Partial Translations

Well, lately I've been getting a lot of emails from people having problems patching the Dragon Quest V rom, so I figured I'd write a quick help page to teach you all a quick lesson which you will probably find useful if you make a habbit of playing fan translations of SNES games.

If you would like to put these instructions on your own web page, go right ahead. I've made a point of making them generic, so basicly just copy/paste everything after this paragraph. You don't even have to give me credit! How's that for public domain. ;)

You may have wondered where SNES rom files come from... or you may have never cared.. but regardless, you're going to know now. SNES rom files are created by electronic devices called copiers which usually mount on top of the SNES. These copiers not only allow you to "dump" or read the rom data onto a floppy disk or your computer, but also allow you to play ROMs back from a floppy disk or your computer. However, when you dump a game, certain information is lost, such as the way the SNES hardware is suposed to read the ROM. To work around this, the makers of the copiers used two methods. One was to name the rom file names using a special password type system so that it could figure out this important detail by just looking at the name of the file. Others appended data to the beginning of the rom, storing the important data there. These copiers also stored the copied game information in different ways. Thus, the ROM files you see on the internet come in many forms. You really can't tell what format a rom is in just by looking at the extension of the filename. In otherwords, Super Magicom/Super Wildcard (.smc) files could really be a Profighter (.fig) file in disguise. Sometimes Profighter (.fig) files have a header (which they're not suposed to), and sometimes Super Magicom (.smc) files don't have a header (which they are). This makes the situation for you confusing. Very, very confusing. In general, SNES ROM Hackers seem to have decided that their patches will be for ROMs in the Super Magicom (.smc) format with a header. There are a few exceptions to that rule, but not very many at all, but reading the readme file that comes with the patch is always helpful for these types of details.

2. Figuring Out What You've Got

So how do you know the truth about a SNES rom? Well, in short if you're an elite romhacker, you use a hex editor and do some tricks. But everyone else can use a premade tool! Yay. Currently, the best tool I'm aware of is inSNESt, but it's far from perfect. However, it's better than Ucon which is prone to random divide by zero errors which cause your rom to disapear. ;)

Using inSNESt is rather easy. Grab a random SNES rom from your collection, which for most of you means "pick one of thousands," and drop it in the folder with inSNESt. Now open a dos prompt window and change to the directory inSNESt is in. I'm assuming you all know how to do that, which might be a big assumption, but a dos tutorial is a bit beyond the scope of this tutorial. In any case, type "insnest i rom.smc" where rom.smc is the name of the rom file you just put in the directory.

Uh oh. The rom isn't in Super Magicom format! That's probably why the patch isn't working! How do we fix it?!?! Well, we use insnest again, this time with a c instead of an i. So now, we type "insnest c rom.smc" where rom.smc is the name of the snes rom we're working with, in this case it happens to be dq5f.fig. We're then presented with a drop down menu where we will want to select "Super Magicom" as shown below. inSNESt will then create a new file in the format we specified with the name we typed in. In the picture below, that would be a Super Magicom format rom named DQ5s.smc in this case.

3. Wrapping It All Up

In any case, the main problem with inSNESt is that it seems to sometimes ignores the entire header question. Sometimes it adds them and deletes them fine, but other times it seems to do icky things. For times like that, you'll need the famous SNESTool. SNESTool isn't ideal either coincidentally since it doesn't tell you directly weither the rom you're working on had a header. However, if you try to delete the header from a rom that doesn't have one, it'll tell you that you're a moron and won't try and delete something that isn't there. The final step to getting our newly converted rom to patchability is to add a header. All you need to do is launch snes tool, select add header, and pick the rom from the list at the left. If the rom already had a header, it'll ask you if you want to delete the header. If you say no, it'll just return you to the menu. In cases like that you're done. If the rom doesn't have a header, you can feel free to answer the yes/no questions randomly as they only matter if you plan on playing the game on an SNES copier. Emulators honestly don't care what's in the header as they realize most of the time that information is unreliable and there are other ways of figuring it out. ;)

You should now be ready to patch.