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Post by Allie on Jan 11, 2015 18:12:35 GMT -5
I get that with something like the NES, it was pretty simple, that anyone would have found the singular .nes preferable to the old PasoFami Split Cart Format, but what about the SNES?
There were a metric ton of formats for SNES dumps back in the day (.smc, .swc, .fig, and I think one or two others), based on what copier was used and such, but I was wondering, when did people finally decide to stop with all but .smc, and who was involved in that decision, and why?
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Post by ReyVGM on Jan 11, 2015 22:53:25 GMT -5
I believe SNES has been .sfc for a number of years now.
Usually ROM dumping groups were the ones that decided what extension to use. The best group right now is No-Intro, they have been redumping and reverifying every possible game.
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Post by Dee Liteyears on Jan 12, 2015 14:12:36 GMT -5
Hasn't it to do something with the dumping hardware? I know the extension .smc stands for Super MagiCom, which was one of those old rom dumpers
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Post by Weasel on Jan 12, 2015 16:05:04 GMT -5
Yes, a lot of the earlier file extensions were dictated by the copier devices that were used back in the day. The Super Magicom was the big popular one, but I believe SWC and FIG also came from other, similar devices. I know for Genesis games it's cycled from .BIN, to SMD, to BIN again, at some point GEN was the accepted extension, and now I'm seeing an awful lot of MD extensions (an entire No-Intro set of them actually). And the same goes for Nintendo 64 games, too; there's a copier called Doctor 64 if I recall...
I think the only reason SNES games are now using .SFC with regularity is because certain overzealous individuals (such as byuu of BSNES/higan) wrote up a manifesto about how SFC should be the ONLY file extension because reasons. And then both BSNES and higan started using a really unintuitive MAME-style folder setup that no other emulator uses.
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Post by Allie on Jan 12, 2015 16:14:49 GMT -5
Yes, a lot of the earlier file extensions were dictated by the copier devices that were used back in the day. The Super Magicom was the big popular one, but I believe SWC and FIG also came from other, similar devices. I know for Genesis games it's cycled from .BIN, to SMD, to BIN again, at some point GEN was the accepted extension, and now I'm seeing an awful lot of MD extensions (an entire No-Intro set of them actually). And the same goes for Nintendo 64 games, too; there's a copier called Doctor 64 if I recall... I think the only reason SNES games are now using .SFC with regularity is because certain overzealous individuals (such as byuu of BSNES/higan) wrote up a manifesto about how SFC should be the ONLY file extension because reasons. And then both BSNES and higan started using a really unintuitive MAME-style folder setup that no other emulator uses. SWC was the Super Wild Card. In the early, pre-SNES96 (later 9x) days of SNES emulation, the emulators were named after copiers (Virtual SMC, Virtual SWC), aside from Super PasoFami, which really didn't run much of anything at all, but neither did the others... As for higan... As useful as it is, I think I'd rather gargle bleach than read any manifesto byuu has written. I have a feeling I'd need 10 years of being trained by coding prodigies to make hide or hair of it. |
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Post by kingmike on Jan 23, 2015 11:32:50 GMT -5
I think the only reason SNES games are now using .SFC with regularity is because certain overzealous individuals (such as byuu of BSNES/higan) wrote up a manifesto about how SFC should be the ONLY file extension because reasons. And then both BSNES and higan started using a really unintuitive MAME-style folder setup that no other emulator uses. In general, byuu was protesting the continued use of copier headers (pretty valid: they're useless and do nothing but add bloat to the emulator and headache for the hack/translation scene) but also ZIP files (more debatable. His argument mostly was that with hard drives now hundreds of GB if not into the TB, saving a few meg on SNES ROMs is unneeded). Though he instead chose to go with an external header file, because while most games could be detected from the internal header, they weren't 100% reliable (like most protos didn't have headers, and he found Bazooka Blitzkrieg mistakenly swapped the ROM and RAM size bytes, also didn't signify games with different address decoder chips, which I believe affected mirroring which games usually didn't rely on but in the name of accuracy...) He chose "SFC" because that was Nintendo's official extension (when back in the day, they required third-parties to send them ROMs on floppies). Most useless emulation header would be FDS. The only thing it specifies is the number of disks sides, which you could just detect from the ROM size.  |
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