Retrozone's PowerPak

[UglyJoe]

I have some unofficial mappers, but they only apply to playing NSFs, as far as I know:

http://nesdev.parodius.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?p=38920#38920

[nintendodork]

Okay, well I'm looking really just for mappers that he has planned or that he has labeled as buggy, because some of the best pirates can't be played without them!

[L___E___T]

It must be said that while the powerpak has great potential it's not very user friendly.

You'll need to fiddle with things here and there and there'll be some trial and error involved.  Having said that, it's nothing more than what's needed for running homebrew on a PSP I think.

People like 133Mhz will have no problem obviously, but I think for most peopl it'll take a little setup to get it right.  I still haven't got FDS games to work, I think I've placed the mapper (or w/e) in the wrong directory, and many of my pirates and a fair few licensed games get a 'bad header' message but it's worth it just for what I have so far and the NSF music, especially as I know what it's capable of.

I do wish it wasn't so frickin' ugly though!

[UglyJoe]

Okay, well I'm looking really just for mappers that he has planned or that he has labeled as buggy, because some of the best pirates can't be played without them!

I wouldn't get your hopes up for the pirate mappers.  Making these mappers takes a good amount of work, as far as I know, so the pirate mappers that only apply to one or two (terrible) games are going to be very low priority.

[L___E___T]

I guess they are a low prority for me, as they all run on my Wii and PSP, which I honestly think plays NES and Famicom games way nicer than the original hardware I'm afraid to say.

[satoshi_matrix]

Speaking of which, has anyone gotten ANY FDS games to work on the powerpak? Mine freezes each and every time, which is a total shame. Any help would be appreciated.

[UglyJoe]

FDS games work fine for me.  Make sure you get the fds bios from a rom site, apply the IPS patch that retrozone supplies, and make sure it's named FDSBIOS.BIN and place it in the POWERPAK directory.  Your FDS roms also need to be unzipped and need to have headers (but there's really no reason for them not to have headers).

[satoshi_matrix]

is there a way to ensure they have headers? I'm not sure if mine do or don't.

[133MHz]

Open the file in an hex editor and check that the first three bytes say FDS.

[UglyJoe]

You can also check the file size.  If it ends with 16, it's got a header.  If it ends with 00, it doesn't.

[nintendodork]

So this ROM of SMB2j has a header?

Fds: Disk 1 Side A: 50k in 8 files..
Fds: file: "KYODAKU-", id: 0, size: 224, index: 0, address: 0x2800, type: NMT
Fds: file: "SM2CHAR1", id: 1, size: 8192, index: 1, address: 0x0000, type: CHR
Fds: file: "SM2CHAR2", id: 16, size: 64, index: 2, address: 0x0760, type: CHR
Fds: file: "SM2MAIN", id: 5, size: 32768, index: 3, address: 0x6000, type: PRG
Fds: file: "SM2DATA2", id: 32, size: 3631, index: 4, address: 0xC470, type: PRG
Fds: file: "SM2DATA3", id: 48, size: 3279, index: 5, address: 0xC5D0, type: PRG
Fds: file: "SM2DATA4", id: 64, size: 3916, index: 6, address: 0xC2B4, type: PRG
Fds: file: "SM2SAVE", id: 15, size: 1, index: 7, address: 0xD29F, type: PRG

[UglyJoe]

You don't need to extract the files out of the FDS.  I meant the size of the FDS disk image.

A single side of an FDS disk can hold 65500 bytes.  So, the size of the FDS file will be a multiple of that (depending on the number of sides/disks the game uses) plus a 16 byte header.

[nintendodork]

It just says 50k in 8 files on the image info

[UglyJoe]

Whatever you're using to check the file size -- don't.  Just right-click the FDS file in explorer and choose properties.  It'll tell you the size.

[nintendodork]

Ok...

Size: 65,516 bytes

Size on Disk: 65,536 bytes

AWESOME