Hi,
I've also been slowly scanning what I have in 600dpi TIFFs but downsizing them to 300dpi JPEG for sharing purposes. I'll gladly give access to these too, just PM me.
I'll be selling what I've acquired as it gets scanned as I'm not really into collecting it, I just want to preserve it. I know I won't be able to get my money back that I paid for the sealed copies but getting some back to purchae more will be helpful. Donations of games or money are also more than welcome but not required. I will gladly pay postage to get it to me, and then get it back to you.
Anyhow, just wanted to say hi and if anybody wants to help or check out my project just let me know.
Thanks,
- Hubz
Sounds like an interesting little project - I'm surprised someone would want to buy all these sealed games and lose money on them this way though - don't get me wrong it's noble of you but I don't think you'll find all games sealed and some will be really expensive to boot. I hope there are people out there that appreciate that.
How many have you done so far? Scanning the packaging interests me a lot, especially at 600dpi.
Yeah it will be a tough project, and I doubt I'll be able to find them all sealed but hopefully all the ones that actually write to the disk can be found. Surprisingly sealed games aren't terribly uncommon even on the rare stuff. Just pricey :) Luckily most if not all the Hacker games don't seem to write to disk. So finding them sealed isn't necessary.
I've done almost 50, but haven't had time to scan much as that's pretty time consuming. But slowly will get them done :)
If you have Hacker games that I don't have, I would gladly work out a deal with you for them.
You can calculate CRC and you don't really need GAP data, except prooven, that some games using it.
Yeah I'm not entirely convinced that there's any meaning to preserving the CRC at least (they would complicate assembly and hacking FDS games since they would be need to be recalculated every time you make changes), but I still like what you are doing.
Especially since you are dumping sealed disks so we can see what changes has been made to them when they have been written to by the game. You would need to dump the game directly after opening it without playing the disk first in order to be sure that it doesn't write to itself.
Scanning is also greatly appreciated.
There are disk writer only games though, which means a sealed version doesn't exists.
There may not be a real point emulation wise, but mainly just doing it for preservation. I have been dumping them directly after opening them luckily.
There have been some minor interesting differences on the few that have been looked at closely, like Great Hierophant did -
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12911&start=15
Does anybody know what games never write to the disk? I imagine SMB1, and the other early Famicom releases don't.
At the very least we will have nice scans to share with the internet world :)
The only way to know for sure is to search the FDS images for writing routines. I believe SMB doesn't write to it though (doesn't even save the high-score) but for example New Clu Clu Land writes to it to save the high-score I think.
Quote from: Great HierophantMetroid was a more interesting case.
...
Side A is SAVEDATA (and should have an ID of 15) and Side B is MENSAVE.
...
However, once a write to these files occurs, the filenames are turned into 02 02 02 02 02 02 02 02...
An excellent example of a game that changes the content of the disk forever after the first write to it. Good job on preserving this!
The only straight cart to disk game I found that genuinely does save something to disk I found was Wrecking Crew. Cart to disk ports are very easy when the cartridge has no memory mapping hardware. All you have to do is just find a place to put in a one-time loading routine and and shift your memory offsets.
Oh was that what I was doing wrong then when I couldn't get my FDS program to load? I was under the assumption that the BIOS loads all files with a certain ID at boot so you don't need a loading routine if you are just loading these files. I couldn't see that SMB2j did any loading routines at boot anyway.
Hey just a heads up, I've posted quite a few more scans for famicom and fds. Enjoy! Also the games I have scanned in are for sale if you're interested, including the Hacker games :) Or willing to trade for sealed FDS or complete FC games.
http://www.gamingalexandria.com/
Woah, those scans are plain awesome! Bookmarked your website right away. Thanks for your work!
Really, really good work! Thanks for sharing Hubz :)
Larrrrrge update :) Check it out
http://www.gamingalexandria.com