•ROM Inspector

Art by Mae

ROM Inspector < Back to Tools

There are a few kinds of EarthBound ROMs out there. Select an EarthBound ROM on your device. The tool will analyse it to see if it's recognised. This is useful for identifying that you've got a clean ROM. If the ROM is recognised but nonstandard, it can be fixed.


Information about ROMs

While most EB ROMs floating around are already clean, some will have minor differences (that don't impact the game at all, just the file). Additionally, several legacy hacking tools will expand the ROM in a strange way or expect a copier header. Modern hacking tools usually expect a 24 megabit headerless ROM.

The copier header is a 512-byte block preceding the ROM data that used to be added by devices that dumped SNES cartridges, such as the Super Magicom. It's normally used to store information about the copier device, but when artifically adding a header, it's common to just fill it with zeroes. Emulators are smart enough to recognise when a copier header is present, but tools that edit the ROM expect things to be in very specific locations. Also, so do patches. So a clean ROM is vital for hacking.

The ROM can also be expanded to 32 megabits or 48 megabits by hacking tools in order to fit more stuff. CoilSnake does this the proper way, copying data for ExHiROM correctly and filling blank space with zeroes. JHack (aka PK Hack) does it a weird way, filling a portion of the blank space with a repeating pattern of zeroes and twos.

The Wii U Virtual Console, New 3DS Virtual Console, and Super NES Classic Edition (aka Mini) releases of the game, as with most games on these platforms, reorganise sample data internally; otherwise they are identical to vanilla EarthBound ROMs. This tool supports the ROM you get after using AwakeEchidna's Wii U Virtual Console Extractor tool to convert the .sfrom file or using snesvcsplit and vcromclaim in the case of New 3DS Virtual Console. Both of these rely on the same code to restore the reorganised sample data, which currently has a bug which causes the sample data to be restored incorrectly. This tool can fix that for you.

As for the Nintendo Classics (aka Nintendo Switch Online) version, no such audio data reorganisation happens, so dumping this will get you a clean EarthBound copy.

All of these official re-releases also include some minor patches that tone down visual effects. For details, see TCRF. These patches are programmed directly into Nintendo's emulators to be applied at runtime, so dumping the ROM from the filesystem will not include these changes. However, this tool will still be able to fix ROMs that have been dumped directly from RAM such that they include the runtime patches. Currently the Virtual Console and SNES Classic runtime patches are supported here; I'm working on figuring out the NSO patches.

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