making a snes repro and need some help

[sprong]

im trying to make a copy of metroid super zero and im using super play action football as my donor which uses 64 kb of sram. im also splitting the rom among 4 m27c801 chips. i have used this method to successfully make other games such as the zelda hacks. the problem im running into is nintendos darn copyright protection. when i try to boot up the game the first time i got the anti piracy message. the second time i tried to use the pal rom since i read somewhere that the pal version didnt have the piracy check. when i booted it up i got a region lock screen, which i didnt really expect from a snes game. next i tried patching the pal rom back to ntsc and i got a warning screen that told me to turn off my console and remove any external unofficial hardware (probably assumed i was using game genie.) i dont understand how it keeps triggering anti piracy measures considering i am using the correct board and sram chip. i also tried cleaning the contacts which didnt work. the issue is definitely witch the rom itself. does anybody know how to patch the anti piracy check in super metroid? i see plenty of copies of this repro floating around in the wild so i know that it is possible but for some reason i cant seem to find a solution anywhere. ive wasted so much time just trying to get this thing to work someone please HAAALP!

 

[bootmonster]

You might need to patch the ROM with uCON64.

Even though the SRAM sizes match sometimes you still have to patch. Have you tried the untouched NTSC rom to see if that works okay?

Could it be that the super zero mission hack has a different SRAM size or needs to be patched?

 

[sprong]

You might need to patch the ROM with uCON64.

Even though the SRAM sizes match sometimes you still have to patch. Have you tried the untouched NTSC rom to see if that works okay?

Could it be that the super zero mission hack has a different SRAM size or needs to be patched?

i have not tried using the untouched ntsc rom. any time i try loading a game in ucon64 it always says that the game either has 8kb of sram or none at all for some reason which im positive isnt true for super metroid since i own an offical cart and can confirm that it should at least be 64kb. i dont actually know how to patch a game with ucon64, is that something that you could explain? all i know how to do is check the properties of a rom file.

 

[bootmonster]

http://ucon64.sourceforge.net/ucon64/readme.html

Believe you need to use -k command

 

[bootmonster]

i have not tried using the untouched ntsc rom. any time i try loading a game in ucon64 it always says that the game either has 8kb of sram or none at all for some reason which im positive isnt true for super metroid since i own an offical cart and can confirm that it should at least be 64kb. i dont actually know how to patch a game with ucon64, is that something that you could explain? all i know how to do is check the properties of a rom file.

Did you ever get this working?

 

[sprong]

Did you ever get this working?

im actually glad you asked. i did end up getting the game to run by putting it through ucon frontend. however there were two issues with playing the game. first that it could not save for some reason, and second the game would always spawn you back at samus' ship after death regardless of whether or not you hit a save room and then it would glitch up. basically the game would play fine until you died, so bizarre. i tried multiple versions of the game and even tried some different super metroid hacks and would get the SAME RESULT. all i know is that the issue definitely is not due to some mistake with the wiring or poor soldering. i know this because i actually went through the hassle of making a test board that fits all four chips plus the decoder, and it would work flawlessly with other games that i threw at it as long as it was not a super metroid rom. honeslty this ended up taking up so much of my time that i just had to give up or i would go insane. my guess is that for whatever reason "super play action football" is not a suitable donor for super metroid, even though it should be a perfect fit for it. if somebody were to offer a solution to this i would probably send them the game as a reward.