32x prototype help

[badinsults]

Howdy folks. I got my hands on some random chips from Interplay games, and I believe that some of these chips are from a prototype of the 32x version of Blackthorne. Now, I know almost nothing about the makeup of 32x games (I'm a SNES guy), but it appears that the ROM is interleaved in a strange way. For instance, I found the following string in the ROM:

EAMG RV CSG 94?? 2 APEPORM-Bakonfrte3x

I don't think the chips are corrupt. I actually found a section that appears to have the game script, and comparing it with the script from the final version, it definitely looks like it is interleaved.

Is there anyone who knows about 32x stuff who might be able to give me an idea of what is going on with this?

[Genesis Knight]

You might try Assemblergames as well if you haven't already.

[badinsults]

Good idea, I will cross post there.

[TmEE]

You are missing every other byte, at least the string shows that.

[Chilly Willy]

You are missing every other byte, at least the string shows that.

Yeah - look at the string like this...

sEgA MeGa dRiVe

[Drakon]

The missing bytes should be found in the other rom. Here's some roms I found that were split in an interleaved pattern:



The top hex is them after they're recombined. The bottom two are the roms being split in an interleaved pattern as I found them.

Here's a comparison between the recombined data and a version of the same game that's not split in an interleaved pattern:



The program I used to re-interleave the files together:

http://www.mediafire.com/?21s4a2c45v61s6j

Where I got it from:

http://www.darkfader.net/toolbox/

[VGTM]

EAMG RV CSG 94?? 2 APEPORM-Bakonfrte3x

So in this prototype, the objective is to make a fort made of bacon?

[badinsults]

Alright, if this thing is interleaved like that, I don't know if there is much I can do with these prototype fragments. I would like to see these released. I don't know if Sega 16 does prototype releases, but I would prefer to give these to someone who can write up a short article to coincide with the release.

[Drakon]

Alright, if this thing is interleaved like that, I don't know if there is much I can do with these prototype fragments. I would like to see these released. I don't know if Sega 16 does prototype releases, but I would prefer to give these to someone who can write up a short article to coincide with the release.

I can interleave it back together if it's split the same way as my roms were.

[badinsults]

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough - the second part of the interleaved ROM is missing. It will not be possible to recover the data.

[Drakon]

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough - the second part of the interleaved ROM is missing. It will not be possible to recover the data.

Then you're missing half the rom data. A game won't run with only half the data. There's a lot of incomplete rom dumps floating around there. While romhacking I found out that the m5 bootleg dump floating around is missing some changed data from the third programming rom that was never dumped for some stupid reason. Luckily I found the missing data in a dump of another bootleg hack made by the same company. The m5 dump just uses the champion edition roms for all the roms it doesn't replace, which is great but the actual m5 pcb has some data that never got dumped so I had to romhack the missing changes back in.

Anyway the interleaved roms I worked with were actually two roms that had been appended together into one long file and then split in an interleaved pattern across two rom chips. Maybe the "missing data" is the second half of your rom?

If you truly are missing the data at best we can hope that you can combine this "prototype" data with the data from the final release and just cross our fingers and hope that it's even compatible? Mostly likely it won't work as prototypes will probably be compiled from different code resulting in completely different hex results.

[Patrick M]

I wish I knew what the hell is going on in this thread.

[Drakon]

I wish I knew what the hell is going on in this thread.

www.google.com

That's where I learned anyway.

[badinsults]

Since it doesn't appear that there are any Sega-centric websites that are dedicated to prototypes, I released the prototype on Assembler Games. Feel free to have a look at the binaries.

http://www.assemblergames.com/forums...ototype-chunks