Huh, I hope so but I wouldn't hold my breath. If Eurogamer do that, I would be very surprised.
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Tomohiro Kawase might've been hired by Nintendo to put ROM headers into VC [Updated Dec. 1, 2018]
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Huh, I hope so but I wouldn't hold my breath. If Eurogamer do that, I would be very surprised.
that's self promotion.
one of us here would have to post a thread on it.
also, great work!
Bumping because i decided to do some research of my own (I'm working on a video series about the history of the three console manufacturers attempts at backwards compatibility/emulation re-releases over the years.)
First off, calling Tomohiro Kawase the "Animal Crossing emulator" developer is a bit of an understatement. He (Alongside Hideaki Shimizu.) actually handled a lot of emulation projects for Nintendo. His first role at the company was making the "GB Tower" mode in Pokemon Stadium, which was effectively a Game Boy emulator that could run the 1st gen (2nd gen in Stadium 2/GS) mainline Pokemon games by inserting their carts into the transfer pak.
In fact, almost all of his work at Nintendo revolves around emulation.
Pretty much everything he's credited for involves it in some form, he's listed for "Connectivity Programming" in Metroid Prime (Which allowed you to play the NES Metroid on a Gamecube, unlocked by syncing a completed Metroid Fusion save file to the game using a link cable.) "engineering" on the Zelda Collector's Edition disc (Which was a compilation of NES and N64 games running on an emulator.) and even the "NES Emulator Programmer" on the E-reader.
(About 1:24 in if the timestamp doesn't work.)
So it's highly likely he was indeed hired for working on iNES.
As for the header situation, here's what i discovered.
The first thing i did was extract the Super Mario Bros ROM from Animal Crossing, a fairly easy task, as all the NES emulator content is conveniently stored in a single compressed file named "famicom.arc", which is then in turn stored as a bunch of ".szs" files. Using ARCtool and Uwizard in that order did the trick. Giving us a unnamed 41kb file.
(before and after extraction, note that the ".nes" was added myself to make sure it could run on an emulator, as noted, the file was completely unnamed when i extracted it.)
After verifying said unnamed file was indeed Super Mario Bros by using an NES emulator. I then acquired the Virtual Console version of Super Mario Bros. Thankfully, there's a tool known "vcromclaim" that completely automates the process of extracting VC titles, so i used that.
This worked, but there's one problem. The file size is incorrect! Super Mario Bros is a 41kb game, while my dump turned it into 320kb. Fortunately, fixing it was pretty easy, it turns out VCromclaim grabbed a bunch of text and data from the VC emulator and appended it to the end of the rom. After chopping that out, the file size was fixed to the correct size of 41kb.
and the result of doing a comparison after this?
Yep, the Virtual Console ROM does in fact originate from Animal Crossing. iNES header and all. In fact, all of the NES games in Animal Crossing have it, with the notable exception of Clu Clu Land D, which lacks a header entirely, starting with the "*NINTENDO-HVC*" text that is normally used by the FDS bios to verify that it's a legit disk image, the NES emulation community didn't start using standardized headers for FDS games until around November 1998 with the release of the fwnes emulator. About 3 months after the release of Pokemon Stadium, Tomohiro Kawase's first project at Nintendo.
I feel like the most logical conclusion here is this.
and that's basically everything you need to know about the subject.
- Nintendo discovers iNES and, rather than sending a C&D, hunts down one of the devs and hires him to help implement a Game Boy emulator into Pokemon Stadium (Not to be confused with the US/EU release of the game, which is actually a sequel in Japan), released in 1998.
- Animal Crossing starts development on the Nintendo 64DD, at some point the decision was made to add playable NES games to it. So the team brought Tomohiro on board due to his experience with the hardware.
- With Tomohiro's help, the NES games are dumped internally for the game, most likely using the same tech the iNES team used, leading to the header issue. The fact that Clu Clu Land D lacks the standardized "FDS" header used by the emulation community at that point outright confirms they didn't "download the roms off the internet".
Interesting.
Thanks for your work.
I've already said that many people severely underestimate Nintendo when it comes to manage their games and legacy.
I am glad someone finally has a thorough explanation for what I think we all knew deep down was reality, Nintendo don't download roms from the internet to sell on their digital stores.
Wonder if the hundreds of websites that ran with the original story will offer lengthy coverage of the new news.
Fascinating work though, I really thought this would be a question mark forever.
Wonder if the hundreds of websites that ran with the original story will offer lengthy coverage of the new news.
Fascinating work though, I really thought this would be a question mark forever.
This news would need to be published somewhere other than a small post on a game forum probably.
To be fair, I don't think anyone thought they are unable. It's a matter of convenience.
That being said, great work OP!
