Project: Star Ocean on the SNES Classic (canoe)

Monday, December 25, 2017

Merry Christmas! =)

From day one of the SNES Classic release, when I first got my hands on it, my goal was to get Star Ocean running on the SNES Classic. And I don't mean that dumb Retroarch option. I mean Nintendos official emulator itself, canoe!

My research into it lead me down a path that saw me solve how to get every other 3 of the total 4 S-DD1 SNES games running on canoe (3 different region versions of SFA2), but successfully cracking the puzzle of Star Ocean eluded me. SFA2 was different, and comparatively easy. Known Preset IDs existed for 2 of them (the other was figured out easily), as well as the required ROM/SDA patch data. The pieces just needed to be found and pieced together with a little bit of effort for the games to work on canoe. Star Ocean is different however. It was never released on a Virtual Console like SFA2. So any work on running it had to be done blind, from the ground up. From scratch. Frustrated with only making minor advancements, I had to put that "project" on the shelf and focus on more productive things, like cataloging the entire list of known/unknown Preset IDs, and eventually working on yesterdays release of my sfrom Tool.

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Release: sfrom Tool

Sunday, December 24, 2017

After a bit of back and forth on releasing the project at all, I've decided to release it for Christmas! "But this is Christmas Eve!", you may say? Well, I figure people will probably be pretty busy tomorrow, and well... I have something else more suited that's planned for then. Stay tuned! =)

So what is sfrom Tool? The SNES Classic uses a game ROM format of .sfrom. But no other program makes GOOD, PROPER, COMPLETE sfroms. The ones made by hakchi2 are bad. The creator wrote his poor implementation of the format off of early, flawed tech documents for formats of different platforms. He didn't bother to research the format of the actual SNES/SFC Classic sfroms themselves. I noticed flaws in it right away, and despite my bringing it to his attention and providing better info... I was just ignored. So I made this!

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I'm back? In more ways than one.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Just realized its been almost a year since I posted anything here. My professional projects started taking so much of a focus, I basically forgot I even had a hobby project blog. Not that I really had anything to post about here.

But things have changed now! A couple months ago I got into SNES communities again, though this time related to the then upcoming SNES Classic. It was nice to feed an old passion again, for the SNES. I found I had a ton of knowledge to share about it on places like reddit, that others could use. After the SNESC was released and I got mine I found myself delving deep into the modding portion of the community, to the point that I was made a mod on r/miniSNES which I happily accepted to help control the spread of proper true information.

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