ROM dumping; advice for a soon to be newbie

[Ray of Lightning]

Well, as the topic title states, I'm about to get my hands a little dirty with some ROM dumping because I, like many of you, have actually started to look for and buy these wonderful trainwrecks.

As such, I've sent off for a GB Transferer II from Taiwan to get myself started and it should be here in a couple of weeks or so. But till then, I have to ask, are there any tips any of you could give me? I'm not as up on all this Hex editing stuff and similar such things as you are, I'm something of a layman, you might've noticed. xD

[taizou]

I have exactly the same hardware and I've only managed to dump, like, 3 GBC games out of about 50 or so ):

 Sintax, Gowin, Vast Fame, Waixing, Sachen, Yong Yong and pretty much any other maker of unlicensed Game Boy games you can name all use protection (or weird cart hardware, the result is the same for me) to some degree or another and I have pretty much none of the technical expertise necessary need to defeat it. The few I've managed to fix have been the ones that had almost no protection, for whatever reason - for those it just took some knowledge of the Game Boy header format to get them working properly.

What I'd suggest as a starting point is to get a decent knowledge of ROM hacking, since you'll basically be using the same tools - romhacking.net is usually a good place to look for anything related to that. IIRC they also have quite a bit of Game Boy specific documentation which probably will come in handy.

but anyway, good luck! (You'll probably need it)

[Ray of Lightning]

taizou

Sep 10 2012, 02:51:51 PM

but anyway, good luck! (You'll probably need it)[/quote]Hooboy, do I believe you there.  

I admit, the moment I look at pages like the one on Programmer-Net, my mind automatically blanks out for the most part. I'll have to put some time aside so I can give it a proper look.

But yes, thanks for the lil snippets of advise, taizou! It won't be easy, I know. But, as I believe an old turn of phrase goes (and correct me if I'm wrong, it's been known to happen): "It's not about where we end up, it's the journey we made getting there."

Might not sound like much in regards to ROM dumping to most of you, but to me? It simply means I'm damn gunna keep trying when I have it in my power to do so!  :evil:

[Robyn]

Found some info that could be used for fixing roms : http://www.devrs.com/gb/files/faqs.html

It IS for developing games, but hey, it helps to know some of the stuff to convert MBCs (memory bank controllers).

[Ray of Lightning]

RobGBA

Sep 14 2012, 02:18:53 PM

Found some info that could be used for fixing roms : http://www.devrs.com/gb/files/faqs.html

It IS for developing games, but hey, it helps to know some of the stuff to convert MBCs (memory bank controllers). [/quote]Hey, this'll be a real help! Thanks for uncovering this, Robbo!

[Ray of Lightning]

EDIT: Apparently I counted my goose before it was cooked. My method below MAY get the program working, but apparently it still won't recognize the GB Transferer 2 due to...well...USB-to-Parallel Ports being too high tech for it. Alas.

Sorry about that, guys. x3
If it's of interest to anyone though, the method to get the program running is still below.
Good luck. xD

Spoiler: click to toggle

Just a little bump for those looking to get a GB Transferer 2, mine just arrived today.



Apologies for the blurriness (auto-resize is a tool of the Devil! =O ), but it can be made to work on Windows 7, despite previous beliefs.

• Grab the version of the program that supports Windows 2000/XP
  
• Set your compatibility settings to Windows 2000. XP settings don't do any good.
  
• Run it as an admin for good measure and...

Voila! You have, to my knowledge, a working GB Transferer 2! The only reason methinks I have an error message is due to me lacking a parallel port at this time. I shall fix this. x3

At any rate, I hope this helps somebody out there!