Corrections and "nothing exciting actually happened"-news are boring. Scandals and controversies bring them clickety clicks.
I'm sorry but it's not. It can be very ethically reported and he can be ritghtfully credited for the discovery he chose to make public.
AND being featured in a popular channel can boost his views.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's in Nintendo best interest to put the utmost care on managing their legacy.
You'd think that, yet the way they've managed it so far has left much to be desired.
Using scene resources isn't even unusual for established devs either. A good example is M2, the company we like to think of as the golden standard bearer for official emulation and retro stuff, who just used GoodROMs sets for their PS2 Sega Ages stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if their later Sega effors (Virtual Console, Sega Ages Online, 3D Classics, etc) also did as well given how notoriously bad Sega is at preservation.
Redistributed to consumers, you mean. This is about about internal management (like archiving, preserving).
Which we have no real information on beyond the investigative work done here, so it's hard to say anything about it, really.
Oh, right! I missed the fact that the person who did the digging and OP aren't the same person. My bad
Assuming a major company who takes pride in their legacy doesn't preserve their work is a major stretch beyond belief and the major piece of evidence that may prove it could've been the case has basically been debunked.
I think he'd be into it. He's more concerned with accuracy I've found than being right.
That said he works for Digital Eclipse now, who has a long history of using scene resources (and people) themselves. This gotcha narrative that spun out of the story never really made sense anyway, even if Nintendo did do it so does literally everyone else.
Well, we do. We know they keep a ton of design documents around (as we have frequently seen when they do PR for re-releases,e ven for shelved titles such as Star Fox 2 where they put out concept art and the full design doc publicly, for example.
Count the entire Iwata Asks series as well, because documenting discussions with the developers of either current or legacy titles and hardware is part of that too. We know a great deal, it's just not really appreciated widely.
Oh cool! Thanks for the info. Wish they'd be more proactive about exposing their legacy to people.
I asked Frank what his opinion was:
As well as if this was the best way for Nintendo to extract their roms and how to improve emulation theoretically:
Pretty great insight honestly. I agree with his point about how there really aren't technical limitations to preserving old games and also agree that the whole Nintendo taking a rom off the internet bit was focused on way too much. I hope no one gives him shit over this.
As well as if this was the best way for Nintendo to extract their roms and how to improve emulation theoretically:
Pretty great insight honestly. I agree with his point about how there really aren't technical limitations to preserving old games and also agree that the whole Nintendo taking a rom off the internet bit was focused on way too much. I hope no one gives him shit over this.
I mean, they're not the worst in the industry regarding this. I think the issue most people have with Nintendo's emulation legacy is they keep starting over and make everything mainly hardware specific, but really that's not much different from Sega, Capcom, Konami, Sony, Atari, SNK, Hamster, Coleco, etc.
The only company really doing better is Microsoft and arguments can be made against them too since they have a whole gaming legacy outside Xbox that's been entirely neglected.
If I may counter-argue this, the FDS preservation scene was a much bigger mess than the NES one and the lack of a standardized FDS header wouldn't really prove anything when FDS images were going around the internet without one (I downloaded and played FDS disc images on a Dreamcast long before there was a standardized header format, for example).
Also, FDS disc piracy is rather infamous - there's even FDS disc copier tools you could theoretically purchase now. And of course, pirated and hacked FDS images were on the internet to such a degree that no-intro's "solution" for proper preservation was to re-dump every single game from a confirmed new, sealed copy.
Rather than it proving or disproving anything, a FDS image just raises more questions.
Cifaldi's comments are interesting, and I have some sympathy with his first tweet there, but he's a smart guy and had to have had some idea that:
"I would posit that Nintendo downloaded Super Mario Bros. from the internet and sold it to you!"
...was both a great "gotcha" line to include in his talk and something the enthusiast media would seize on, particularly when the cost of Nintendo's VC offerings and the quality of the emulation is a regular topic of conversation. I don't think it was presented as a "vaguely-researched theory" at the time, and it certainly got a lot of attention as a "proof" that Nintendo were doing exactly what Cifaldi claimed (regardless of how "vaguely-researched" his claim was).
His talk was great, with a lot of interesting food for thought, and it's a shame this one claim and the one-liner about it got much of the attention, but I think in this case he's really got to own that outcome :-)
"I would posit that Nintendo downloaded Super Mario Bros. from the internet and sold it to you!"
...was both a great "gotcha" line to include in his talk and something the enthusiast media would seize on, particularly when the cost of Nintendo's VC offerings and the quality of the emulation is a regular topic of conversation. I don't think it was presented as a "vaguely-researched theory" at the time, and it certainly got a lot of attention as a "proof" that Nintendo were doing exactly what Cifaldi claimed (regardless of how "vaguely-researched" his claim was).
