Thread by @frankcifaldi

Back at my terrible ROM puzzle tonight, making some progress by identifying chunks of games! Ufouria NES would be very exciting, except we're missing 1/3 of the game

Most of this pile is pretty much garbage (only half a game etc.) so it was relieving to actually get something both playable AND interesting just now

Hey, who wants to see my process? So we start with the actual physical item, in this case an NEC 27C1000 simply labeled "3." The ROMs we received were not in any logical groups, so while I did my best to match the "3" with a 1 and 2 based on physical evidence, my guess was wrong.

The extra wire here is because the GQ-4X requires you to wire a specific pin (26) to a different socket for this particular chip. I don't really understand why. I'm sure a more handy person could come up with a better adapter, but I just cut up a socket with scissors.

So once we've fed the appropriate chip part into the GQ software, we hit the Read button, and get a complete binary dump. The first thing I do is quickly eye-scan the data to see if anything jumps out at me like a game script or credits, in this case nothing did.

From here I use a tool from @ocornut called SMS Page (smspower.org/Development/To…), which spits out not only a CRC for the entire ROM, but for individual pages. It also shows the first line of data for each page.

With this knowledge we can compare the data here to a database of all known ROM dumps. In this case, I don't have to have a database of literally everything, because I'm pretty sure this is a Game Gear game. So I've got a txt file that has this same data for every GG ROM.

If the ROM is from a known dump (usually, the final game) the CRC highlighted here will match something in this text file. In this case, there is not a match. So now we move on to seeing if any of that raw data from the beginning of the pages matches anything.

In this case, there's no match. So the next thing I do is look at a tile viewer to verify the system, and to look for clues. In this case, it's indeed Game Gear, and the tiles suggest that it might be pared with ROMs I suspect are related to World Series Baseball 95.

And look at that, we already had a 1 and 2 for this game, so we put 3 with its friends. Unfortunately it doesn't appear that we have the first ROM at all (0), so we have 75% of a game that is SIMILAR to World Series Baseball '95 but might be an unknown sequel or something.

As they should! But I won't keep that one out for long, and also, the @GameHistoryOrg office has zero UV light as a policy - no windows at all, and everything is LED. Not 100% safe, but safe enough for some temporary work like this.

https://twitter.com/SailsSez/status/1388260627987173377