Goodsnes vs NSRT

[PHoNyMiKe]

a copier implies a backup unit, which is capable of copying games to floppy disks and playback without the use of a computer.

at the time goodsnes came out, all the rom websites had the same crap bad dumps and filenames like mario.fig and 16473.078. goodsnes would identify that you have a bad dump, or whatever the rom was, and label it as such. you dipshits overlook all the time and effort it took to identify and name these files. if it weren't for that brainless fudgepacker there'd be no NSRT and you'd be asking what the difference between mario.fig and MARIo_allstars.swc is. morons like you guys are the reason people quit contributing things like this, because he created the whole snes rom naming system, and is now bashed because lame rom kiddiez can't use the command line to filter [!].

[Matthias_H]

What is the difference between a copier and a programmer?[...]

Well, I use my programmer strictly to copy games. but it's still a programmer because it still has that capability. A tape recorder is still a tape recorder even if you never so much as touch the record button.

So would my copier become a programmer if I bought a flash cart (obviously, mask ROMs cannot be programmed) and added 3 lines in the firmware?

[Gil_Hamilton]

What is the difference between a copier and a programmer?[...]

Well, I use my programmer strictly to copy games. but it's still a programmer because it still has that capability. A tape recorder is still a tape recorder even if you never so much as touch the record button.

So would my copier become a programmer if I bought a flash cart (obviously, mask ROMs cannot be programmed) and added 3 lines in the firmware?

Just adding the firmware lines would be enough in my book.

[badinsults]

a copier implies a backup unit, which is capable of copying games to floppy disks and playback without the use of a computer.

at the time goodsnes came out, all the rom websites had the same crap bad dumps and filenames like mario.fig and 16473.078. goodsnes would identify that you have a bad dump, or whatever the rom was, and label it as such. you dipshits overlook all the time and effort it took to identify and name these files. if it weren't for that brainless fudgepacker there'd be no NSRT and you'd be asking what the difference between mario.fig and MARIo_allstars.swc is. morons like you guys are the reason people quit contributing things like this, because he created the whole snes rom naming system, and is now bashed because lame rom kiddiez can't use the command line to filter [!].

Phonymike brings up a great point here. Cowering has done a lot for the scene, and you cannot fault him for the people who misuse his auditing tools. Cowering himself bought thousands of games in an attempt to verify rom dumps.

[grinvader]

if it weren't for that brainless fudgepacker there'd be no NSRT

Not really. Nach implemented pretty much all his heuristics methods himself



10 years ago





in BASIC

[byuu]

Phonymike brings up a great point here. Cowering has done a lot for the scene, and you cannot fault him for the people who misuse his auditing tools. Cowering himself bought thousands of games in an attempt to verify rom dumps.

It's more his attitude. He's been extremely condescending to anyone who's asked him to remove their translations from his list. Yes, no honor amongst thieves.

Of course the legitimate verifications are to be commended, as is the general usefulness of the tool. But his methodology still sucks. There is no legitimate interest in archiving all 287 variants of the Super Mario World ROM with various hacked headers. Just refuse to recognize the game as valid, spit out the internal header name and append (unrecognized).sfc to it, and leave it at that.

Many people think Starfox 2 is broken in bsnes (it's not) because the version he chose to archive has an invalid header that says the game has no SRAM.

His intentions may have been good, but the road to hell and all. The fact is, his choices have made an absolute mess of things. Had NSRT become the de-facto standard, we'd be a lot better off.

[grinvader]

Had NSRT become the de-facto standard, we'd be a lot better off.

Nach also got a lot of flak from senior members of the scene back then, remember.

[byuu]

Nach also got a lot of flak from senior members of the scene back then, remember.

Many ROM hackers back then were total dicks, myself included. I think it had more to do with everyone being 14. Even worse than the ROM hackers were the ones who couldn't actually hack anything, but loved to bitch about anyone who could. Even on lithium those kids could make the little skirmishes around here (speed v accuracy et al) look like child's play.

It is quite hypocritical to complain that Cowering should remove fan translations, whereas removing commercial titles would ruin the utility. If anything, the commercial titles have more privilege to ask that they be removed.

Already covered the damage his actions cause in the above post.