His talk was great, with a lot of interesting food for thought, and it's a shame this one claim and the one-liner about it got much of the attention, but I think in this case he's really got to own that outcome :-)
Bumping because i decided to do some research of my own (I'm working on a video series about the history of the three console manufacturers attempts at backwards compatibility/emulation re-releases over the years.)
First off, calling Tomohiro Kawase the "Animal Crossing emulator" developer is a bit of an understatement. He (Alongside Hideaki Shimizu.) actually handled a lot of emulation projects for Nintendo. His first role at the company was making the "GB Tower" mode in Pokemon Stadium, which was effectively a Game Boy emulator that could run the 1st gen (2nd gen in Stadium 2/GS) mainline Pokemon games by inserting their carts into the transfer pak.
In fact, almost all of his work at Nintendo revolves around emulation.
Pretty much everything he's credited for involves it in some form, he's listed for "Connectivity Programming" in Metroid Prime (Which allowed you to play the NES Metroid on a Gamecube, unlocked by syncing a completed Metroid Fusion save file to the game using a link cable.) "engineering" on the Zelda Collector's Edition disc (Which was a compilation of NES and N64 games running on an emulator.) and even the "NES Emulator Programmer" on the E-reader.
(About 1:24 in if the timestamp doesn't work.)
So it's highly likely he was indeed hired for working on iNES.
As for the header situation, here's what i discovered.
The first thing i did was extract the Super Mario Bros ROM from Animal Crossing, a fairly easy task, as all the NES emulator content is conveniently stored in a single compressed file named "famicom.arc", which is then in turn stored as a bunch of ".szs" files. Using ARCtool and Uwizard in that order did the trick. Giving us a unnamed 41kb file.
(before and after extraction, note that the ".nes" was added myself to make sure it could run on an emulator, as noted, the file was completely unnamed when i extracted it.)
After verifying said unnamed file was indeed Super Mario Bros by using an NES emulator. I then acquired the Virtual Console version of Super Mario Bros. Thankfully, there's a tool known "vcromclaim" that completely automates the process of extracting VC titles, so i used that.
This worked, but there's one problem. The file size is incorrect! Super Mario Bros is a 41kb game, while my dump turned it into 320kb. Fortunately, fixing it was pretty easy, it turns out VCromclaim grabbed a bunch of text and data from the VC emulator and appended it to the end of the rom. After chopping that out, the file size was fixed to the correct size of 41kb.
and the result of doing a comparison after this?
Yep, the Virtual Console ROM does in fact originate from Animal Crossing. iNES header and all. In fact, all of the NES games in Animal Crossing have it, with the notable exception of Clu Clu Land D, which lacks a header entirely, starting with the "*NINTENDO-HVC*" text that is normally used by the FDS bios to verify that it's a legit disk image, the NES emulation community didn't start using standardized headers for FDS games until around November 1998 with the release of the fwnes emulator. About 3 months after the release of Pokemon Stadium, Tomohiro Kawase's first project at Nintendo.
I feel like the most logical conclusion here is this.
and that's basically everything you need to know about the subject.
- Nintendo discovers iNES and, rather than sending a C&D, hunts down one of the devs and hires him to help implement a Game Boy emulator into Pokemon Stadium (Not to be confused with the US/EU release of the game, which is actually a sequel in Japan), released in 1998.
- Animal Crossing starts development on the Nintendo 64DD, at some point the decision was made to add playable NES games to it. So the team brought Tomohiro on board due to his experience with the hardware.
- With Tomohiro's help, the NES games are dumped internally for the game, most likely using the same tech the iNES team used, leading to the header issue. The fact that Clu Clu Land D lacks the standardized "FDS" header used by the emulation community at that point outright confirms they didn't "download the roms off the internet".
Thanks for this! Fascinating stuff, clearly explained.
OP
OP
I'll go ahead and report this (to request a title change). Apparently, the forum alert system didn't notify me this thread has new posts for me.
OP
OP
Thanks, a moderator has updated the thread title.
Krvavi Abadas Want me to quote your entire post in the OP section?
Krvavi Abadas Want me to quote your entire post in the OP section?
OP
OP
There is a point in time where you would accidentally cross the line and would annoy someone about it, but if that person is fine with it, go ahead. But in my opinion, I don't think it matters. But if we're able to get in contact with Tomohiro Kawase himself, then it would be a completely different story.
There could be sites that do preservation but dont distribute roms online.
The problem is the distribution. Not the preservation.
To argue otherwise is just dishonest.
Always seemed odd that people so readily accepted that Nintendo pirated their own games. Software companies SHOULD be keeping years worth of different software stored through source control. I would expect part of this to be built ROMS for their classic games, especially since file size isn't a concern.
