SNES Copier question.
As my Super Nintendo collection nears completion of all the US games I'm interested in, (not a literally complete collection) I thought I'd start collecting some of the Japanese games that I enjoyed playing on emulators.
That being said, I'm not fluent in Japanese, and want to find a way to play them in English. While the easiest way to accomplish this in most cases is with something like an SD2SNES using patched ROMs, this defeats the purpose of collecting the carts. (Plus any cart with an expansion chip will not tolerate that very well)
I remember reading that some old school copiers were capable of applying hot patches to games in real time, temporarily. This would also help get around the physical problem of running JP carts on a US system. Can someone tell me what is my best option here?
Thanks!
That being said, I'm not fluent in Japanese, and want to find a way to play them in English. While the easiest way to accomplish this in most cases is with something like an SD2SNES using patched ROMs, this defeats the purpose of collecting the carts. (Plus any cart with an expansion chip will not tolerate that very well)
I remember reading that some old school copiers were capable of applying hot patches to games in real time, temporarily. This would also help get around the physical problem of running JP carts on a US system. Can someone tell me what is my best option here?
Thanks!
Comments
The most direct solution to your problem would be to get your Japanese cartridges converted to English. The process is the same as building reproduction cartridges, the only difference is you keep the Japanese shell and label. A good repro builder can salvage the original ROMs intact, which you could tuck inside the cartridge, plenty of room in most SFC carts.
You might be told to get a RetroN5 which can apply hack/translation patches, but don't do it. The RetroN5 has a high failure rate and it's just an emulator in a box. There is zero difference between a RetroN5 and a PC emulator.
No matter the solution you choose, there are still a lot of Super Famicom games that aren't translated yet.
No the copiers don't do that, or at least my gamedoctor didn't. You can apply other patches and copy it to a floppy or run it through the parallel port. I ended up doing a floppy USB emu drive with mine.
I recall that with later firmware I could insert a cartridge in my V64, dump it to DRAM, then patch it with an IPS patch off the CD-ROM on my Doctor V64. I'd guess that UCON64 could essentially accomplish this with a Game Doctor/Professor SF or Super Wildcard DX2 over the parallel port PC connection. This is essentially what the RetroN5 does as well. Also curious if the Super UFO Pro 8 can do this.
I am not against using pre-patched ROMs loaded into a copier's Memory, although then it is functionally identical to more modern ways of doing it with an SD2SNES. (Potentially getting issues with carts that have unsupported enhancement chips and even copy-protection issues.) Albeit you would have the small benefit of using using ROMs from your own cart directly, I can't say it would be worth getting an old copier for that given how the modern variants would probably be simpler to use.
I also considered the idea of just sucking it up and playing them straight is still an option if slightly undesirable for text-heavy RPGs.
The SNES X-Band had extensive real-time patching capabilities and I've always wondered what a custom ROM could do with the same hardware. Every time you connected to the service with a different game it would take much longer to disconnect (it must disconnect to call the other player or wait for a call). Successive connections with the same game would not have this extra wait, even after a power cycle, unless you cleared the SRAM on the X-Band. If you cleared the SRAM it would take even longer, not just to restore all your data/email and download the latest editions of X-Band News/Bandwidth, but also because it was patching ITSELF.
For example, I could press Select to cycle through preselected topic titles and X-Band service email addresses on a freshly-initialized X-Band, but not after the first connect. I'm sure it was also downloading the prerendered Nintendo Power logo and "You're unbelievable!" voice clip that they added to X-Band News/Bandwidth half-way through.
An example of game patches were Killer Instinct forcing you into tournament play with pre-filled player names and forcing you into controller setup. It would also force random select after a win and required BOTH players to enter speed/Combo Breaker/character cheats and background selections. Well, sometimes the other player only had to hold a direction to allow it, such as when selecting Cinder to enter the Eyedol cheat. If you're thinking that the SRAM wouldn't be nearly enough to hold a text-heavy translation, well, it held the email, stats, personal info, taunts, contact lists, and the personal info of everyone on your contact lists for offline access in addition to the aforementioned X-Band News and Bandwidth with downloaded audio samples and graphics. It could store all that along with a patched in multiplayer mode for Doom. Also, anyone hacking the X-Band to add a custom ROM could probably swap the SRAM chip for something larger.
Wish I was an engineer at the level to poke around with that!
Originally posted by: freespace2dotcom
(Potentially getting issues with carts that have unsupported enhancement chips and even copy-protection issues.) Albeit you would have the small benefit of using using ROMs from your own cart directly, I can't say it would be worth getting an old copier for that given how the modern variants would probably be simpler to use.