[badinsults]

Regardless of your opinion, it is a moot point anyways, as Cowering hasn't really been part of the scene for several years.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Honestly, I have more of a problem with GoodNES than GoodSNES.

For all the hacks, wrong names, and bad info(NINTENDO POWER NEVER GAVE AWAY GAMES!) in GoodSNES... you've got a good chance of getting a working file out of it if you pay attention to the [] codes.

Aside from the massive pile of overdumps in the database, GoodNES didn't pay attention to NES headers, and most emulators were heavily dependent on that information being "right."
Adding header data to the checksum would've made life SO much easier.
Pity NESToy never got a complete database, as it DID have header information.

[PHoNyMiKe]

if it weren't for that brainless fudgepacker there'd be no NSRT

Not really. Nach implemented pretty much all his heuristics methods himself... 10 years ago... in BASIC

I've just never seen nach give credit to where his snes database came from. he must have made it himself 100% from scratch because I've never seen any mention of "thanks cowering for all your hard work in gathering thousands of roms and all that file information". maybe nsrt uses different heuristics to identify the same information, but nach would have never collected a fraction of the information that cowering did. sure some of the names were adjusted a little bit, but really it all came from goodsnes.

[Matthias_H]

Uhm... so how exactly does all this relate to the topic of the thread?

[grinvader]

Uhm... so how exactly does all this relate to the topic of the thread?

That's how things go around here. Nothing serious, is it ?

[Nach]

if it weren't for that brainless fudgepacker there'd be no NSRT

Not really. Nach implemented pretty much all his heuristics methods himself... 10 years ago... in BASIC

I've just never seen nach give credit to where his snes database came from.

It's listed in the credits of NSRT.

ipher, MK, CL, Gengar_1, and myself worked on it. It was further corrected by Gideon Zhi, FitzRoy, and NGEfreak.

because I've never seen any mention of "thanks cowering for all your hard work in gathering thousands of roms and all that file information".

Because he didn't have anything to do with it.

but nach would have never collected a fraction of the information that cowering did. sure some of the names were adjusted a little bit, but really it all came from goodsnes.

Untrue.

Gengar_1 and CL stayed up hours for every night for about two weeks straight looking through each ROM they had naming them.

A ton of work was done using heuristics to weed out hacks from real dumps, as well as getting NSRT output lists from various people who dump ROMs.

In cases where we found two dumps for a ROM online, but was unsure of what the actual differences were between them, and could not determine one to be a hack, then we adopted the standard we saw in filenames from the net in putting the checksum in the filename, which probably originated in GoodSNES, but we never took anything from it.

[PHoNyMiKe]

because I've never seen any mention of "thanks cowering for all your hard work in gathering thousands of roms and all that file information".

Because he didn't have anything to do with it.

maybe he had nothing to do with the programming of nsrt, but you guys wouldn't have a folder full of thousands of snes roms without him.

but nach would have never collected a fraction of the information that cowering did. sure some of the names were adjusted a little bit, but really it all came from goodsnes.

Untrue.

Gengar_1 and CL stayed up hours for every night for about two weeks straight looking through each ROM they had naming them.

so you're saying Gengar_1 and CL dumped all these roms by hand? where'd you guys get these roms? you're trying to say that the vast majority of these roms downloaded weren't already identified and renamed by goodsnes? come on now.

A ton of work was done using heuristics to weed out hacks from real dumps, as well as getting NSRT output lists from various people who dump ROMs.

heuristics like good checksum/bad checksum? why go through all this trouble when good dumps have already been found and cataloged by cowering? because you don't want to admit you're a thief.

I hate to keep bringing this topic up but come on man, you and whoever did do a fair bit of work, but it was all thanklessly built on cowering's work, plus countless others involved in gathering the rom information. the whole point is the filenames and checksum, and your project indirectly stole that from goodsnes. pretty simple, program comes out that takes years to assemble that names thousands of rom files. another program comes out after that does the same exact thing. why keep acting you you reinvented the wheel? you guys didn't gather thousands of roms completely independent of goodsnes from hundreds of websites. you just polished it in your own way and slapped your name on it.

p.s. if nsrt has super mario allstars + world european cataloged, I bought that of ebay (along with others) and dumped it for cowering, not nsrt, so please don't say he has nothing to do with it.

