SNES Classic: Some New Stuff & Changes

Saturday, May 25, 2019

I've been trying to nitpick some things lately. Finding ways to improve the SFROM Tool page mostly. I updated the page to include a basic usage guide, because even though the tool is so simple to use, that doesn't mean that new users would naturally realize as much. So a simple "How To" can kind of teach them that.

HowTo:

The guide is for when using a non-CE version of hakchi2. CE is fine, but it's not how I designed or ever intended SFROM Tool to be used. It was just a compromise to help with getting better adoption of people using SFROM Tool at all, and thus ensuring more people are using good proper .sfroms. Usage with CE is not my place to provide guidance for, so I just need to focus on regular hakchi2 use with my information.

Along with that "How To" addition, I... regrettably... had to add a link to a normal hakchi2. For a few weeks now the link has been to 2.21f. Why such a older version some may ask? It's popular among canoe purists, as it doesn't have a lot of unnecessary BS, and its very stable and fast.

But recently even recommending that has been irking me. You see, non-CE+SFROM Tool versions of hakchi2 still use very problematic code. They make bad .sfroms by default, use a bad internal database of Preset IDs, and the Ctrl+Alt+E Preset ID window corrupts good .sfroms. These where issues I've seen people run into countless times, and support had to be offered to the users again and again. It's been irritating me that I can't in good conscious be recommending a version any longer that causes such issues.

hakchi2 NPE:

So? Well, I finally caved... I created my own fork of hakchi2. It's exactly like v2.21f, except I removed the most problematic/stupid/annoying parts. It's something that I CAN actually be comfortable recommending to new users!

I call it "hakchi2 NPE". It's not meant to be a fork that's going to be maintained and revised. It's not going to see anything like command line integration like CE uses. No new bells and whistles. It's simply 2.21f, minus the stupid BS/problems. That's it. For current veteran users this version isn't going to offer very much thats new to entice you to change to it. But I'd hope you would at least recommend it to new users. I can mostly see veterans wanting to use it to maybe break the bad habbit of sometimes making .sfroms with clusters shitty code, or using the SNES Preset ID window instead of opening a .sfrom in SFROM Tool like you should. Those are definitely habbit to be broken! But atm there are couple decent changes, like a proper copyright line in the .desktop file, proper detection of SRAM from .sfroms, and possibly some more things coming.

For the most part though, the major changes are that I removed the Preset ID window, and it's ability to generate .sfroms at all. You can't select a SNES ROM in it. You are meant to generate a .sfrom in SFROM Tool, and select that .sfrom in hakchi2 NPE, just as you always should have been with previous versions.

For now this new version is available for testing on my private/unofficial links page, but should be public with its own github fork updated soon.

un-Official Links page:

Speaking of my private page. I've off and on used a private page for unofficial pre-release builds/patches. But until now it's generally been Discord only. And along with that, largely ignored. All people care about on Discord is the pointless modding stuff. Basically, everything except canoe! So to give the page a little more traction I added a link to it from the SFROM Tool page. I encourage non-new users to check it out, but please don't link directly to it or any of its files. I'll be rotating the URLs to prevent such things. I don't want the page to ever been seen as "the current latest builds" page, and thus the default to tell people to use.

On it right now I have the next version of SFROM Tool (changes listed), and the Mac/Linux ports. I created a link to my sfrom2sfc tool on the SFROM Tool page a few weeks ago. Previously that was only found via some reddit threads. But I now moved that to the unofficial links page, along with a new NES "kachikachi sav2sram" tool I quickly whipped up after being asked to on Discord. I don't deal with NES Classic stuff, but it's similar code to the code I use in SFROM Tool for sram conversion, so why not?

There's some .cnps there too. Games that had incomplete data to comfortably release as normal, and maybe some custom non-official stuff in the future.

I hope you enjoy these extras/previews, and find some of the changes more new user friendly!