Thanks a lot for the patched rom. I have tried to emulate the un-patched game based on the patched one and on the info posted by Brian Provinciano on his website years ago, but something is not working properly (so it might well be that the available dump is bad for real and not only protected :( )
it was worth the attempt though, so thank you again for reposting this :)[/quote]It's alright, man. :)
Yeah, Makon/Yong Yong had high standards for their protection, unless it's just all bad programming. >_<
- taizou
- Feb 25 2013, 12:37:42 PM
For what its worth, I dumped this game myself from a multicart and the result was identical to the existing unpatched ROM.. So either its a good dump or it just can't be dumped properly by existing hardware.[/quote]which one? the 2MB one or the 256KB one? because the latter seems to miss some data (e.g. Mario sprites)...
also neither file seems to match Brian's description of the protection as written in
http://web.archive.org/web/20090318140531/http://www.bripro.com/low/obscure/index.php?page=hko_sm3s (http://web.archive.org/web/20090318140531/http://www.bripro.com/low/obscure/index.php?page=hko_sm3s)
well, I will go back to this after some break
well mine is 1mb - I think the 2mb one is an overdump.
OK. small update, to report that probably the first 512kb of the image is all that is needed for the game (even if mirroring it twice up to 1mb is harmless)
the unpatched 2mb rom consists indeed of 4 copies of the first 512kb chunk (crc32 5e4266a7), while the patched 2mb rom consists of a first modified 512kb chunk (crc32 10b63778) followed by 3 copies of the not-modified 512kb chunk, meaning that the patch only modifies the first block and that the game never requires the other blocks to be modified (maybe it never access them at all)
not sure if this additional understanding can be really considered as a step towards emulation of the "mapper" used by Yong Yong for this game, but it explains at least why patching the 256kb file results in a broken file :)
Interesting find there. :D Their games that use the latest engine (Mewtwo Strikes Back) dump as 4 to 2mb, and they only use 512kb too. The Makon mapper is pretty confusing though, and usually differentiates through all their games. You'd probably have to change quite a lot, looking at the info Brain put up for it. :\
is there any source/doc describing what is known about Makon mapper(s)?
Well on the link you put up from The Low Level, it has some technical information about it. (Here, if you can't see it.) (http://web.archive.org/web/20090318140531/http://www.bripro.com/low/obscure/index.php?page=hko_sm3s#tech)
yup, I knew about that, but other Makon/Yong Yong games seems to behave differently (e.g. Rockman 8, or Digimon) and SM3 Special itself does not seem to fully behave according to those info (I still have to see a write to bit 5 of $5xxx)
that's why I hoped for some additional info :)
Aw. :( That's the problem. Even if one's on the same engine, it won't have identical behavior. D:
I've looked into same Digimon ones before, and TBH I didn't get much of an outcome. :\