset 6 and add $61C0 to get the offset where the ROM starts, but there's no clear indication of ROM size, mirroring, or mapper. On top of that, some of these ROMs have been hacked specifically for the emulator.

There wasn't anything particularly interesting in the four ROMs I looked at:

• Contra (U) with a single byte changed, making the game crash (probably a hack for idle loop detection)
• Ikki (J) with the copyright text removed (same as [p2] in GoodNES) and, oddly, the IRQ/BRK vector changed to match the NMI vector
• The Little Mermaid (U) with a trainer menu and an inexplicable change to its graphics ("DISXEY", "XIXTEXDO", "PRESS START BUTTOX")
• Rainbow Islands - The Story of Bubble Bobble 2 (J) with the copyright text removed (same as [p1] in GoodNES) and the same game-breaking one-byte idle loop detection hack as Contra

The ones I looked at seemed to be 52400 bytes of header (looks like MIPS machine code?), followed by the concatenation of the PRG and CHR, and then 4944 bytes of footer.

Takahashi Meijin no Boukenjima (J) had also a single byte changed (to $FB)

I'm actually really noob at this. I have no Idea how to check/modify a nes rom. But I've opened those files in a hex editor. Found a string value "Need:%" or something like this. Rom data starts after this in all of those .bin files. Also some data added at the end. So it's actually possible to get rom data from any of those .bin files. But unsure about what you say header or mapper. I really don't understand this. Is it possible to convert those .bin files to a working .NES files?

Yes, but it's not easy, and it's not possible to do it automatically (with a converter program).

The .bin file doesn't say how big the PRG or CHR ROMs are. I had to look at the data myself to try to figure out how big each part is supposed to be.

The .bin file doesn't say what kind of cartridge the game uses. There are over 100 different cartridge types, and they are not compatible with each other. The .nes file calls this the mapper number.

The game in the .bin file might use special emulator-specific hacks. Other emulators (and a real NES/Famicom) won't run the hacked game. If you don't have a copy of the original game to compare (because you don't know which game it is), you have to run the game in a debugger and try to figure out where it goes wrong.

Can you overwrite the PRG and CHR sections with the PRG and CHR of an appropriately sized Holy Diver Batman ROM? It'll at least print the mapper number that the emulator is assuming. And if the problem is one of finding the dividing line between PRG ROM and CHR ROM in a given ROM image, you could think of a heuristic for detecting strings of bytes that are likely to be CHR data (such as correlation among adjacent pixels of each tile when decoded).

If those are just standard NES ROMs with a few modifications, why even bother to get that Super VCD stuff to run in the first place? Why not take an emulator and use regular ROMs?

As I understand "some games which I cannot find on the internet", the collection includes some exclusive games and/or hacks thereof.

About hacks: Who gives a shit about hacks?

And actual exclusive games: Well, that would indeed be interesting. Which games are they? There are really games in that collection that aren't listed, for example, in GoodNES?

The thing is, every single game is now available on the net. But some games on that collection had their name changed. So it's hard to find those games, at least for me. Also I don't have the full list of those games. Found about half of the list here. So can't remember all of those games of that CD. That's why I opened this topic.

In this case, I would suggest to simply post the title screen and one gameplay screenshot of every game that interests you and I'm sure people here will be able to tell you what's the official name of that game. In my opinion, that's better than fiddling with those ROM images.

Alternately, this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JueI4bsctgQ
provides one screenshot for 2648 ROMs in 45 minutes.

I still think figuring out the file format they use and the details to execute it would be of interest.

If you want to see one of those roms, let me know. I can give you

I think if someone can program an appropriate BIOS, then those roms can execute in emulators we use.

But why?

Some person illegitimately published NES games per ROMs on the PC and used a proprietary file format with a bunch of hacks. This doesn't even have anything to do with actual cartridges. It's basically a random person who used a random file format to do random stuff.

This has no relevance to NES programming or NES games themselves. It's just an arbitrary piece of software without much worth. So, why is this of any interest at all?

