megasdkirby
11-07-2020, 08:16 PM
I'm searching for a good SNES dumper. I have a few carts I want to dump and play on Retropie, but since they use menus (the Data East compilations), they don't ndump well using the INL Retro Dumper.
Any ideas of one that can dump these carts correctly? And that can still be purchased?
Pr3tty F1y
11-08-2020, 09:18 AM
It may not be possible with current dumpers simply due to Retro Bit's usage of modern components on the PCB. They're using custom chips that simply didn't exist and were not used on original cartridges: https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=20985#p257415
10794
You very likely could desolder the rom chip and read it out if you had the skill and hardware for that (which I'm assuming 99.99999% of humanity does not have this skill - and, even if you did, it would risk permanently damaging/destroying the cartridge). However, without emulation of the specific chips used by Retro Bit, the rom may not be playable in emulators (think NES emulators that don't support specific mapper chips - it's essentially the same situation here). My guess is, if the emulator would accept the entire image - which is probably only a 16mb or higher flash ROM - it would probably only see/play the 1st game on the cart and/or the menu (whatever was first in the byte order of the ROM image) if the logic chip is not being emulated.
Hopefully someone with a Retrode can tell you if that works or not, but I'm almost certain that none of the old/original cart dumpers (e.g., Super Magicom DX, SF Doctor, etc.) would dump this cart.