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A lot of the pain comes from cleaning every single cartridge. Many old games look like this: http://i.imgur.com/sdRqyl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sdRqyl.jpg And y
by byuu 10y ago
A lot of the pain comes from cleaning every single cartridge. Many old games look like this:
http://i.imgur.com/sdRqyl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sdRqyl.jpg
And you need them to look like this:
http://i.imgur.com/GbxMxl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/GbxMxl.jpg
That takes about a half hour's work. Then you get to open the cart and clean the contacts, another five minutes. Then once it's connected to an SNES and powered on, you have to wait 5-10 minutes to dump it, and then move on to the next cart.
It's a full-time job for several months to do a complete PAL set. And that's not even counting scanning the boxes, manuals, cartridges and PCBs :/
It's a lot less effort for the donor to send me his games, and I send them back, and reimburse him on his shipping charges.
- Arelius 10y agoI don't know why you are getting so much crap. It seems entirely reasonable to me that mailing the games to you is a suitable way to solve this problem. And entirely reasonable to expect said packages to not get lost in transit.
- byuu 10y agoYeah. Truth be told, I've had around 400 mail shipments to complete my US set, and another 900 or so to complete my Japanese set. Even the last 100 games made it just fine. Never lost a package of any importance until now. I honestly didn't expect this package to go missing.
- mkarr 10y agoHave you ever written up or documented the technical aspects of your whole process to scan one of the cartridges you receive? That would be something that I would find interesting to read.
- byuu 10y agoNot really, no. Most of what I use are FreeBSD tools I wrote. So it's mostly just connect cart, turn on SNES, run commands on the terminal, log the resulting SHA256 and cart serial#s into a database, move ROM to archive, rinse repeat.
- rsync 10y ago"I have a one-of-a-kind setup in order to analyze and dump the entire memory maps of cartridges. All other methods to back up SNES cartridges cannot do this." Are there pictures of this setup that I can see ?
- byuu 10y agoI can do much better! :) Here's renderings, the full schematics and part numbers, gerber files, FPGA source code, and boot loader source code. https://github.com/defparam/21FX https://github.com/defparam/21FX
- Fej 10y agoHey byuu, just wanted to say that I appreciate everything you've done for preserving gaming history. higan is still the finest emulator I've ever seen, and it's an amazing feat that it can run SFC games cycle-accurately. On a side note, has anyone gone to the Jersey City facility? Is that even possible?
- byuu 10y agoThanks for the kind words. And afraid not. I am willing to drive there, but only if I know it's possible to get my package that way. It's a ten hour drive.
- Fej 10y agoI go to a university about ten minutes away. I highly doubt you'd want some random guy off HN to go looking for an extremely valuable package, but I figured I should offer.