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 ImageImage
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 Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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.

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More from @frankcifaldi

3 May
Okay everyone, I've got a video game preservation tragedy here, make sure you're sitting down.

We were recently gifted a pile of loose EPROMs for video game console games from the 90s. I spent a lot of last week identifying and connecting them. Here's the results. (1/?) Image
At first blush these look okay, right? Complete sets, 1-3!

Except, in literally every case, we're missing ROM 0, the first ROM in the set. All of these games are missing 25% of their data.
As you can see, most of these are first-party Game Gear. Let's look at a complete set of first-party Game Gear EPROMs, from another collection. Notice something...different? Image
Read 11 tweets
29 Apr
Before I mail out one of @GameHistoryOrg's blind box magazines (gamehistory.org/shop) I make sure it's been scanned online. If not, I put it in a "donate to scanning group" box. I'm finally sorting them today and it's, um, a lot. This is years of labor.
We're getting closer to my dream of having every video game magazine OCR searchable every day, I'm so excited that we're able to use this program to get more things online and make video game research easy for everyone!
I'm going to spell this all out in detail soon, but we're taking donations of your old unwanted video game magazines! Every donation either gets directly preserved (physically and/or digitally), or if that's already been done, we sell it and use the money to buy the mags needed!
Read 8 tweets
28 Apr
This is an amazing reminder that what we call "pixel artists" were often painting for messy analogue television canvases. In this case, it's absolutely clear that this game is meant to be played with a composite signal. Look at what it does to the checkerboard dithering!
Poking around on Smart Blur with Photoshop has some pretty compelling results
Read 5 tweets
26 Apr
Looking at a giant pile of mystery EPROMs tonight that are all cryptically labeled and mismatched, with few clues as to anything, including their platforms. It's a really hard puzzle game basically. Image
So far it's mostly stuff like "...I think that's SNES?" but we did recently have OUR FIRST SIGN OF LIFE, FOLKS. Image
We also have what appears to be tiles for a janky, early version of Ufouria on the NES, one of my favorite games on the system! And it appears we're missing 1/2 of the game's program data, so it will never run. Image
Read 13 tweets
23 Mar
Video game companies would sometimes (not always!) "watermark" copies of games sent out before release, so that if it leaked they knew the culprit. Here's a fun example in a build I just dumped of Boogerman on the SNES. Left is retail game, right is review copy. Image
Update: Motika has been apprehended and is in federal custody
Since y'all are into this, here's my favorite prototype watermark that I've seen, just straight up in your face telling you that they know it's yours so you better not copy it, GAME PLAYERS MAGAZINE. Image
Read 4 tweets
21 Mar
Our old Cuisinart burr coffee grinder has a hilarious design flaw that fills its own insides with super fine grain coffee over time. The switch stopped working so we couldn't turn it off, there was a solid coffee brick stopping it after like 13 years of near-daily use. Image
I should brew this and relive most of my adult life in one cup
It still works but after cleaning it's dumping like 75% of the yield inside of itself, our current theory is that it's been doing this for years now but we didn't know because the fresh coffee was bouncing off the Coffee Wall and into the hopper.
Read 5 tweets

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