I've never seen any game trip its copy protection on the Super UFO Pro 8, not even the infamous EarthBound which usually displays an anti-piracy screen long before it ever makes the game harder and locks up near the end.
The Super UFO Pro 8 isn't an old copier, it is a new device you can still buy. It floats around the $50 - $80 mark. It is the cheapest SNES flash cart and by far the most useful, given it is a flash cart and copier.
http://www.tototek.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_8_11&products_id=145&zenid=4erasui5h5hbiuplnboobojqa1
www.ebay.com/itm/122451632165
That is really nice to know. it may not be patching in real time, but the Super UFO Pro 8 definitely seems like the next best option for me since I do intend to collect the original carts which will have any enhancement chips anyway.
[quote]I've never seen any game trip its copy protection on the Super UFO Pro 8, not even the infamous EarthBound which usually displays an anti-piracy screen long before it ever makes the game harder and locks up near the end.[/quote]
I'll take your word for it. This seems like the option to go with, then, for playing any patched SFC games as authentically as possible on real hardware. Unless there is a way to do it in real time, I'm content with this answer. Thank you!
That said, keep in mind there are hardly any SNES games with support chips. There's over 700 USA SNES games, only about 30 have support chips. They're not very expensive and most have little text making them ideal imports (Star Fox, Kirby games, etc). Nearly every Japanese RPG, including ones with fan translations, doesn't use a support chip. The two exceptions I can think of is Star Ocean (uses SDD-1) and Tales of Phantasia (oversized standard game, no support chip). Everything else from Square, Enix, Chunsoft, Quest, Sting and every other JRPG company is a standard SFC cart that doesn't exceed 32Mbit ROM which will work on the Super UFO Pro 8, which has a max ROM support of 32Mbit.
Oh yeah, one more thing. The Cx4 chip used in MegaMan X2 and X3 has literal anti-copy protection, you can't dump the ROM on those two cartridges. The anti-piracy on Nintendo and Rareware games just checks for a specific amount of SRAM in the cartridge. Old copiers often supplied a ton of SRAM which would trip the anti-piracy check. Super UFO Pro 8 restricts the SRAM to the correct amount for each game.
I understand that it wouldn't have native support for those chips, but are you saying that the piggybacking doesn't work with it either? It's worthless to me if so.
This is a pretty important thing to know because one of the games I want to get my hands on is Star Ocean. I know that it has a stubborn support chip because I was a very small part of the team of people sending in ZSNES logs of the graphics that DeJap was using to decompress through an actual chip because emulating it was a royal pain in the ass. I think the game still requires the decompressed graphics to emulate properly, all these years later. I could be wrong about that though because I haven't touched that in years.
In any case, I already have legit versions of NTSC USA Megaman X2 and X3. (I am still proud of getting my hands on them dirt cheap.) I have no interest in making copies/backups of my games beyond that which would be required for translating them through patches. Because a few of the games I want to patch do have chips, I really do want to have something that works for them.
If I'm right then you may be able to make boot carts out of sacrificial games by desoldering the games of making a pass-thru adapter that blocks certain pins
In this video the guy uses the Super UFO Pro 8 to play Mega Man X2 with Rockman X2. He gets Mega Man X3 to boot with Rockman X2 but the graphics are corrupted. I've been told that this is due to the Cx4 chip being revised between the games. He also demonstrates play-thru working with Rockman X3 but does not demonstrate it running Mega Man X3 with it, which is a shame because that is the most important one. If it works: Awesome! Seeing it work for X2 gives me high hopes that it will.
Obviously, it demonstrated that you can run a ROM and use the special chip pass-thru to play a game because it worked between Mega Man X2 ROM and Rockman X2 boot cart.
I think that video was made using X2 and X3 because (almost) no other support chip works. I am sitting here watching various carts and ROMs fail to work as I type this. I have tried the following configurations with my white Super UFO Pro 8:
[Cartridge -> ROM loaded in UFO = result]
Star Fox -> Star Fox = music plays after long delay, black screen
Star Fox -> Star Fox Super Weekend = Black screen
Vortex -> Star Fox = black screen
Vortex -> Star Fox Super Weekend = black screen
Stunt Race FX -> Stunt Race FX = nintendo logo + sound effect, then black screen
Hoshi no Kirby 3 -> Kirby's Dream Land 3 = black screen
Hoshi no Kirby 3 -> Kirby's Super Star = black screen
Super Mario Kart -> Super Mario Kart = works fine
Super Mario Kart -> Mario Kart R (hack) = works fine
And to confirm my Super UFO Pro 8 does work:
Rockman X2 -> MegaMan X2 = Works fine
Rockman X3 -> MegaMan X3 = Works fine
In short, the Super UFO Pro 8 is good for MegaMan X2 and X3 in English and Super Mario Kart hacks. It is incapable of Super FX and SA1. Going by the comments on that YT video, SDD1 for Star Ocean doesn't work either which isn't in any way surprising given how the SDD-1 is wired.
