Snes Usa Romset - Complete Collection

[Shawana Kallhoff]

RecentlyI've been searching far and wide to collect, in digital form, the exact games that I owned as a child, or had temporarily, or rented/borrowed/played at somebody else's house, or never really got to play but stared at magazines screenshots of for hours upon hours and always dreamed of one day being able to get my hands on. Since I have no money or even the ability to buy things from auction sites and physically get them shipped here, there is no chance of me collecting the actual cartridges/floppies/discs/machines.

Frequently, there is only an NTSC version of a game available even though a PAL one was released, or there's only a v1.1 version available (not v1.0), or the other way around, or it's a "dirty" ROM which is not a clean representation of the physical cartridge, but contains "extra data" and potentially modifications.

Note that I'm not saying anything about the difficulties of actually running these, which is a whole different topic. I'm just trying to "prepare" for the day when I will find a way to properly run these games with some kind of future, unified emulator or hardware device which plays anything correctly. This question is solely concerned with the low quality of all existing "ROM sets" or collections of games.

I very much realize that this is a thankless and massive undertaking for an individual to sit and do for "ungrateful" people like me to complain about, and they of course can never make any money from it, since it's very illegal to make these available, which also puts them in serious danger of getting personally sued and having to pay money to Nintendo or others. I get it. I realize all of this, but still can't help but get annoyed that still, in 2020, there aren't 100% verified and vetted ROM archives with every single game for a specific console, with clean, unmodified ROMs/images, named consistently, not leaving out any version, and complete not just for NTSC region but also PAL, etc.

I've spent so much time now on this, and yet I'm sitting here with ROMs that don't seem to hash-match what appears to be verified hashes, and they aren't consistently named, and not all from the same source (since each set always misses various games), or, especially for arcade and PC games, it's highly doubtful that they are the "real" dumps and not some kind of modified or broken version.

If they are able to host all these archives on "Internet Archive", as they are, and have spent so much time compiling the collections, why not go the extra, final mile to actually make them complete and not include "dirty" (modified/incorrectly captured) ROMs?

Knowledge of every game might sound like a strange requirement, but new games are sometimes discovered that were thought to never have existed. Cooly Skunk is a PS1 platform game, but there was a precursor of the same name available through the Satellaview on the SNES as a limited demo. It was only this year that a BS-X unit was discovered that held the Cooly Skunk SNES image that could be dumped, but it was later found that the entire game was present, just not accessible. Prior to 2020, Cooly Skunk might as well have never existed.

You might also be interested in Byuu's project to make a perfect dump of every SNES game for the purposes of hashing, and the intense frustration and great amount of personal expense and effort involved for all the participants - A shipment of games worth thousands of dollars was shipped and then lost for months, and was only recovered after media exposure and constant queries.

There was a very unfortunate incident in late-2016 where a packagecontaining 100 PAL games valued at around $10,000 was lost in the maildue to damage during shipping. After several agonizing months ofwaiting and trying everything possible to escalate the case privately,I had no choice but to take the matter to the public.

It generated far more press than even I had anticipated, whichsuccessfully caught the eye of a manager at the USPS Consumer Affairsdepartment. His team helped locate the missing package in the AtlantaRecovery Center, where it was slated to be auctioned off asundeliverable mail in the near future.

Is there an easy way / a program to search any of my rom folders for missing roms for a specific system?

What I would like to found out, for example, is if e.g. my SNES collection is missing any officially released roms. I've tried using clrmamepro with the no-intro DAT file (no Intro is the set I use), but it tells me that I have "0" known games, which is obviously not true.

What I'm aiming at is a collection consisting of US releases --> European exclusives --> Japanese exclusives --> (random other regional exclusives). I also only want the latest revisions of any given rom. Since I did all the sorting manually, I'm sure I made some mistakes alog the way. That's why I'd like to check.

So if anyone knows of an easy to use way to do what I want, please telle me =).

Using an XML file you can use Dan's hyperspin tools to search a rom directory and it will match all the roms to the names in the xml file, then you can manually match whatever it couldn't scrape on it's own within the program. Then the program will export all the newly named roms to a new folder for you. Only downside is i think (not 100% sure) you need hyperspin installed to use Dan's hyperspin tools kuz they need to be in the hyperspin folder to open for some reason. Also it only uses xml files so if you cant find the full game list in xml format you wont be able to use this program

Thank you for this tipp, however, I really don't want to rename all of my roms, since I've already importet them into Launchbox and I have save files within retroarch which match the exact rom names. I think it would be great if a tool scanned for something like file size to identify roms, but I guess something like this doesn't exist.

This is the answer. However, be aware that Hyperspin lists are not "complete". They give you the complete US rom set plus European exclusives plus Japanese exclusives that have been translated or can be played without needing to know Japanese. It will only contain the same game twice if for example, there are significant differences between the US version and the European/Japanese version. This way you get a complete collection of the games that are playable with no duplicates. There are a few exceptions like the NEC PC-FX where the whole collection is Japanese or systems that did not not make it to the West. Hyperspin lists will also contain homebrews and unreleased games. I personally don't like that but they are easy to remove.

Unfortunately, Hyperspin lists are the best thing we have at the moment and given the amount of work people put into them over the years, i would say they are quite reliable. It would be nice if launchbox would implement a database that could be checked against.

not to go too off topic but... my ideal situation would be to have a built in checker similar to rocketlauncher where it lists what you have against a complete list. if only there was a reputable site that kept list for complete retail sets per system, but I dont think that will ever be a thing

Also I'm not demanding anything, the current way is fine for now

A great complete collection of SNES games. Even some hacks are included in this one. All regions are also included in this set. You'll have the North American, European and Japanese versions of all the games. Even games that were only released in one region. Also, some betas are included with certain games. This is great if your a SNES enthuaist.

This is a great dump.

A tip I have for sorting through the files for duplicates and such:

I do a search in the folder that I extracted the files to, and I search for "(U) [!]" without quotations. What this does is it only searches for games in your region, in this case the North America region, then it searches for only verified good files.

If you want european files only search (E) [!] and if you want japanese files search (j) [!].

Hope this helps.

I would love to be able to do this for myself, but consider myself not very technologically savvy. I have decided though I need it. Any help where I could get someone else to do this for me, or more assistance in getting this done myself?

Nope, unfortunately not. If softmodding it will need to be locked and not all HDDs will work. See here for a list of those that will (might!): -hq.com/html/modules.php?name=Xbox_HardDrives

Cheers, Ant

3a8082e126