Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Nestopia Internal Database and Headerless Rom Support

The simple fact of the matter is that people who make proprietary ways of classifying ROMs are doing so for no reason other than to have a personal fap-fest over the fact that they're getting someone to do things their way. It makes them feel important. Case in point: NSRT. I agree that removing headers from ROMs altogether is the best way to go, but good luck getting large numbers of people to buy into that.

A universal database would have been a good suggestion back in the late 90s. 10 years later the world is used to iNES (and some UNIF) headers, it's nigh on impossible to force a change now, except for introducing iNES 2.0 that's backward compatible.


The initial iNES header format is Marat's pet, he's semi-responsible for the big mess by fapping not updating the format. UNIF (and now iNES 2.0) was created to clean it up, not for self-importance.

The world isn't used to iNES headers, they're used to having games "just work" in emulators[1]. You can easily get there now with a headerless format. It'll be just as hard to switch everything to iNES 2.0 or UNIF as it would be to switch to headerless, so again, why not make it the final switch instead of yet another waypoint? I don't know and I don't care who the person that's pushing iNES 2.0 is, but it's a dumb idea, and arguably even a step backwards from UNIF.

[1] I support this by noting that SNES, Genesis, N64, and GBA games (among others) have largely always been headerless and nobody cares. Headered ROMs are actually something of an anachronism.

End-users are not the world. For example introducing headerless files would make every NES emulator and related programs stop working, and every IPS translation/hack incompatible. I'm afraid Cowering (unfortunately he's the main console ROMs distributor) would not support this.

Every living NES emulator could have an appropriate update out before the new ROMs started being distributed (and if end users are not the world, who cares anyway?). And Cowering is the problem, not the solution. This is 2007. The concept of a single source for ROMs is so stupid in light of things like BitTorrent I can't begin to imagine it.

[stupid question]
Wouldn't there be a way to strip the headers out of ROMs?

Of course - you just chop the first 512 or whatever bytes off the file.

So why'd there be a problem with changing the ROMS? MAME Changes them all the time and people adapt, I mean other than PokeROM collector's, and even in their case, couldn't there be a simple batch program to "update" the ROMs?

Heck, I have less than 40 megs of Nintendo ROMs, I'd probably be able to download that in one night on dialup if I had to, but I'm sure a batch program would do just as well, right?

MAME makes it look easy because all the decisions are generally made strictly on technical merits. Most of the console "scene" is still too immature to be there yet. The NSRT swindle Moogly mentions is a prime example: SNES ROMs have no header so they want to add one and then charge emu authors to decode it. It's been fabulously successful thus far, as you might imagine

Authors are probably still leery of old versions, older emulators, etc. that are permanently dependent on them now that headers have been allowed to exist for so long.

The way that the internal database should work is this: there should be an option at first for "use internal database." Upon being checked, it would use the internal database for headerless roms and headered ones (ignoring the header), essentially adding support for rom-only files. This would give advanced users and DAT makers exactly what they want without disturbing GoodTools/iNES dependent newbs. With any luck, the option itself might wise people up to their unnecessary dependencies, and headers could gradually be phased out.

Anyway, Marty has probably seen the thread already, so it's not looking good.