vcromclaim

Intro

vcromclaim is a program to extract game ROMs from Wii Virtual Console games. It does this by analyzing an extracted Wii NAND filesystem, locating the ROMs, and extracting them. It automatically detects and decompresses compressed ROMs. It also extracts the game manual and save files for each Virtual Console game it encounters.

This is a fork of Bryan Cain's original version. This fork fixes a number of bugs and adds compatibility with Famicom FDS, TurboGrafx CD, and some Neo Geo games.

Features

• Extracts virtually all NES/Famicom/Disk System, SNES, PC Engine / TurboGrafx16 / TurboGrafx CD, Mega Drive/Genesis, Master System, and Nintendo 64 games without fail!
• Extracts several Neo Geo games: Magician Lord, King of the Monsters, Spinmaster, Neo Turf Master, Metal Slug, Metal Slug 2, Magical Drop 3, so that they are playable in MAME. Support for many other Neo Geo games can be added easily, as long as the game is not encrypted.
• Can recreate a playable replica of the original ROM for SNES games where the original sound data has been removed from the ROM, by re-encoding the PCM sound data to BRR and restoring the BRR data to its original place in the ROM.
• Automatically extracts the built-in manuals in VC games.
• Automatically extracts saves for all formats, except PC Engine / TurboGrafx16 / TurboGrafx CD.
• Displays useful debugging information in the extraction process.
• Cross-platform - compatible with Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and any other platform supported by Python.

Requirements

• Python 2.6 or 2.7 (or higher, but not Python 3.x)
• A NAND dump dumped by BootMii and extracted by ShowMiiWads or nandextract

Usage

The program is run by executing wiimetadata.py:

python wiimetadata.py nand_directory

Known Issues

• NEO GEO: Because of the way Neo Geo games are made, part of the extraction process has to be hardcoded separately for each game. If your game is not supported, it might be trivial to expand neogeo_convert.py to include support for your game.
• NEO GEO: Many Neo Geo games are encrypted. At this time, there is no way of decrypting these games. (Though, in theory it should be possible. Worst case, one can extract the game as a Wad, run the game in Dolphin's debug mode, dump the RAM, and get the ROM data from there.)
• NEO GEO: The BIOS used for Neo Geo games (MVS version for some, AES version for some) is extracted, but many of the support ROMS (e.g. 000-lo.lo, sfix.sfix, etc) are NOT extracted at this time.
• FDS: Many games spanning multiple disk sides will glitch in common emulators when you are supposed to switch side. For example, Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa will show a flashing WAIT message and Zelda no Densetsu will show "Press Start" (but nothing happens if you do). In both these games, just switching disk will continue the game. This is because the ROMs have been modified for the Virtual Console emulator to automatically switch sides.
• ALL SYSTEMS: Due to reasons unknown, some ROMs are simply different from the real ROMs causing them to glitch or not run in common emulators. Known cases:
  • Mario Tennis (N64) - 8 bytes are different in the middle of the file, making it unplayable.
  • Ogre Battle (N64) - Many bytes are different throughout the file, making it unplayable.
  • Shadow of the Ninja (NES) - 2 bytes are different, causing the intro to glitch and freeze.
• TURBOGRAFX CD: CD audio will play too slow in Mednafen. Reencodeing the OGG files to 44.1kHz should make them run correctly.
• TURBOGRAFX CD: Super Air Zonk does not play.
• TURBOGRAFX 16/CD: Save games are not extracted at this time.
• COMMODORE 64 and ARCADE: games cannot be extracted at this time.

Credits

• Bryan Cain - author of vcromclaim
• hcs - author of C decompression code for Huf8, LZH8, and romchu, all of which I (Bryan) ported to Python for vcromextract.
• Hector Martin (marcan) - original author of the Python LZ77 decompression code, which I heavily modified and expanded for vcromextract.
• sepalani - author of librso, with some reverse engineering done for RSO file format
• Bregalad - author of BRRTools, a Java program on which the BRR encoder in vcromclaim was based.
• qwikrazor87 - author of PCE CD Tools, of which the TG CD data decompression was based.