ROM Hack Want to play a game in a Chinese Multigame ROM, not working

[DeltaBladeX]

I recently was given one of those infamous Chinese made multigame bootleg carts that every collector must own, and while the games on it aren't anything special (Pokemon Emerald, Pokemon Ruby, Finding Nemo:The Continuing Adventures and 109 NES ROM hacks), the version of Emerald was a poorly translated version done by someone who didn't seem to understand at least one of the languages needed to translate from Japanese to English. Because of the mess they made, I was having quite a bit of fun doing a Nuzlocke run on the game. Until I suffered from a common flaw with Chinese bootleg carts, save loss. Not even the battery, it held the saves for other games, just not Emerald. I'm not even going to attempt playing more on the actual cart after losing 20 hours, and likely more if I continue with it. I decided to just dump the ROM instead and start over using VisualBoy Advance using save states to keep my progress safe. Unfortunately, while it can boot the initial game selector, it doesn't run anything else after making your choice.

What I want to know is if there would be a good way to get the data for the Emerald part of the ROM off the dump (likely difficult since I'm aware the GBA didn't have a filing system for their ROMs), or if there is an emulator that could likely boot a multigame ROM image.

I'd just look for an existing ROM file of just the translated Emerald, but I've had no luck finding it myself, just references to the Vietnam Crystal translation and random ROM sites with regular versions of Emerald.

 

[PolloDiablo]

so... let me see if i understand this correctly
you want to play on a poorly translated pokemon emerald rom just for the lolz?

 

[DeltaBladeX]

Yes. It helped me enjoy it after recently beating a Ruby Nuzlocke. Just seeing the mess they made was enough to keep me going. One Team Aqua member yelled at me about waxing his arse before attacking me.

 

[FAST6191]

There are various ways it could have been made- the main one I guess would have been similar to proper old school GBA flash carts and this is where it could get tricky.
The general idea behind those carts was you stuck a NOR chip (in your case probably a write once chip of some form but the idea stands) and the menu selector application sent a command the cart interpreted to mean "place the start of the rom space at this page and do a soft reboot (if you just launch the rom it is a soft boot but a hard one and you will see the startup logo again)"- remember the entire GBA rom is accessible in memory at all points in time. If I had to do an analogy kind of like when reading a book you might get a few pages in Roman numerals and then Arabic numbers for proper page numbers that you use from then on when referencing things.
I doubt it would have used proper bank switching or something like mappers (memory paging is one thing but it could have gone full hardware fun) but most things would be variations on the theme above (GBA roms have memory locations hard coded into them so swapping them out is not done by anybody really and especially not cheapo Chinese pirate carts).

This then leaves the main issue being how you get the data if it is above 256Mbit in size as you might have to wind in the select commands to your dumping program (if you like pokemon as much as the rest suggests you might have seen the hassle with some of the DS pokemon games and dumping saves- pretty much the same concept), if you do bother to go full on hacking mode to do this then please share your results as it would probably help dump the Shrek Video roms (the only known commercial roms known suspected to use such things and currently the only major undumped roms). I can not think of any hardware (or software) capable of doing it but it might be easier to let the cart select a rom and then dump it (read up on http://hackmii.com/2010/02/lawsuit-coming-in-3-2-1/ for the idea).

If it is under 256 Mbit I guess it is just a matter of doing a search for GBA rom headers (they might have been changed from the commercial rom but in general they should have been kept http://nocash.emubase.de/gbatek.htm#gbacartridges has some info but if in doubt look at a selection of normal roms as you will get the idea quickly that way.

 

[DeltaBladeX]

It was a 256Mb / 32MB ROM, and I can find parts of the same code when comparing it to a regular Pokemon Emerald ROM dump I made earlier today, but it seems the data in the multicart ROM starts earlier quite a bit earlier, so I wasn't sure what to do. Not really experienced with hex editors beyond changing some stuff with a guide for some old game saves.

 

[Thesolcity]

Pokemon Emerald's AP did that....You can't even get it to work/save on flashcarts unless it supports RTS.....however I want a picture of the member screaming about waxing his arse. That will be my holiday card!

 

[DeltaBladeX]

Its not a flash cart I'm trying to run it on, but an emulator. The emulator itself can't run past the game selector to pick anything.

 

[Deleted-236924]

Pokemon Emerald's AP did that....You can't even get it to work/save on flashcarts unless it supports RTS.....however I want a picture of the member screaming about waxing his arse. That will be my holiday card!

There's no Anti-piracy on Emerald.
And "Doesn't save unless it supports RTS": The original cart doesn't have RTS.
Unless you meant RTC? In that case, I was able to get Emerald to work on EZ-Flash IV.

 

[DeltaBladeX]

Sorry to bring back an old topic, but thanks to someone on another site, I now have a working version of the game. Tried to convert it into a patch in case anyone here was interested, but I was having no luck, with the program saying it was too big for IPS and just crashing when I tried to make it as another patch type. Anyone want to suggest software and a file type I should try?

 

[FAST6191]

Interesting- what actually needed to get done in the end and was it like I thought it might be (again depending upon how it is set up it might help dump a couple of "undumpable" GBA roms)? Assuming the other site does not have roms on it linking is quite OK.

Anyhow IPS is limited to 16 megabytes and moreover if it was a bunch of shifts then it would fare even worse meaning most rom hackers adopted other formats. Xdelta is the favoured method of most DS rom hackers these days- http://code.google.com/p/xdelta/downloads/list but GBA hackers sometimes use UPS as well http://www.romhacking.net/?page=utilities&category=&platform=&game=&author=&os=&level=&perpage=20&title=&desc=ups&utilsearch=Go
I do not know if you want to get further into it but http://gbatemp.net/topic/320568-gbatemp-thoughts-and-links-10feb2012/ has some more on patch making.

 

[DeltaBladeX]

The site is sadly unlinkable. It is about bootleg pirate games (games of such grand quality like FF7 NES, Sonic 3D Blast 6 and others), and they allow dumps of those carts so they can look through them, hack them, etc. Shame though, there is some interesting content on their wiki.

I think the user who did the work was just better able to figure out what data he needed to copy, I got confused when it wasn't where I expected.

I'll take a look at the links later today and see about posting a patch as well.

 

[DeltaBladeX]

Okay, made a UPS patch, and its almost as big as the damn game.

Anyway, hope people enjoy this.
http://www.mediafire.com/?9f87h1ier17grz5