FinalFantasy6 (SFC)

[Pickle]

Looking for some ideas to get a good dump from a FF6 cart I have.

So at first the cart was not working at all and my retrode couldnt pull anything from it.
I read online windex could be used a good cleaner on the pins. This actually helped and improved things drastically and I was able to get something from the cart (I also got perfect dumps from my FF4 and FF5 carts)

But i ran md5sum on the FF6 sfc and im not getting a match and snes9x is saying the CRC is bad.  My FF4/5 did match and CRC's work fine.

So im not sure what else I can really do at this point. The FF6 sfc does actually run, but I dont know where the corruption is at and if it will effect running the sfc later.

I wouldnt expect to to but the battery should have no effect other than on the save data?

I also thought to do a binary compare on a known good dump and see how bad the corruption is. Although I would have to hope I get the same revision of the cart.

Any other ideas to getting a perfect dump?

[Matthias_H]

This might have to do with dumping speed. On my list for a firmware update in the not-so-far future, I have a "slow mode" that I expect produce more reliable dumps for some titles across all systems.

[Pickle]

Need a beta tester? ;-)

[Matthias_H]

Sure, always. I usually post pre-release versions on retrode.org and in here.

[MasterOfPuppets]

Did you compare the ROMs, not just the checksums? We discovered a "good" N64 ROM had one minor difference, making it not true to the cart. Maybe this is a similar case.

[Pickle]

I did make an attempt to compare my dump to something, but the diff tool hung on me. I didnt try since then.
Id be ok if the checksum passed in snes9x but it doesnt, otherwise I assume the same thing that I have an undocumented cart.

[Pickle]

So still suspecting the cartridge I replaced it with another, which came yesterday.

The new cartridge was read and had the same checksum as before. At first the md5 was wrong, but I checked the CRC and it passed this time. So I figured I had a good dump but maybe a different version rom.

So I went to get setup to apply the translation patches. I used a tool (nrt i think) to add headers to the rom. (FF4/5 patches would not apply correctly without the header). I noticed the tool had a scan option. I ran it on the new dump and it told me the rom might be overdumped. It also had an option to auto trim the rom. I ran this next and redid my md5 and bingo I had the correct number.

Next I applied the header to a copy of the rom and applied the patches and it runs great.

Aside from hoping to have good cartridges this has been a fun project. Between the retrode and the kazzo I now have all FF2-6 original roms with translation patches (FF1 I went with the US release, which the kazzo also dumped).