[Repro] Star Fox 2

[Pheen!x]

Hey guys and gals,

I was planning to do a reproduction of the unreleased Star Fox 2 for the SNES.
Hardware-wise, I think I have everything set and I found a company that would program a 27C801 EPROM chip for me.
For that I have to prepare the rom-file and send it off to them for writing, but here some questions remain for me.

The rom-file can be found here http://bit.ly/2d6S2DY. It worked fine when used on my computer in an emulator, it is English and as far as I can tell it is bug-free.
With this in mind I reckoned a patching of the rom is not necessary and as the size is exactly 1048576 bytes (1MByte/8MBit) a expanding/splitting will not be necessary either.
All I was planning to do is to fix the checksum and use the swapbin-function from "SFC/SNES ROM Utility" before putting it on the chip.

What do you think? Maybe somebody could look at the files and verify that my plan is reasonable?
Does somebody have a "better" ROM to work with or has one that he has good experience with?

Thank you in advance.
Best regards,

Pheen!x

[P]

Is there any reason you need to fix the checksum? Usually you don't want to fix the checksum on hacks.

[Pheen!x]

Don't know how far that counts as a hack, but some people say they always repair the checksum.
Albeit it being optional, so I could also not do it. Thank you for your answer.

Is there something else that I am missing?

[xIceMan]

There's rarely any games that do check for correct checksum: Earthbound for example.

All you need is a Stunt Race FX donor and 27c801 wired in properly. If the game starts in higan/snes9x it will work on the SNES, too.

P.S. Isn't hotlinking to ROMs illegal?

[P]

In this case it might be ok, he has to show people the ROM he is using somehow so they can tell him if it works. It's just that we don't want the forum to get a reputation for a place to download ROMs from.
It isn't interleaved or anything so I guess it should work with just the swapbin. But I have no experience in this area.

Don't know how far that counts as a hack, but some people say they always repair the checksum.
Albeit it being optional, so I could also not do it. Thank you for your answer.

It's a translation and fix to make it playable so it's definitely a hack. But yeah there seems to be two camps about fixing checksums. Some people are proud to not fix the checksum after they hacked a game so to show that it has been modified.

Earthbound has some nasty copy protection, but for most other Super Famicom games it's not needed. It's not like Game Boy and Famicom Disk System that has a BIOS that checks the checksum and refuse to boot if it's broken. So fixing the checksum is mostly for it to show up as "good checksum" in emulators and ROM tools I guess.

[Pheen!x]

Great, thank you guys and thanks for not editing out my link.
I will give it a try and report back if it works.

Best regards Pheen!x

[shoggoth80]

Good luck on the build. I've got a SF2, and it's really fun on real hardware. The maker sent me some pics of the board while working on it... that's no small task!

[jpx72]

Next time give me a call I can program you everything up to 32 legs

[jensma]

Good luck on the build. I've got a SF2, and it's really fun on real hardware. The maker sent me some pics of the board while working on it... that's no small task!

That really depends. There's the old and tedious way and the "new" drop-in way.