NES ROM- the actual fucking arcade game

[nightwulf]

~sigh~ Thanks go to Gantry for getting me interested in the iNES file format. After reading up on the format, and looking again at the arcade ROM, a quick stiching of the two files and whipping up a header brings me to ...

rbibb_nes.zip

Ya. That's the actual arcade ROM, in an NES format. The ROM plays perfectly in Nester. In Nesticle, the colors are entirely wrong, and eventually the ROM crashes. Note that to play the game, you'll have to use an emulator which has a "coin" button. Nester does, and actually Nesticle does too, which makes me wonder why it doesn't emulate in Nesticle when it obviously supports VS Unisystem ROMs.

If I sound a little pissed, remember that I spent hours a few days ago converting the NES ROM to the arcade stats. Wish I would've thought of this before heh. Actually tho, the color of the play field looks identical to the NES field. When I ran the ROM in Mame, the field looked darker, which is why I darkened the field in my "rbi_arcade" ROM. I'm guessing that Mame uses an incorrect NES palette.

I'm still doing research to make this playable in Nesticle. Also, I'd like to find a way around the "coin" button. I've had a little experience with hacking Game Genie codes, so I'm thinking I could come up with a GG code to force the credit counter to 9. I'll be workin' on it ...

Nightwulf

[Gantry]

Well done!  Keep us updated...

Too busy at work to do any real hacking today, stupid job...

[nightwulf]

Heh be glad you have a job. /shrug

Anyway, I've been doing more testing. Here's the results in different emulators:

Nester- 100% playable

FCE Ultra- correct colors, playable with minor graphic glitches

Nesticle, famtasia, Nesten, RockNESX- palette errors, graphic glitches, crashes when playfield switches from "batter" view to "field" view.

fwNES- displays title screen with wrong colors, crashes immediately

Looks like Nester or FCEU are the only options for emulation.

Nightwulf

[Gantry]

Wonder why that is...  Is it the coin slot that is messing things up?  Or perhaps the arcade version uses a different MMU or something?  

[Gantry]

Tried it out on FCEU for Linux, but don't know how to enter a coin.  Watched the computer demo and the batting scenes look perfect.  Pretty bad glitches in the fielding scenes though, but certainly playable...

[nightwulf]

Nah it's not the coin slot; I know Nesticle supports VS Unisystem ROMs. I know it has a coin button too. My best guess is that the emulators have incomplete VS support.

Edit: Oh ya Gantry, the readme for the windoze FCEU says that "C" is the coin button.

Nightwulf

[Gantry]

That helped...  Here are a few Fceu Linux glitch pics:

[nightwulf]

Hm. I played through a complete game (well, played until I was 10 runs up on the computer hehe), and the ROM crashed just when the newspaper would've been displayed. Ehh, at least you can finish the game.

Nightwulf

[Gantry]

Was that on Nester?  Don't think the arcade version had a newspaper, just takes you back to the start screen IIRC