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Why do You need this thing...
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It's easy. Nowdays a lot of people are dumping roms for different consoles (especially GBA). Some of them are doing pretty good job releasing good, verified roms. Other not so experienced people are often
release bad or oversized roms. I don't want to hurt anyone with my words, because bugs happens, but...
According to ROMs classification made by Cowering, there are several types of ROMs. Among them we can find "bad" [b] and oversized (overdumps) "o" ROMs. Those roms are either contain bad or unneeded
data. Bad ROMs appear due to many different reasons, but overdumps are mostly born by incorrect dumping of the cart. Depending on the type of the console overdumps have different distinctive features
and can be separated by categories.
In fact overdump usually works as good as it's good verified version. But it's size is can be twice or more times bigger than the good ROM. For example, NES ROM overdump can hold several kilobytes or
even hundreds of kilobytes of useless data which is "ok" since all NES ROMs are small anyway, but when it comes to GBA ROMs they can hold about 2-4 Megs (!) of useless data. Multiply this by number of
Your ROMs and You can easily get the true amount of space of Your harddrive which is occupied by unneded, useless data.
So thinking above all of those things i got an idea: is there any way to cure such bad ROMs? In fact it is. And moreover it can be done in full automatic mode. So that's how my AntiOverdump utils were born.
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Let's go to Work!
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Nes Anti Overdump was born first since almost half of all available NES roms consists of bads and overdumps. Full scale testing of this utility on the GoodNes romset showed to me that almost 2000 of
roms are curable. Only 150 of them are not recognized by GoodNES utility after curing. Moreover almost all roms are still working after curing. Here You can find log files of curing process and a list
of cured roms, which were renamed or not by GoodNES.
After that by the Eevon's request i wrote similar utility for the GBA ROMs. It still didn't tested on the large number of roms, but minor tests showed pretty good results. Generally GBA overdumps are
similar to each other and can be cured easily.
Both programs are working in the console mode. First one works in DPMI DOS mode and second is Win9x console program.
If You are interested in these utilities, if You have any suggestions - You welcome. Here is my e-mail address: CaH4e3@mail.ru
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Project News
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Large Test results here.
17.12.02
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GBA Cleaner v0.95a now released. Whatsnew:
- +Saving Intros to File (optional)
- +Move cured file to CURED directory (optional)
- *Improved intro removal procedure
- *Fixed bug with removing intro from middle of file (disabled)
- *Fixed byte-filler detect procedure
19.11.02
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GBA Cleaner v0.9a now released. Features:
- Display ROM info (Name, Size, "Over" or/and "Intro" detected)
- Remove Intros (may be wrong - don't uncheck "Backup Files" option!)
- Cut extra data from Overdumps.
After curing program rescan directory and it may contain overdump again - just cure one more time.
04.11.02
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English translation by Eevon
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