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Lost Package Derails Project To Preserve Super Nintendo Games (eurogamer.net)
A developer's quest to preserve (and validate) every game ROM for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System has hit a glitch -- thanks to the U.S. postal service. Byuu, the creator of the Higan SNES emulator, had been expecting a package with 100 games from the PAL region (covering most of Europe, Africa, South America, and Oceania).
wertigon writes:
As it turns out, someone at the USPS thought it was a good idea to lose the package, thereby robbing the project of roughly $5000 and the sad hopes of ever seeing a full indexing, like the one done to the U.S set. Byuu writes... "I do still want to dump and scan the Japanese games I already purchased. But we will never have a complete PAL set.
Kotaku reports the games were worth up to £8,000, and though Byuu says the sender never requested reimbursement, it's going to happen "because I can't live with myself if it doesn't." He's asking for donations on Patreon, adding "If the package ultimately arrives, I will be refunding all donations."
In that Thursday update, Byuu writes that the post office had finally shipped him the label from the package "and nothing else, claiming the machine ate it." They've launched an investigation, reports Byuu, adding "It's still an incredibly long shot that they'll find anything, but we'll see. I really, really hope that they do."
shoulda split that up into different carriers at least
Stuff gets lost in the mail... or UPS or FedEx. It's rare, but nobody's perfect.
This is unfortunate, but nobody "saw fit" to "rob" anyone.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's up there with "the dog ate my homework".
Or did someone misprogram AIs so they thought "Bytes" were "bites"...
"She's furniture with a pulse"
The caliber of people working for the USPS is marginally one step above the DMV or TSA.
Whenever I have to go into the post office, the body language of the employees just *sucks* and I feel like I have interrupted their otherwise important lives by trying to mail a package.
How about purchasing an insurance next time you ship a package worth $5000 ?
The postal service is low-cost, best effort without guaranteed delivery. If you have a valuable shipment you need to pay more for a more reliable service.
It's really sad that this happened, but really, sending something irreplaceable, (and arguably culturally important), by POST for Christ's sake, strikes me as irresponsible. I know courier companies lose stuff too, but I highly doubt that the automation equivalent of "the dog ate my homework" would be offered as an explanation. And if the package had been lost by a courier company, I suspect there would a better chance of it being found sooner or later.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Would have been to ship the cartridge reader.
Oh well, somebody will just have to hunt through garage sales, flea markets and boots to get more copies.
He's doing more than just dumping the ROMs, he's been photographing the carts and scanning the manuals as well as part of his preservation project. He has a custom rig for dumping that knows more about some obscure hardware quirks of how it does addressing to properly map out the ROMs.
But maybe I should let byuu explain:
Missing the point. This is a preservation effort, not a piracy effort.
Nintendo makes a NES Classic Edition and a guy wants to preserve games for others to play. Hmmmm...inside job? The damage for cartridge games has already been done, but if you go online to actually find easy to download Nintendo ROMs of any kind right now, it's become very very difficult without going to shady websites.
guess the machine ate it = the bomb squad blow it up; lol.
>drain the swamp
don't worry, the US has a new commander in chief who said he would drain the swamp. He didn't say anything about not building a bigger one though.
It was shipped from Germany.
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A lot of the problems we have with the international postal system is down to customs and governments overall sucking at their job. They do nearly everything terribly inefficiently and this is just one great example of that. Fortunately the private carriers do get packages do their destinations reliably- I can attest to having sent thousands of expensive packages via the private carrier DHL without issue. What we should do is open the market up to competition and institute reputation systems similar to an old-style eBay rating system or something similar. Then we'd be able to determine for ourselves what products and services to purchase based on feedback from others. Monopolies like the copy"right" system need to go. They're not helping matters and depend on violence, theft, fraud, and coercion to enforce where there is no real victim. A copy of something does not deprive anybody of the original. No loss no victim. No violence no victim. No victim no crime.
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I'm not saying it happened here, but many people do not understand that you have to put things in appropriate packaging for the machines to process. It saddens me every work day to see what is thrown out of the machines without the packaging it came with. No address, no delivery. Only paper goes in envelopes for example. Not hard items. Not keys. Not pens. Not coins. Not makeup you want your friend to try. Not anything but paper. And that is because it has to go around hundreds of steel rollers, held between high speed belts for sorting. If you have a hard item, put it in a flat bubble-wrap protected envelope for protection and processing through the Automated Package Processing System machines, or, better, in a well-taped box with an address written on the box. And NOT a tiny box. Heck, if you have ANYTHING that is very important, put it in a flat or a box and make it bigger than the item by far. And let me say that only a very tiny percentage of the 156 Billion pieces of mail the USPS processes every year is damaged, destroyed or lost. And most all of that is due to improper packaging of items. Think before you send because people don't route mail anymore, multi million dollar machines do, and at high speed and accuracy.
E Proelio Veritas.
Who modded this down? Xenophobe
take your meds.
Oh that's funny you think the USPS will cut you a check when they lose an insured package?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This is what Registered Mail is for.
