I got the memory dump of Phantasy Star II when it's loaded on the Wii. From the looks of it, and I'm just assuming this, it loads both the Original plus the newly patched version in memory at the same time. I don't know how to extract the rom though, but it should be easy for people are who used to using Hex Editors. You can grab the dump here. I'll find a way to get more games as soon as I get them again. If you want to join me, load Dolphin-Emu in debugging mode (make a batch file so it can load the main executable with a -d flag), load your game, press Play, then open up the Memory tab on the left (it might be tucked away on the left, so drag it out so you can see it.), then finally click the Dump Memory button and Dolphin will crash. You can find the dumped RAM in User\Dump\ram.raw.
Erm, just found this. Code (Text): SEGA MEGA DRIVE (C)SEGA 1988.NOV PHANTASY STAR 2 BACKUP RAM PROGRAMMED BY NAKA YUJI Hey, at the very end of the ROM, it says: Code (Text): GREEN CROSS FIX. By the way, both copies of the ROM inside RAM seem to be identical (patched), made from version 02. EDIT: Uploaded here (with its internal name).
Note to those confused: He means "EUropean", not "Europe + US". The ROM inside is PAL. EDIT: And it looks like there's no dump of the PAL version on the internet? Could you please also extract the ROMs inside the WADs, so we can compare them with the known dumps? EDIT 2: Hey, in the case of PS4 there are two different ROMs indeed! EDIT 3: The internal name (for the unpatched one?) is PhantasyStar4_Europe.SGD, by the way.
Thanks a lot for the files. Are you getting these from torrents? Just found this inside the RAM dumps for both Phantasy Stars: Code (Text): DynaBrothers2Special.... AlienSoldier.... BareKnuckle3.... BareKnuckle3(eu).... BareKnuckle3(us).... EccoTheDolphin2(eu). GunstarHeroes... GunstarHeroes(us)... HybridFront. Pulseman.... Sonic2(eu) Code (Text): DHMD.... DHMU.... MLMD.... MW3J.... MW4J.... RSTJ.... RSTU.... ECOJ.... ECOU.... HAR2.... SN1J.... SN1U.... GAXE.... CLMS.... ABST.... CZMD.... CZMU.... CZME.... Sonic2.. roms.c..KSCC.
Hm, I'm not sure what to make of that. It's true that there have been references to other games in other Virtual Console files (Earthbound references I think). Not sure what the purpose is for having a list like that. Another thing I realized is that we can probably get those encrypted/different versions of SNES games I've heard about - like SMRPG. I don't know how to find the header for those though, but we can still dump the memory and take a peek.
Except Revenge of Shinobi isn't in the Ultimate Collection??? On-topic, has anyone noticed Golden Axe III appears to use a unique rom for the EU VC release? It doesn't match any of the existing GAIII roms. Interesting to know what got altered considering it was a Japan-only release (and the US VC release doesn't use the Sega Channel version, but rather the Jap rom).
Just bumping this topic to let people who were specifically interested in the patch files - but Sonic & Knuckles doesn't have anything. But the ROM is weird. I think they just added all of the games that could be locked on into one SGD file (sonic3/sonick/sonic2 all in one). You can grab all the files from the WAD here.
Intriguing indeed. Firing it up through Fusion just loads Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Although according to Wikipedia's S&K article, this VC release is supposed to be able to detect if you already purchased Sonic 1/2/3 and allow a "virtual lock-on" to those titles. But I don't know much more than that.
I checked out of curiosity if the upmem was recompiled to work on that location of the rom but that doesn't seem to be the case, so I guess the lock-on stuff is mostly handled by the emulator itself.
Can I redirect some of you folks to this thread for a moment? http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=18403 I want to get the ROM of Dyna Brothers 2 Special, please. D:
Sorry for the bump but I just remembered something. I remember someone saying that Super Mario RPG was a brand new ROM with noticeable differences. The game doesn't have a separate patch file to patch the rom, and the rom itself is compressed. I also recall that someone did get the decompressed ROM out but didn't want to release it. Now that I know of a way to get roms that are compressed from memory, maybe I can have a go at trying to obtain the rom of this version of the game and release it properly - if there's a need for it of course. It's been a long time since, and there are probably tools that can decompress the rom from the original file (I remember the roms being LZ77 compressed for some reason, probably incorrect). So if anyone has recollections about this, can anyone share them? Speaking along the lines of the Super Mario RPG VC release, there are probably other games that have differences (or the possibility of different versions) that have been released on VC. We know how far Sega can go with MD/MS/Arcade games, and I sorta have an idea of what Nintendo does for their N64 games (I don't think any of them use any new versions), so I'm thinking maybe any SNES titles that have differences. But let me know how far others have gone before I attempt at anything.
I know that some of the GBA and NDS resources are encrypted in LZ77, so you might actually be right... the devkit pro community might be able to lend a hand, I remember once seeing some documents about what the format was used for.
