taskforce wrote:
This sounds like an issue with a bad rom dump. There were quite a few of them out there unfortunately.
That could well be the case, but -- just to be clear -- are you talking about a bad dump being used as the basis for the original translation patch, or a bad dump being used by the people reporting a crash bug at the end?
I'm pretty sure I did everything right on the user end. The ROM I used was from No-Intro (CRC32: 2A6F930E), whose dumps are usually flawless, and I applied the XDelta patch found
here, version 1.01. Full disclosure, I did have to append a 512-byte blank header to the beginning of the ROM and then remove it after patching, but that's standard practice when dealing with old patches that expect a header.
The release notes from 1998 warn of a crashing bug at the end of the game, so this has been a known issue for 20 years now:
Code:
Use SNES9X without GUI for best results. ZSNES will Emulate this game very well,
right up to the point where the game freezes irretrievably at the very threshold
of the big battles with the final bosses. You have been warned!!
[...]
WARNING: CERTAIN VERSIONS OF ZSNES WILL LOCK UP AT THE END OF THE GAME. NOTHING CAN BE
DONE TO FIX IT (NOT EVEN LOADING YOUR SAVE IN SNES9X AFTER USING ZSNES WILL SOLVE
THE PROBLEM.) IF YOU DO USE ZSNES AND THIS HAPPENS, YOU MUST START OVER FROM
SCRATCH WITH A NEW GAME IN ANOTHER VERSION, OR BETTER YET, SNES9X. TO KEEP THIS
FROM HAPPENING, I SUGGEST SNES9X AS THE EMULATOR TO USE WITH THIS GAME.
The release notes seem to think that ZSNES is the problem, but since I experienced the same bug (or a similar one) in the highly accurate BSNES, I suspect that if people were getting away with using SNES9X, it was actually a case of inaccurate emulation from SNES9X. After all, we've discovered in recent years that many older SNES translation patches crash on real hardware and more accurate emulators. CryptRat notes that he got the bug in SNES9X 1.53, but SNES9X 1.39a didn't, and I'm pretty sure 1.53 is more accurate than 1.39a.
I think if crashes have been seen in three different emulators, and I'm applying the patch to a clean No-Intro ROM using a validated method (XDelta) and getting the same issue, it's probably a flaw in the game code -- whether induced in the localization process or original to the game itself, I can't say.
By the way, the
Villgust project page only has the 1.0 patch for some reason (the link says 1.01, but it's the 1.0 patch). What's the difference between the 1.0 and 1.01 patches, anyway?