[Nach]

because I've never seen any mention of "thanks cowering for all your hard work in gathering thousands of roms and all that file information".

Because he didn't have anything to do with it.

maybe he had nothing to do with the programming of nsrt, but you guys wouldn't have a folder full of thousands of snes roms without him.

A friend of mine downloaded over a thousand SNES ROM images well before GoodSNES even existed. ROM sites were a dime a dozen, despite not having a standard.

In fact I would have to thank my Aunt who worked at a place developing internet infrastructure at the time, and had CD burners back when they were only 1x, required SCSI, and costed thousands of dollars, and didn't mind me coming over with a friend or two and downloading like crazy, and burning stuff.

I'd also have to thank the creators of the original GetRight for making possible downloading thousands of files over unstable servers of the time.

And lastly, Web Crawler and Excite, for having search engines which could find stuff back in the dark ages (but not Yahoo which only added sites by hand, and didn't actually spider the web for illegal software).

but nach would have never collected a fraction of the information that cowering did. sure some of the names were adjusted a little bit, but really it all came from goodsnes.

Untrue.

Gengar_1 and CL stayed up hours for every night for about two weeks straight looking through each ROM they had naming them.

so you're saying Gengar_1 and CL dumped all these roms by hand? where'd you guys get these roms? you're trying to say that the vast majority of these roms downloaded weren't already identified and renamed by goodsnes? come on now.

Even if some were already named, the name was ignored, and double checked against the title screen, and in case of a game which was recognized by the actual reviewer, against official list names too.

Granted at first, many were done incorrectly, but much of that was sorted out by the terrific work of FitzRoy and NGEfreak.

I'm told that something like 1/5 of the ROM images hashed in NSRT 3.0, had different names than GoodSNES, not to mention ~50 dumps not even covered by GoodSNES at the time.

A ton of work was done using heuristics to weed out hacks from real dumps, as well as getting NSRT output lists from various people who dump ROMs.

heuristics like good checksum/bad checksum?

Much beyond that. Such as scanning ROM images for known code replacement strings to remove SRAM/Video Standard/Protection checks, or comparing ROM images from Europe against their siblings to see if the image is nothing more than a header hack.

why go through all this trouble when good dumps have already been found and cataloged by cowering?

Because they weren't.

At the time his tool did nothing more than check the SNES checksum which can easily be replicated in a hacked dump, and many many were. Practically every single dump on the net at the time (if not all) of Metal Combat or Tales of Phantasia were hacked, yet all reported as correct by GoodSNES. It's because several dumpers told me hacks of their dumps were passing identification as real dumps is the reason why I started including a database in NSRT in the first place. On top of all this, many hacks were being labled by Cowering with a [!] despite cartridges for a game never even existing.

I hate to keep bringing this topic up but come on man, you and whoever did do a fair bit of work, but it was all thanklessly built on cowering's work

You may think that for some reason, but it's not true.

plus countless others involved in gathering the rom information.

Whoever helped gather ROM image information for NSRT is in fact listed in the credits of NSRT.

the whole point is the filenames and checksum, and your project indirectly stole that from goodsnes.

No, and most certainly no.
In fact, later versions of GoodSNES switched their checksum calculations to closer match those in NSRT.

pretty simple, program comes out that takes years to assemble that names thousands of rom files. another program comes out after that does the same exact thing.

If it did the same exact thing, I doubt people would prefer one over another.

why keep acting you you reinvented the wheel?

I don't, I act as if I invented a brand new invention, which I did.

I don't keep acting as if the database I assembled was something, which in fact I view as a necessary evil, which for some reason you seem to harbor on, as being the only thing I did, which if was true isn't something really spectacular. More accurate perhaps, but not more than annoying data entry.

What I view as the major strengths of NSRT is proper hashing, better SNES information calculation and retrieval, and dealing with the interleave nightmare which GoodSNES and other utilities were doing absolutely nothing to combat, as they either identified ROM images by using SNES checksums which could not tell between an interleaved or non interleaved dump, or they used something stronger where order does matter, but then would view any dump which didn't match the interleave format of the database creator's hash as invalid. NSRT put a stop to both those issues.

