Decompression of Roms?

[Vicious88]

Well, I've spent about an hour or so on google looking for a way to decompress or somehow open roms into an editable form.

Having found nothing on the subject, I've wandered into emutalk because you're community appears to be very knowledgable.

What I'm looking to do is somehow open up the rom files (specifically those that work with Project64) so that I can edit details about them, such as extract .bik movies or replace them with custom ones, or perhapes even replace meshes with lower-poly copies of the original, making the game run a bit smoother.



I'm decently sure that once upon a time there was a way to do this (as I've seen a large variety of homebrew SNES roms -- though I'm aware that we're talking about N64 roms and they're going to be much harder to work with most likely).

Any help that you guys can offer me would be greatly appreciated, as right now I'm left hoping for some magical sort of "WinROM" program to appear.

[Agozer]

You can't. At least not without considerable knowledge of how N64 games are coded and how to reverse-engineer them. There are a few game-specific tools (Super Mario 64 and Zelda OoT, Custom Robo, GoldenEye come to mind) that allow you to mess around with some of the game data, but that's it.

http://www.romhacking.net/?category=...o&title=&desc=

[Vicious88]

Wow, thanks for the link, this is significantly more information that I had a few hours ago.

As far as reverse engineering goes -- surely the software that converted the games from multi-file cartridges to roms could be reverse engineered to give back the multiple files for editing purposes, right?

[Agozer]

Data on N64 carts aren't multi-file (I'm not even sure what you meant by that). N64 backup units simply output the data found on the cart's ROM chip (the actual game) to a file. On systems with multiple chips storing pieces of the game data, all the chips need to be dumped, hence why we have romsets that contain more than one file. No cart-based system aside from the Neo-Geo AES uses multiple ROMs inside the cart to store actual game data.

Reverse engineering itself is a very difficult and arduous task (even if you knew what the hell you are doing), and there is hardly a single piece of software that can disassemble any N64 rom image you throw at it back into its individual pieces. An N64 development kit would probably help, but even then developers often need to create additional tools for the game they are developing - which brings us to:

In short: What you ask doesn't exist - there is no general purpose tool that can disassemble anything and everything in such a complex mess that is an N64 game. Tools exist for specific games and they only deal with smaller pieces of the game. The true developer tools aren't something you'll find floating on the Internet, either.

[squall_leonhart]

Actually Agozer the Cartridge file consists of a directory hirearchy consisting of sound, gfx and other varios data's, There "were" some tools about which can open the rom allowing you to view its contents, however i never payed much attention to where i noticed them.

[Agozer]

I see. Were those tools designed for any game, or specific games?

[cybergeekkid]

toad's tool, the mario 64 editor, had a rom decompression feature to it..