so...er...this perfect set of US ROM dumps that byuu has...any chance of...er...borrowing them?
No, and it's not necessary.
The SHA256 sums that I have already released can be used to validate that your ROMs are correct. There is no known way to create SHA-1 collisions, let alone for the much more secure SHA-256.
If your SHA256 matches mine, there's a 100% chance right now that it's the bit-perfect original ROM.
When it comes to simple bit-corruptions, I just listed the corrupted bytes since it's only been a couple bytes so far. That has allowed people to fix their copies and update their databases, so they'll probably propagate in future ROM sets. But I'm not in any way involved with those guys, so I don't know.
You need to wait longer if you are going to have a fundraiser I think.
Oh, definitely!! I'm not going to ask for money until we're at least three months after shipping, so April at the very earliest. I don't want to receive money, and then receive the games later on.
Basically, everyone on r/emulation was saying I should use fundraising to help repay the guy for the lost games, and I said I'd strongly consider that. Although the fees those sites charge (8%!!) is outright criminal. Here I thought Paypal's 3% was too high.
No-Intro was started to get clean rips without any added junk, hence the name.
My biggest issue with No-Intro is that they're pragmatists. When they don't have a clean ROM, they just index an unclean one. Which is why they were distributing the two corrupted PAL games I mentioned earlier.
The problem with pragmatism is it removes motivation for someone to go and dump and verify the game, so it ends up not getting done.
The second biggest issue is that they don't require proof and public disclosure of who dumped what. It's optional now, but for the most part, it's private. So if a ROM ends up being bad, we don't know what else that person verified to go back and audit their work.
Same. I always run SNES9x to see if it says good checksum on my roms.
That proves absolutely nothing, sorry. Those checksums were good on both the corrupted ROMs I mentioned. On one of them, someone used a tool to 'correct' the checksum. On the other, the bits flipped in such a way that the checksum was still the same.
A checksum inside of your file serves absolutely no purpose. Anyone can replace it with any checksum they want. A real checksum needs to be much stronger than 16-bits like the SNES uses, too. SHA256 has 1766847064778384329583297500742918515827483896875618958121606201292619776 times as many possible results as SNES checkums do (they have 65536 possibilities.) And said checksums need to be stored externally to your files, so that the files can't be patched with new checksums.