Also, tons of dumps were overdumps. It's because I invented overdump detection and added that to NSRT that we have proper sized dumps today for many ROM images, as many were creating overdumps, and of course Cowering didn't have a clue and just labeled it all [!]. Virtually all SA-1 games on the net a decade ago were all either interleaved or overdumped, not to mention dozens of other popular games.

On top of all this, other large features of NSRT were identifying games with special controls, and sibling relations between dumps, which I feel were major features, which GoodSNES and other utilities don't do anything to address.

And in terms of renaming itself, myself and most of my friends actually played SNES games, and wouldn't dream of just renaming every ROM image file we had (most of which were in 8.3 names, as Windows 95 was hardly popular in 96 or even 97), and breaking every single SRAM file, save state, cheat code files, and anything else emulator generated. Which is why NSRT also allows you to rename all your emulator created ROM image related files to match whatever name your ROM image was being renamed to.

you guys didn't gather thousands of roms completely independent of goodsnes from hundreds of websites.

Yes we did. I'd say only one third were named by GoodSNES prior to when we started creating a serious database (NSRT didn't get a serious database till version 3), and it didn't really matter, as we double checked everything anyway.

you just polished it in your own way and slapped your name on it.

You can think that if you so desire, but you'd be wrong.

p.s. if nsrt has super mario allstars + world european cataloged, I bought that of ebay (along with others) and dumped it for cowering, not nsrt, so please don't say he has nothing to do with it.

If you're referring to the one with a hash of 0x303205D8, it was dumped by one of my dumpers. You may have done the same thing with Cowering, but that's irrelevant. Also, most likely your dump is an overdump, but that can easily be fixed with NSRT.

[BCprogger]

Hey, that reminds me- I keep forgetting about the credits for windows making note of the Mac... or perhaps, more precisely, the Xerox Alto.... Oh wait! It's not here!

It's almost as if...

they wrote it from scratch to do the same thing!

credit doesn't have to be given in such a case, especially since that means all FPS games in existence would have to include ID software in their credits. Oh, and I guess, since Wolfenstien was based on "Castle Wolfenstien" they'd have to thank that too.

Oh and let's not forget all the BIOS code all this was built on... better put that in the credits. And of course all BIOS screens should say something like "Even though Phoenix technologies successfully reverse engineered the IBM BIOS way back, since it does the same thing, apparently we have to give them credit for things they had no part in doing"

And of course- since all keyboards are based on Typewriters- they better put the credits on every single keyboard. "While not based directly on it and only imitating it's generic functionality, we'd like to thank Henry Mill for applying for something that seems to be a very abstract idea of a typewriter, which in turn eventually got the QWERTY layout, which we have blatantly 'stolen', - despite it being a well known standard at the time - and improved by adding both electronic circuits, a control chip, and various other innovations. Regardless of all that though we stole from Henry Mill. we should all be ashamed.


And dear GAWD! we're all using "Text" format to communicate here!

so in a way we're STEALING from whoever invented ANSI, and they stole from whoever create ASCII, despite it being a improvement over an established standard.... much like NSRT is to GoodSNES, but even saying that is to neglect that cowering actually had nothing to do with NSRT, except perhaps in a "in the shadows but not really directly affecting the development or implementation of the program but somehow being ranted about as not being featured in a line in the readme "COWERING IS RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL OF THIS. HE CHANNELED HIS POWER THROUGH ME TO CREATE IT. I WAS MERELY A VESSEL FOR HIS GREATNESS. PRAISE COWERING! PRAISE GOODSNES!"" sort of way.

[PHoNyMiKe]

wow, truly no honor amongst thieves. the rom information stored in NSRT was verified by myself before NSRT even existed, yet this dipshit says I have a bad dump. I bet 'his dumper' desoldered the rom chips from all the SA-1 carts out there and dumped them by hand with an EEPROM programmer. you win Nach, let it be known that because of you every snes cartridge ever made was dumped and cataloged by you and two guys in a matter of two weeks. no need to make up complete lies about the information in NSRT anymore, you did it all.

[byuu]

Ah, the most wonderful attribute of human beings: pride. Nach creates a tool that supersedes GoodSNES in every way, and instead of being happy for him, we have someone bitter because his name isn't in the credits.

[badinsults]

Well, as much as I would like this whine fest to continue, I'd rather have this topic ended.