Or the joys of being a total completest

I’m going to talk ROMs and romsets. Yeah dubious legality and all that, and boring stuff too, but I wanted to cover some the hassles I’ve had with my ROMs. I’m not going to talk about where you can get ROMs or anything like that. Apologies for the really long post, I went trough loads of hassle, forum posting and hair pulling with this, so I feel it needs covering in fair amount of detail.

First things first, I’m a completest. If I’m going to have some SNES games to play on my machine I want to have all the SNES games, and so on. I’m like this with a lot of things not just old games, just the way I am, anyhow…

So I started out downloading the what is known as the GoodSet for each of the consoles I wanted (SNES, Megadrive, NES, etc.) Now this it turned out was a really bad idea, I think the name GoodSet is ironic as they are far from good in my opinion. These sets contain every single possible game ever made for the console, this includes versions from every region, hacks, pirate copies, and things known as bad dumps (where the game cart has been incorrectly dumped to a ROM file on the PC). I’m a completest but this was just stupid. The SNES GoodSet for example has over 8000 ROM’s, 80% of them are duplicates of the same game. The set-up I wanted was 1 ROM per game, but the “best” ROM for that game, so if the game was released in Japan, USA and Europe, I’d take the USA ROM (As it’ll play at 60Hz but be in english). If a game was only released in a single region (e.g. Cannon Fodder only got a PAL release) then I’d take that one. Taking a GoodSet and getting what I wanted was really hard work. In the end I did a mixture of two things:

- Use NoIntro Sets

The NoIntro sets are far superior ROM sets, that that have all the rubbish like bad dumps and hacks removed, they still have multiple copies for each of the regions but they are miles cleaner than a GoodSet. By using a NoInto DAT file and a tool called RomCenter you can delete all the spurious and rubbish ROMS from your GoodSet. This method doesn’t get exactly what I wanted, but it’s close and with very little effort.

- Rename & Copy

Can’t think of a better term for it so I’ll brand this method “Rename & Copy”. This method gets exactly what I want (1 ROM per game, and the best one) but on the other hand it’s a lot of work.

1. Use one of the GoodTools utilities (where the GoodSet get’s it name from incidentally) run it against the full GoodSet with the “move dirs” option. This will organise the ROMs into sub-dirs based on type; Japan, Hack, BadDump, PD, etc. which means it’s easy to get rid of a lot of the rubbish. So you can concentrate on only the good stuff which for SNES will be the; Europe, USA, Japan & World directories only.
2. In each of the dirs; Japan, USA, etc. Go through and manually remove any duplicates, keeping only 1 ROM file per game, some judgment needs to be done here to select the best ROM file. Sometimes you select the ROM with the highest version number, picking v1.1 instead of v1.0, or some games will only have one good dump, this will be marked with a [!] in that case it’s taken in priority over any others. In the end you’ll try and get it down to 1 ROM file per game.
3. In each of the dirs; use a mass rename tool like Bulk Rename Utility. And remove all “extra chuff” from the file name, this includes country codes like (J), (U), etc. and version numbers (v1.0) and the [!] markers. In general it’s stuff in brackets at the end of the filename.
4. Nearly there… Now take all the files in each of the region sub-dirs and copy them all into a single directory but here’s the trick, do it in reverse order of the region priority you want, and when you copy you choose to overwrite any existing files (this is why we needed step 3 - so the file names were the same). The order I picked for SNES was; Europe first (lowest priority), then World, Japan, and finally USA.
5. Optional final step, run your tidied up romset through a DAT file with RomCenter, I’d suggest using one of the NoIntro DATs which will put all of the country codes back into the filenames (personal preference this)

Phew! As you can see that is a massive amount work, in the end I only did this for my SNES games, the rest I’ve settled for a NoIntro set and I’ll live with the few duplicates I’ll get.

Now I don’t have a better term for it but my currently little side project is building a “retro emulation machine”. This consists of a laptop running a load of emulators, plugged into the TV via VGA with joypad as the controller. So what does it consist of:

• Old laptop - 1.7Ghz with 2Gb of RAM, (semi-decent graphics card but it’s not gonna run Crysis) running Windows XP SP2
• GameEx - Main front end
• XBox 360 Wireless Receiver (so I can use my 360 pads with it)
• VGA cable into the telly and sound going out the headphone socket into the Amp

The key thing I’m trying to achieve is get it running so I never need to touch or use the keyboard - all control should be via the joypad; so in many ways it will resemble a console, except a console capable of playing any game, on any of the old 16-bit and 8-bit systems. The systems I want to emulate are most, if not all the main classic systems; SNES, Megadrive, NES, N64, Arcade (MAME), NeoGeo, etc. The software build is done, the machine is up and running I’ve configured it to automatically log on using autologon (from Sys Internals) and GameEx starts automatically. However since loading the machine with most of the emulators I’ve found it increasingly tricky to get everything set up exactly how I want it, especially when it comes to ROM sets and joypad configurations both of which have drained a lot of time.

I’ll cover some of the ups & downs of building this thing, in some more posts. When it’s complete I’ll post all the build details and software I used.

Well 2007 was a pretty amazing year for games, with the later 3rd of the year being mental with the amount of triple A games being released. It’s also the year in which I’ve been most picky about what I bought, which means for once I had a pretty good completion rate, so what games did I complete this year:

• Half Life 2 (Orange Box)
• Half Life 2: Episode 1 (Orange Box)
• Portal
• Okami
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker
• Tomb Raider: Anniversary
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
• Gears of War
• Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
• Guitar Hero II
• Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (200.6% )

There might be a couple of retro and GBA things I’ve missed but that’s the bulk of it. Actually for me I think that’s good going. I’ve broken the cycle of; see new game, buy new game. Inevitably leading to a pile of barely touched and/or half finished games. Generally buying games I intended to play all the way through is a bit of a novelty.