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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."
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.
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.
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.
It wasn't insured because the sender is a defrauder of the German welfare system and he isn't allowed to have such expensive items, be it games or gold bars. He had to lie about the package value in the post office and at Bundeszollverwaltung (German Federal Customs Service).
The German dude admitted to it, but byuu tried to hush him because it doesn't look good on his e-begging account on Patreon.
byuu is lying. It wasn't insured properly because the German sender is a welfare defrauder and he can't admit to the government that he owns so many expensive video games. He had to lie they are worth 1000 EUR because the welfare agency would raise a red flag if had more than 1000 EUR worth of video games.
When people caught byuu on this, he added this info to his Patreon page, but on the very end and worded in a way that tries to play on people's emotions by portraying the German defrauder as a poor guy who can't give up his childhood collection. Only an idiot would believe this German person got 400 SNES games as a kid, including the rarest ones.