guitarzombie wrote:
I was looking at a game that I KNOW uses TLROM and inside of nestopia it said it was TSROM.
The iNES file format, the most common format for distribution of NES ROMs, is not very good at defining boards. With the older version of the format, which is the more common one by far, it's only possible to define a mapper number, and both TLROM and TSROM use the MMC3 mapper, so it's impossible to distinguish between those 2. Also, the old iNES format can't specify whether RAM at $6000-$7FFF is present, only if it's battery backed (which is why most emulators map RAM to that range for all games). So yeah, the deductions that can be made based on the iNES header aren't the best, and you'll get inaccurate information from emulator reports.
Quote:
I checked a few roms I had that had that hex area blank
Using breakpoints like rainwarrior suggested will save you the trouble of manually looking at that memory. A proper breakpoint will open the debugger on any access (read or write) to $6000-$7FFF, so you'll know that the game is using extra RAM.
guitarzombie wrote:
Oh so code wont necessarily be there when you start the game? I opened up the game played it and just read the readout. Most of the time I didnt even need to play it.
Like all RAM that's not battery backed, it's empty/undefined on power up. Most games will probably access that memory very early on, which is why you don't have to play very far into the game in order to see data stored there.