Hey guys, I was playing with the European only game The Smurfs on an eprom cart I just finished testing (yay! finaly got my eprom programmer:)) and I ran into some GFX glitch. I figured, that's to be expected as this is a PAL only game running on a NTSC game and was able to reach the last stage without too much issue. Once at the last boss, I figured it would be impossible to finish as the glitch on that stage were very bad and I switched to an emulator to finish it. Well to my surprise it was glitching exactly on all the same place as on my eprom cart... So I went and changed the emulation region to PAL thinking it could have had run it on NTSC. Once again, to my surprise, the game glitched at the same place and in the same way! I went and downloaded a new rom thinking my goodnes set might have gotten corrupted after being on my HDD for a long time. Same issue! Checked with goodnes to see if it was a bad dump but it get detected as a good dump... Is it possible that a bad dump of the game sneaked in the goodnes database and nobody ever really cared enough about the game to play more than 3 stages? I tried it on Jnes and FCEUX and both glitch at the same place as my nes.
GoodNES is not reliable at all, and has about as much credibility as Fox News. They label hacks as alternate versions or even "revisions" of roms.
I see... I guess I was out of the loop for a long time and didn't keep up with rom tool. Which tool is recommended for nes rom nowadays? I keep hearing about TOSEC these day, is it better than goodnes? I'll look around and scan it with something else in that case.
What is the CRC of your dump? Been dumped a couple of times into nes database, if it matches the one
here it
should be good.
CRC: 0x4022C94E
Seem to match the hash on your database. I'm starting to think it's not a good dump and that it is likely that the people dumping it didn't try to play completely through the game (gfx glitch are near the end). I will confirm that by ordering the cart and trying to redump it. And play through it again. I doubt it would be an emulation issue as it glitch at the same place on both a real nes (NTSC mind you) and 2 different emulator running in PAL mode.
BootGod wrote:
What is the CRC of your dump? Been dumped a couple of times into nes database, if it matches the one
here it
should be good.
My cart wasn't dumped. I don't know about Piteta's and Kinopio's but if they weren't dumped either then this doesn't mean a thing.
Yes it has been dumped 2x in there. The (x !) in the ROM info indicates how many times it was actually dumped. Undumped profiles such as yours do not increment that count.
I will contact the dumpers to investigate further. Seems very odd that it would be bad, it's a very standard pcb.
Actually could you try playing this in Nestopia, I played for a bit and encountered no problems even on levels that are supposed to glitch like act 9 / bridge level (which I can't pass :/)
I think you are running into PAL/NTSC timing issues and the emulators you tried just aren't good enough. I was reading around and found people that have the physical cart experience the same glitches when trying to run on an NTSC NES.
Thanks for checking out, i'll be sure to try on Nestopia tonight and let you know!
It is confirmed, the GFX glitch are emulation issue. I just played through the last 4 stage of the game (where the glitch were occuring) and finished the game and can confirm all went well with Nestopia in PAL mode! Thanks bootgod, you saved me buying the cart to double check the dump:) And I will be switching to Nestopia from now on, I never really paid attention to it but it seem like it could be a more accurate emulator than what I was using.