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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."
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.
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:
Naive child, maybe where you live, people are honest. Where I live, there is one angry woman (demographic withheld) who is known to slice open packages and give you empty boxes. She literally remembers faces or has a list of names. I was banished from my post office as well as my neighbor for coming in and demanding an explanation. Things of all sorts for me, from adult lubricant my boyfriend ordered to jewelry was stolen. For my neighbor, valuables were also stolen. A Yelp review had nothing but similar reviews of snotty service and things being obviously stolen or "lost". Yet another friend literally had tire tracks from a postal truck on his package. The carrier apologized and said he could reject it but he had his suspicions on why it was that way and wasn't allowed to go any further than that. This friend got the OK to look at the treads on the truck, and sure enough, the pattern matched the impressions in the package. Carrier apologized that someone would have the nerve to do it but he was not allowed to point fingers.
This doesn't happen with FedEx or UPS. Something might be stolen off the front porch, but packages aren't sliced into routinely. Real companies have real tracking and cameras all over the place to keep fraudulent employees in check. Their investigations are actually investigations.
Won't help. I had the postal service "lose" a $50 package once. They won't deal with the recipient, they'll only talk with the sender. In my case they "delivered" it during a Hold Mail order and I never saw it. They didn't care. Apparently to get my money pack, the sender would have to file a police report!
When I had five packages ($200 in merchandise) stolen from the post office, two from inside and three from the post office box outside, I did the following:
https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/
The shippers verified my stolen package compliant, filed for insurance reimbursement, and sent out replacement packages. The supervisor who blew me and a dozen customers off when we complained got fired. Exterior cameras were installed to monitor the post office boxes located outside. Package handling inside the post office is no longer anonymous as initials are required for putting a package on the shelf for pick up or in the post office box.
I've also had them "lose" multiple credit cards and various other smaller packages over the years. They don't care. They don't have to. They're government.
Most people find it easier to play the victim game and complain about the government rather than take responsibility and take action..
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.
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.
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.
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.
You need to stop pissing other people off.
How do I square that with expecting people to do at least the minimum? Should I just lower my standards so far that I suck their fucking cocks just for showing up at work and giving me bitch face? These people are grade "A" fuckups. And here's the thing, I'm more than willing to help. When the weird-ass prior mail carrier chick's classic Willys broke down, I was the only guy to stop and see if she needed help. I am polite, I smile, I say please and thank you. I do all the same shit that most of these fuckups don't bother to do. I get along great with the one postal employee who actually does her job with grace if not a smile (personally I think smiling is part of a customer service job, but I realize that people have shit days and so I don't care much) but if I rub some of them the wrong way by having some basic standards then that's just going to fucking happen.
I piss people off just by virtue of existing. I'm a gigantic part-Mexican with liberal attitudes who drives a German car in a redneck backwater full of hicks in sticks. And I do not go around telling people how backwards their ideas are, no matter how dumb I think they are. That's not my job and they don't give a shit. I treat people with more respect than they show me, and if they're not satisfied with the level of treatment they're receiving, then they can give a little more or they can fuck right off.
I stop and pick up hitchers, I stop and ask people if they're doing OK and I'll go back and get my tools and come back for them if they need me to. But I also expect people to know how to drive and keep to their side of the road and in general do their fucking job. If that's too high an expectation for you, you know where the door is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.