I would understand if it gave some insights in actual NES stuff. But why do you care what some obscure person did in his own little emulator?

To me, that's the software equivalent of someone selling a print-out of a famous painting where he drew some alterations on.
Do I care why Joe Everybody gave a copy of the Mona Lisa red eyes and a blond streak in her hair? No, why should I? It doesn't tell me anything about the actual painting. Why should I have interest in the alterations of some hobbyist that he put on a printed copy?

Likewise, we have a well-documented NES file format and good knowledge about how the real NES works. What do we gain if we analyze the private file format of some nobody that he created specifically for ROM versions of the games that don't even have to do with stuff on the actual console?

In my opinion, the only situation where this might be useful is if that CD really has a brand-new NES game on it that we want to try on standard emulators.
But if these are only regular games or games with some slight alterations ("Super Mario Bros." with 30 lives etc.): Meh, who gives a shit?

I gotta say, I agree with this. If somebody wants to take their time to do it, that's fine, but personally I haven't the slightest interest in any of these obscure ROM hacks.

I'd much rather see somebody spend their time making a game, a tool for making games, hell, I'd think seeing someone make a single animated sprite would be more interesting.

I do too, but if someone who want to do something else instead, it is one thing to figure out; I don't know what it might reveal. Especially if they are actual exclusive games or if there are significant modifications to alter game rules and such.

Unfortunately, the original poster hasn't provided this information yet. But somehow, I highly doubt it. I mean, should we really believe that somebody puts together a hacky emulator and some non-standard ROMs and also provides a completely new game written from scratch?

Believe me: If you actually analyze that stuff, then the end result will be that you know how a specific ROM hack of a game that we've known for 30 years works on an emulator that some script kiddie wrote in his mother's basement. Wow! What a valuable piece of information for the NES community.

Yeah I feel like you're going to take way more time to try to analyze a poor way of doing something and any info you get out of the process is most likely going to be bad information.

Is there a mind-bending game here that does something unheard of? I dunno. I'm programming an NES game so who am I to say what's worth someone's time?

Guys, Let me give answers to some of your questions.

First of all, that was standard NES games collection. Those games were without any hack.

There was no exclusive game, all are available now in fresh nes format.

It's right that it was programmed in non NES way. But all of those games has pure NES rom data.

The only reason to make this post, those games were the first video game experience of my life and I still love to play those games. I've found a few of those games but I can't remember most of the games there. I'm not a NES programmer so asked for help to you guys. Also I don't have the hardware that the CD worked.

Here's an idea: grab a random sequence of bytes from the middle of each file and search for those sequences in a "Full NES ROM Set". Chances are you'll find the clean ROMs.

Coding a script to do this should be fairly quick.

As I said: Invest 45 minutes and watch this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JueI4bsctgQ

Afterwards, you will have seen every ROM. This way, you can find out which of these games are missing in your collection.

Notes:

The ITEMxxxx.DAT files in the SEGMENT folder are the menu screens. I converted them to jpg using ffmpeg -i ITEM0001.DAT 01.jpg and so on, then typed up all of the names.

Menu pages 16 to 30 contain repeats or slight spelling changes of the game names on pages 1 to 15 in a different order.

I compared the ROM BIN files using fc /b G001.BIN G236.BIN and so on and all of these pairs are the same except for one: "Donkey 1" (Rom 34 or Page 4, Game 4) and "Donkey1" (Rom 275 or Page 28, Game 5) have 13 bytes different.

menus.zip The menu screens in jpg format. I will remove this link in about a week.

list.txt The list of game names, sorted and grouped by the pairs of matching names. The text uses tabs to separate the data, so you can copy the text and paste it into a spreadsheet if you want to sort it other ways.

compares.txt The comparison results.

Thanks so much Bavi_H!!

I was exactly looking for this kind of help. Finally I got the full lists. Now I can look for the games myself.

Thanks again