Some (slight) GBA love
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- Category: WIP News
- Published: 20 April 2017
- Written by Maddog
- Hits: 3844
It feels kinda weird when a notorious Sega fan decides to make a trip on the dark side...
This means that the Nintendo GBA - Games dat was updated. This dat was feeling very empty before and I felt something could be done about it. Do not expect anything particularly impressive, but it's still some more games added. The good news is that most of the new additions are genuinely good games, so if you have not yet played stuff like Fire Emblem, Golden Sun or Advance Wars, do yourself a favor and go play them ASAP!
As the checksums came from dumps of original carts and it was possible to compare checksums to scene releases and other publicly available information, nice little [!] denote confirmed good dumps. This does not imply that TOSEC aspires to be a dumping project for carts (others have done a much better job at this years earlier), but if any checksums we get our hands on can be confirmed, why not use the confirmed good dump flag? ;)
In terms of naming, you may notice some disagreement if you compare our names to the (popular for GBA) Good Tools and No Intro naming schemes. I name files only in verifiable ways, not by public consensus or copying others' names. Especially GoodGBA seems more US-centric so several dumps that came from EU carts are marked US-only for it. I hope my info gets added to it at the next version as well, for those carts like Doom and Banjo that are actually confirmed to be the same for EU-US. Rest assured that every single name you see is the result of a lot of thought and comparing information. And as a final note, with a casual look at the dat you may see the (Ubi Soft)/(Ubisoft) "discrepancy" in names. It's not a mistake, feel free to check how the company was called at the respective years...
Hope you enjoy this small update, now I'm going back to doing Sega stuff! :)
Work in Progress... Sega
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- Category: WIP News
- Published: 01 March 2017
- Written by Maddog
- Hits: 4338
As Spring is almost upon us, it was time for some extensive spring cleaning of the Dreamcast Firmware dat! Apart from renaming all existing sets in the dat, one more retail Dreamcast BIOS and one more Devkit BIOS were added. This new dat reflects newer knowledge acquired in the recent years and is in line with current Demul and MAME builds.
None of this would have been possible without the kind help of MetalliC, who gave me most of the really important information. Therefore he wins a well-deserved place among the dat authors despite not being an actual member of Tosecdev. Thank you!
PS: the previously marked [h] of 1.001d is actually a translation, replacing Japanese with Chinese. However it is marked as bad because it fails the HOLLY protection checks. This means it can't be used on real hardware! It works fine on emulators, as the HOLLY algorithm is unknown and not implemented in any emulator.
Work in Progress... Sega
- Details
- Category: WIP News
- Published: 20 February 2017
- Written by Maddog
- Hits: 6823
After a long hiatus, work has been resumed in the Sega Dreamcast dats. Expect to see some long overdue updates for the system soon.
In the US dat, several ringcode/audio variants of USA GD-ROMs were added.
In the PAL dat, there are several newly verified dumps. Most of them will be more interesting to our French-speaking friends. The list of new additions includes French versions of Legacy of Kain - Soul Reaver, The Nomad Soul, Tomb Raider Chronicles ('Tomb Raider - Sur les Traces de Lara Croft') and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire ('Qui Veut Gagner Des Millions'). Also added v1.002 of Metropolis Street Racer, which was the intermediate bugfix version. Now all 3 known versions of MSR are verified.
Thanks go to everyone that submitted their dump information!
Happy Birthday TOSEC!
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- Category: Other
- Published: 18 January 2017
- Written by Cassiel
- Hits: 4198
I am proud to announce that today is the TOSEC project's 17th birthday!
For over a decade and a half we have been dedicated to the cataloging and preservation of software, firmware and resources for arcade machines, microcomputers, minicomputers and video game consoles.
As of release 2016-11-11, TOSEC catalogs over 280 unique computing platforms and continues to grow. As of this time the project had identified and cataloged 700,623 different software images/sets, consisting of over 5.02TB of software, firmware and resources.
We've come along way in the last few years, here's to many more!