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Chris Covell
@chriscovell.bsky.social
I'll be posting retro gaming, retrocomputing, and retro dev stuff. Canadian living in Japan www.chrismcovell.com/
79 followers30 following67 posts
CCchriscovell.bsky.social

OK, random game Saturday/Sunday...

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CCchriscovell.bsky.social

I don't know how many people this benefits, but I continue to work on a little program that extracts X-Terminator cheat codes from various SFC/SNES device ROMs, and matches them to a game name. Currently I found the code locations+pointers for the UFO 7.3, 8.1, 8.3j, 8.8c, UFOSD & X-T Param Cassette

UFO Devices
UFO Cheat Codes
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CCchriscovell.bsky.social

Very strangely, the Supercom Partner copier dumps SNES cartridges accurately if you choose the "CARD->SAVE CARD" option to write to disk directly, but it adds this 65816 code somewhere in some free (or not-so-free) bytes of the ROM if you go the "CARD->DOWNLOAD MEMORY" route. 🤔

hex dump
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CCchriscovell.bsky.social

I picked a "Supercom Partner" for pretty cheap with its box. It's your standard copier with some quirks. It has slow-motion, X-T code support (but none built-in?) and realtime savestates, which work, but not as well as the UFO in terms of glitching. (Now, does anyone have a "Special Partner" BIOS?)

Supercom Partner
Supercom Partner screen
Supercom Partner box
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CCchriscovell.bsky.social

Okay, since there were no programs that simply printed SNES internal header checksums into the console/text output, I programmed up my own. That's the first step done for matching UFO/X-Terminator codes up to their game names.

List of SNES checksums and game titles
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CCchriscovell.bsky.social

The Super UFO 8 copiers, both the 90s & 2010s vers, contain X-Terminator cheat codes stored in a similar data format to the SNES X-T itself. When a SNES game is loaded, the *inverse* checksum is compared to a list (so no game titles.) Each code uses only 4 bytes plus 1 byte for a generic description

Super UFO copiers
Some extracted UFO cheat codes
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CCchriscovell.bsky.social

Oh, so it's post a random game from your collection day? OK!

Jigoku Gokuraku Maru -- great game!
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CCchriscovell.bsky.social

Summer Projects 3/3: I also added a mini IEC (disk interface) breakout to my C64 DTV in a mini-keyboard, and played around with switching the hardware between NTSC/PAL timing via register writes. NTSC Demos like "Entropy" still crash, so I'm still missing something that DTVBOOT is doing correctly.

C64 DTV crammed into a keyboard
Happy Hacking KB
C64 DTV program
C64 DTV Demo
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CCchriscovell.bsky.social

Summer Projects 2/3: Another was cleaning up my Neo-Geo MVS whose battery had leaked. This resulted in Bit 3 of the music command to the Z80 always being 0. Perhaps the foam pads on the bottom of the PCB also become conductive with age? Fixed!

Neo Geo MVS board top
Neo Geo MVS board bottom
Neo Geo Zed Blade
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CCchriscovell.bsky.social

Summer Projects: part of my 3-week vacation was spent in hospital for an operation and then resting in bed at home. Still, I had some fun: music drivers in Konami SNES games, where are they in the ROM, how do they get loaded into the SPC, can I hack a sound test into any game? I didn't get very far.

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Chris Covell
@chriscovell.bsky.social
I'll be posting retro gaming, retrocomputing, and retro dev stuff. Canadian living in Japan www.chrismcovell.com/
79 followers30 following67 posts