It gives end-to-end point-to-point traceability. At every moment between when the package is handed to the clerk and when it is handed to the recipient, it is either in someone's hands or in a locked storage container. Every time the package changes hands, the new holder has to sign for it.
The US Postal Service HATES it. They try HARD to talk you out of using it. It is a pain in the patootie for them, being forced to do their job properly.
If you ever want to see a postal clerk get a SICK look on his face, tell him "I need to trace a missing Registered Mail piece." He knows, in that instant, that one of his co-workers may be about to lose his nice cushy job, and quite possibly move into a Federal zero-star hotel, the kind with iron bars on the windows and doors.
I never understood why game collectors are so willing to ship ultra rare games around. It might be perfectly fine for cheaper stuff, but when you start shipping around games worth more than $300, you'd start to get worried. At some point it would be better to travel the distance and personally take possession of the item than risk losing it.
There's always a possibility they'll end up somewhere like govdeals.com where the USPS lists items.
https://www.govdeals.com/index...
The part of the Sega Genesis memory map allocated to the cartridge is a linear sequence of bytes from $000000 to $3FFFFF. The part of the Super NES memory map allocated to the cartridge is not. See my diagram of Super NES address space.
The 65816 divides its 16 MiB address space into 256 banks, each 64 KiB in size. In order to make certain addressing modes more efficient to use, the Super NES divides up cartridge ROM address space as follows:
The "HiROM" mapping (mode $21 or $31) is a linear sequence of bytes from $C00000 on up. Because of incomplete decoding of the address bus, the second half of each 64 KiB bank is usually mirrored into $808000-$80FFFF, $818000-$81FFFF, $828000-$82FFFF, ..., $BF8000-$BFFFFF. In addition, banks $80-$FD are mirrored into banks $00-$7D, so that the 65816 CPU can find the reset vectors at $00FFE0-$00FFFF (which is mirrored from $80FFE0-$80FFFF). Usually, battery save memory is at $306000-$307FFF, $316000-$317FFF, ..., $3F6000-$3F7FFF.
You might notice that everything in the above skips banks $7E and $7F. That's where the Super NES puts its 128 KiB of RAM, with the first 8 KiB mirrored into banks $00-$3F and $80-$BF. It also mirrors the memory-mapped I/O ports associated with the CPU's memory controller and the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) into banks $00-$3F and $80-$BF. They are made accessible through all these banks so that the same value of the Data Bank Register (DBR), analogous to the Data Segment (DS) register on 8086, can see RAM and ROM at the same time.
The "ExHiROM" mapping (mode $25 or $35) has two linear sequences of bytes: from $C00000 to $DFFFFF and then from $400000 to $5FFFFF, which get mirrored down into the second half of $80-$BF and $00-$1F respectively. Only the largest games, mostly exclusive to Japan such as Tales of Phantasia, use ExHiROM.
The "LoROM" mapping (mode $20 or $30), more common on early games, does not connect A15 out of the system to the ROM. This means it uses only the second half of each bank: $808000-$80FFFF, $818000-$81FFFF, $828000-$82FFFF, ..., $FF8000-$FFFFFF. Banks $C0 through $FF mirror the 32K of data in that bank into both halves of the bank, and banks $00-$6F are a mirror of banks $80-$EF. Usually, battery save memory is somewhere in $700000-$77FFFF.
Cartridges use either slow or fast mask ROM. Modes $20, $21, and $25 are "slow ROM", where the CPU slows down slightly in order to allow use of cheaper 200 ns ROM. Modes $30 and $31 are "fast ROM", which needs 120 ns ROM that was more expensive in the early 1990s. Mode $35 has fast ROM for the $C00000-$FFFFFF region but slow ROM for the $400000-$5FFFFF region.
Slight differences in address decoding in each cartridge lead to differences in which address ranges actually contain mirrored ROM (as opposed to open bus) and which address ranges contain battery-backed RAM. Furthermore, some coprocessors included in cartridges can change this mapping at runtime.
Ever heard of EpicMod by TrickyNinja? It's pretty nice.
They probably thought there was a Nazi SS V-2 Zyklon-B Hitler Messerschmitt thing in there.
Only a moron would send something irreplaceable via regular mail. Sorry. This is what UPS and FedEx are for. If it's purely domestic within the US, there are services available from the USPS that will do the same thing (priority mail with tracking). It also needs to be in a secure box - thick cardboard and taped up really well.
It's sad that these carts were lost. Consider it another expensive class at the school of hard knocks.
Do you have ESP?
What kind of machine do they have, a shredder?
Bookmarking this if I'm ever on trial for piracy.
Another black eye for the shitty USPS. If these government workers were doing their jobs, UPS, FedEx, and UHL would not even exist.
If you/re shipping 5K, insure it for at least 5K if not 10K. That allows you to replace it and deal with costs associated with that replacement. If this did anything other than delay the effort, its from sheer incompetence.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
When you send a package internationally, there are a lot more hands than just the USPS involved.