EDIT: I think I have an unresponsive Kirby Super Star cart if you guys want me to test that as well.
For the original Doctor V64 it seems that there was no way to pass-thru SRAM access while disabling the boot cart's ROM, which is why they made the Bung DS1. Though I had a DS1, the banks were too large and were switched electronically, so it is possible to detect for copy protection. To avoid patching games, I simply socketed the ROM on a WCW vs. nWo Revenge cart so that I could yank the ROM and pop it into an N64 copier as a 6102 SRAM boot cart with no need to run through a ROM blocking device like an Emulation Adapter, DX256, or Protected Cartridge Decoder. I'm interested to know if doing something similar with an FX game for the Super UFO Pro 8 could bear fruit. Does it have the extra pins on the sides of the main connector?
The only special chips I ever expected to work were the DSP series since that was all I remember the original copiers supporting, so it's still good news, actually. I do wonder if an FX cart with a disabled ROM chip can be used to boot another FX game.
Though I don't know exactly how the FX chip is interfaced, just looking at the pinout it looks like the FX sits in-between the SNES and the cartridge ROM. Since the FX<->ROM signals never leave the cartridge, then no, there's no way to get the FX to do anything without wiring a ROM up to it directly.
In the linked video's comments, it was pointed out that for Star Ocean, at least, an uncompressed rom would likely work, in which case I'd need a flash cart with support for very large ROMs.
Since piggybacking support chips seems futile for the most part, it seems the best options are either resigning oneself to playing the carts as is, or else getting a flash cart with a large memory.
I learned Kana on a SFC DBZ game, so maybe just playing some games untranslated might give me the motivation to learn some more vocabulary and Kanji. It's not totally out of the realm of possibility...
In any case, I absolutely have the information I need to make an informed decision now. I just don't know what choice to make yet, but I'm sure that it will work out eventually.
Well, this is nice to know. Thanks for that extra info.
In the linked video's comments, it was pointed out that for Star Ocean, at least, an uncompressed rom would likely work, in which case I'd need a flash cart with support for very large ROMs.
Since piggybacking support chips seems futile for the most part, it seems the best options are either resigning oneself to playing the carts as is, or else getting a flash cart with a large memory.
I learned Kana on a SFC DBZ game, so maybe just playing some games untranslated might give me the motivation to learn some more vocabulary and Kanji. It's not totally out of the realm of possibility...
In any case, I absolutely have the information I need to make an informed decision now. I just don't know what choice to make yet, but I'm sure that it will work out eventually.
SD2SNES does Star Ocean.
The only special chips I ever expected to work were the DSP series since that was all I remember the original copiers supporting, so it's still good news, actually. I do wonder if an FX cart with a disabled ROM chip can be used to boot another FX game.
Though I don't know exactly how the FX chip is interfaced, just looking at the pinout it looks like the FX sits in-between the SNES and the cartridge ROM. Since the FX<->ROM signals never leave the cartridge, then no, there's no way to get the FX to do anything without wiring a ROM up to it directly.
Thanks for checking on that. ArcadeMaster makes multi cart PCBs that use salvaged FX and Cx4 chips and I do wonder if he'd consider making his own flash cart some day. It'd be even cooler if someone added FX support to SD2SNES or ported the whole project to a more powerful FPGA for some more special chip action.
Originally posted by: CZroe
Does it have the extra pins on the sides of the main connector?
Yes it does, but most games that use the extra 16 pins barely use any of it. SA1, SuperFX and Cx4 boards only use the 21.477MHz clock pin, which is sometimes replaced by an on-board crystal. Star Ocean doesn't use any of the extra 16 slot pins whatsoever.
If you don't believe me, check board scans yourself here. http://snescentral.com/system.php
The only SNES cartridge I've found that makes real use of the extra 16 pins is the Super Game Boy.
Originally posted by: CZroe
SD2SNES does Star Ocean.
And Tales of Phantasia, which doesn't use a support chip, it's just an oversized standard game.
The SNES can address more ROM than Nintendo's maximum of 32Mbit, but above 32Mbit is reserved for add-ons like the SNES CD. The Genesis is the same story, only difference is the Sega CD and 32X did get released.