So, I've begun to dumping my GBA games, but have been running into problems. So far, every single cartridge has been auto-detected as 8MB despite half of them actually being 4MB or 16MB. As you can imagine, having to check the correct size for every second game and re-dumping it is somewhat annoying. Is there anything that I can do to improve this behavior?
Forgot to mention: using a Retrode 2 with official plugin on Windows 7 with the latest firmware and voltage set to 3.3. At first I thought this was related to me hotswapping, but that's not it. It wrongly detects all my GBA stuff as 8MB even if I disconnect and reconnect the Retrode.
Edit: Just found this post: http://forum.retrode.org/index.php/topic,132.msg1085.html#msg1085
Looks like this a known bug and fixed in latest "private" alpha. Will give it a try then!
The update fixed this, partially. Anything up to 8MB seems to be fine now. Anything beyond though still gets detected as 8MB. Except Mario vs. Donkey Kong which gets detected as 2MB(!), and Mario Golf which was the only game above 8MB so far actually recognized correctly as 16MB.
Okay, an update as to my latest results. The following 16MB games were not detected as 16MB. All of them are detected as 8MB, except Mario vs. Donkey Kong which gets detected as 2MB. The only 16MB game so far rightly detected as 16MB was Mario Golf:
DK: King of Swing
Ice Age 2
Kingdom Hearts (actually, this one should be 32MB)
Mario vs. Donkey Kong
Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest
But there's a new problem as well, the following games are detected smaller than they should, 2MB instead of 4MB. I verified that the 2MB dumps are underdumps by trying them out in an Emulator (higan), none of them work. They all work when forced to 4MB.
Board Game Classics
Inspector Gadget Racing
Is there any way at all this detection can be improved? The problem is, I'm trying to verify existing dumps. But when I have to force the size to the supposedly correct size of the existing dumps, I'm breaking this verification. After all I haven't verified anything, it could still be an overdump. Manually testing every possible under-/overdump isn't really feasible with hundreds of carts to dump :(
You can help me improve the detection by sending me dumps of the games at the correct size plus at least 1MB. Please mail to development at retrode.org. Needless to say, all dumps will be treated confidentially and deleted after investigating the matter.
Quote from: Matthias_H on 12/Apr/2013 09:08:56 PM
You can help me improve the detection by sending me dumps of the games at the correct size plus at least 1MB. Please mail to development at retrode.org. Needless to say, all dumps will be treated confidentially and deleted after investigating the matter.
Can do. So, for the 16MB ones you'd want a 17MB dump? And for the 4MB ones a 5MB one, yes?
Also, I was told by someone via PM that the minimum size of actual GBA ROM chips is 4MB, which, if true, would mean that anything detected as smaller than that should be automatically detected as 4MB instead.
The Retrode's autodetection routine currently has a minimum setting of 2MB. There are some GBA games as small as 1MB (e.g., NES Zelda), but it behaves like a 4MB ROM that contains four copies of the game. As I'm slowly getting an idea about ROM types and sizes that are out there, we may expect further improvements down the road.
2MB is not a good idea. The smallest officially used chip for GBA-games is 4MB and that Zelda-game uses size-detection for copy-protection. Trimming down the "4 times the same" data to 1MB will make the game unplayable. I'd seriously stick to 4MB upwards on the GBA system.