Shipper. Did they box and package it correctly? Did they understand how durable the package had to be?
Point of origin postal service. In many countries, these operations are corrupt or prone to theft or delays. If the actual value was declared, that is a huge invite.
Point of origin Customs service. Who knows what they may open or inspect or sample. Will they reseal it properly? Who knows.
Shipper. Boat, airline, whatever. They toss it in with all the other mail. Hope it was packed correctly.
Destination country Customs service. They will check it, may open it, inspect it, impose duties or fines, or confiscate it entirely. The item is not released back into the mail until Customs clears it. If they open the box, they are supposed to reseal it properly.
Destination country Postal Service Who knows.
Sig for hire.
That's where a lot of lost things end up.
....like all of my packages that I am missing. I'm now on the third package that was never delivered and last place each of them registered is the exact same postal sorting facility in Jersey City. They must have a huge pile of unhandled mail and packages at that place. One of the missing packages came from Staten Island and had to go only a few hours up the Hudson. Anyone who lives near that facility, can you do the world a favor, hop over the fence, and get our mail? Thanks!!
My brother and his wife lived in a Cleveland OH suburb in a blue collar neighborhood. In that neighborhood it was about 50-50 that a parcel post item would make our of the local post office. They could track those items to the post office but then they disappeared, the delivery guy never saw them. Boxes from Victoria Secrets had a near 100% disappearance rate. If you wanted to mail order you had to use Fed Ex or UPS
...then you're a fucking MORON not sending it fedex, and/or insured.
Dipshits.
-Styopa
It was registered. It was insured.
Thought this story sounded familiar, then I realized it was the same fucking thing I read a week ago elsewhere. Get your shit together, /.
While I'm sure he'll find plenty of mistakes. There's one kind I don't see mentioned anywhere in this thread.
How is he supposed to KNOW that the bits in the cartridge are correct?
Radiation and high-temperatures still effect ROM memory. Otherwise, why would we need rad-hardened ROM memory on satellites? And what is space? Just a more dangerous version of what we have on Earth--but Earth still has some radiation. Now add DECADES of sitting around absorbing background radiation, with periods of sitting thrown around on top of someone's table under hot sunlight.
There's a reason super-long-term storage is not as simple as burning a CD.
Now, yes, yes, the practical cure of things like boot loaders, ROM hacks, poor early dumps, and all that crap. Sure. I'm clearly NOT debating that. But tiny artifacts in sprites? Single bit changes in code? Maybe not so much...
I know i am going to get flack for this, but i don't like him.
When he was the zsnes sound dev, and higan was bsnes he purposefully sabotaged the zsnes alsa sound system by ignoring the dev documents and grabbing the audio hardware directly. When this was put up as a bug he refused to fix it by saying 'switch to oss'.
By that time oss had LONG since been deprecated because the company backing it tried to sell foss's devs hard work on the system as their own as a commercial *nix sound system.
So i consider this karma, he fucked with people's enjoyment of snes games because he had a software political belief. Some overworked and underpaid united states postal service worker nicks his package of thousands of dollars worth of snes games and claims the machine ate it.
Every once in a while, the post office delivers a letter that was sent home by a soldier in WWII in Europe to his folks in some place like Illinois - only 70 years late.
Sometimes stuff gets lost in the cracks next to a sorting bin or conveyor belt, or they discover some mail delivery person got lazy and just dumped bags of mail in his basement (or in the nearby woods, etc) for a few years rather than doing something really hard like earning his pay delivering the mail. When the lost stuff is found, it gets delivered. Let's face it: the matter composing this shipment did not go "poof!" and disappear through some interdimensional wormhole - it still exists SOMEWHERE if it was not incinerated in a firey mail plane/truck crash. Hopefully it shows up before the ROMS get so old they start to bit rot, and before the guy running the project moves to some new address without leaving a forwarding address at his current location.
yes its a preservation effort that makes it 10000% easier to make perfect fakes
Much like any modern preservation of media. Games, television shows, books... Hell, even a modern preservation of ancient cave drawings would include super high res scans and such. Of course, this project is only dumping hashes of the actual game data, but that allows any archival copy to be properly verified as good. Which'll come in handy next time Nintendo wants to put "pirate" versions of ROMs onto the Virtual Console. Kinda embarrassing for them to be so anti-emulation (at least of the unauthorised kind) and then to be found to be using ROMs from the very "pirate" sites they supposedly despise.
The package being "found" is a lot more likely to happen now that some Postal worker realizes his theft has been made very very public, and that investigations are going to come his way and shine the light on what really happened if the games aren't returned. Or her.... Probably him.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Even Nintendo Doesn't have perfect rom dumps. They have republished roms "Illegally" dumped, downloaded from the internet that have identical errors from faulty dumping.
Yeah right, it was "lost". More like a postal worker stole it. Every time I've had a package lost it was something that you could tell that was of value without opening it, and of course it never made it. But the snail-mail spam? Makes it ever time.
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