converting .ips trainer menus into standalone roms?
category: general [glöplog]
This is a question that bothers me for quite a while, so I thought I just ask for general advice here.
As console heads know, trainers on platforms such as GBC, GBA or WSC are released as .ips patches, containing both the trainer menu and the modifications for the game rom, and are applied to the game rom with a patcher.
Now, what I wonder is, is there any way to extract said trainer menu from the .ips and convert it into a standalone rom file? Are there any tools for this, or is this only possible through some hands-on hex-editing, if at all? I'm asking because there are still a bunch of intros / trainer menus on several handheld platforms that are not added to pouet and demozoo yet, and it would be great to be able to do so.
Console freaks, any hints? Or is this a hopeless undertaking unless one is a console coder/cracker oneself?
As console heads know, trainers on platforms such as GBC, GBA or WSC are released as .ips patches, containing both the trainer menu and the modifications for the game rom, and are applied to the game rom with a patcher.
Now, what I wonder is, is there any way to extract said trainer menu from the .ips and convert it into a standalone rom file? Are there any tools for this, or is this only possible through some hands-on hex-editing, if at all? I'm asking because there are still a bunch of intros / trainer menus on several handheld platforms that are not added to pouet and demozoo yet, and it would be great to be able to do so.
Console freaks, any hints? Or is this a hopeless undertaking unless one is a console coder/cracker oneself?
ok, so there is this tool called "GBA Tool Advance" by coolhj from 2006 (download), which can extract intros/trainer menus from GBA roms - but what about other platforms such as WSC or SNES? Any ideas?
I wouldn't mind some of the same for .ppf files for PSX and DC :)
Perhaps I suck at searching, but are there any examples of such "cracktro/trainer" ips-files you can post? Most ips:es seem to be translations from Japanese to English.
all trainers came out as .ips, at least on SNES, N64, GB, GBC, GBA and WSC. i don't know whether there are any online (although there must be), but i have a big archive from old backups.
Iirc, ips is like describing difference between moded rom and original rom. I don't think there is a way to make standalone file without original rom.. but i might be wrong.
And what makes things worse is some of menus might use original rom's resources in some cases
@Minus256, yes, of course, this is obvious. One has, of course, to have the original ROM - which is no problem. The problem is to extract the intro/menu from the patched ROM. "GBA Tool Advance" does exactly this, but sadly only for GBA ROMs (it's not even backwards compatible to GBC and GB).
It would be amazing to have a universal tool like the one by coolhj for all ROM-based consoles...
I was doing the retro game localization and what i learned about these kind of things (like extracting code for modifying and expand font table etc..)is since each game differs slightly from each other, i had to do it one by one with hand.