Japanese developers are historically notorious for not putting any consideration into preserving their code and assets. After a game shipped, that was it. If the source disks ended up in a dumpster, that was fine, they never planned on needing them in the future anyway.
More titles than not only have their retail release in existence.
Surprisingly enough, Nintendo's a hoarder. Old masters and even retail new products can be found on their shelves in offices or in storage rooms. Hell, even the Sky Skipper Arcade Archives port was because they had a cabinet still on the premises.
I've seen those photos before. I can't imagine the treasures they have in that archive. But, Nintendo has the space. Their Kyoto campus is huge. Most developers there operated out of small offices, especially tiny in the pre-32-bit era, and have no space for full archives... or are simply gone.Surprisingly enough, Nintendo's a hoarder. Old masters and even retail new products can be found on their shelves in offices or in storage rooms. Hell, even the Sky Skipper Arcade Archives port was because they had a cabinet still on the premises.
Bumping because i decided to do some research of my own (I'm working on a video series about the history of the three console manufacturers attempts at backwards compatibility/emulation re-releases over the years.)
First off, calling Tomohiro Kawase the "Animal Crossing emulator" developer is a bit of an understatement. He (Alongside Hideaki Shimizu.) actually handled a lot of emulation projects for Nintendo. His first role at the company was making the "GB Tower" mode in Pokemon Stadium, which was effectively a Game Boy emulator that could run the 1st gen (2nd gen in Stadium 2/GS) mainline Pokemon games by inserting their carts into the transfer pak.
In fact, almost all of his work at Nintendo revolves around emulation.
Pretty much everything he's credited for involves it in some form, he's listed for "Connectivity Programming" in Metroid Prime (Which allowed you to play the NES Metroid on a Gamecube, unlocked by syncing a completed Metroid Fusion save file to the game using a link cable.) "engineering" on the Zelda Collector's Edition disc (Which was a compilation of NES and N64 games running on an emulator.) and even the "NES Emulator Programmer" on the E-reader.
(About 1:24 in if the timestamp doesn't work.)
So it's highly likely he was indeed hired for working on iNES.
As for the header situation, here's what i discovered.
The first thing i did was extract the Super Mario Bros ROM from Animal Crossing, a fairly easy task, as all the NES emulator content is conveniently stored in a single compressed file named "famicom.arc", which is then in turn stored as a bunch of ".szs" files. Using ARCtool and Uwizard in that order did the trick. Giving us a unnamed 41kb file.
(before and after extraction, note that the ".nes" was added myself to make sure it could run on an emulator, as noted, the file was completely unnamed when i extracted it.)
After verifying said unnamed file was indeed Super Mario Bros by using an NES emulator. I then acquired the Virtual Console version of Super Mario Bros. Thankfully, there's a tool known "vcromclaim" that completely automates the process of extracting VC titles, so i used that.
This worked, but there's one problem. The file size is incorrect! Super Mario Bros is a 41kb game, while my dump turned it into 320kb. Fortunately, fixing it was pretty easy, it turns out VCromclaim grabbed a bunch of text and data from the VC emulator and appended it to the end of the rom. After chopping that out, the file size was fixed to the correct size of 41kb.
and the result of doing a comparison after this?
Yep, the Virtual Console ROM does in fact originate from Animal Crossing. iNES header and all. In fact, all of the NES games in Animal Crossing have it, with the notable exception of Clu Clu Land D, which lacks a header entirely, starting with the "*NINTENDO-HVC*" text that is normally used by the FDS bios to verify that it's a legit disk image, the NES emulation community didn't start using standardized headers for FDS games until around November 1998 with the release of the fwnes emulator. About 3 months after the release of Pokemon Stadium, Tomohiro Kawase's first project at Nintendo.
I feel like the most logical conclusion here is this.
and that's basically everything you need to know about the subject.
- Nintendo discovers iNES and, rather than sending a C&D, hunts down one of the devs and hires him to help implement a Game Boy emulator into Pokemon Stadium (Not to be confused with the US/EU release of the game, which is actually a sequel in Japan), released in 1998.
- Animal Crossing starts development on the Nintendo 64DD, at some point the decision was made to add playable NES games to it. So the team brought Tomohiro on board due to his experience with the hardware.
- With Tomohiro's help, the NES games are dumped internally for the game, most likely using the same tech the iNES team used, leading to the header issue. The fact that Clu Clu Land D lacks the standardized "FDS" header used by the emulation community at that point outright confirms they didn't "download the roms off the internet".
Thanks for doing the research. Good stuff!
The idea that Nintendo did it seems believable when there was already documentation of other Japanese companies doing exactly as such or similar, such as Sega and Taito, who were both "caught" using scene-modified ROMs rather than pure dumps in the past, which sometimes led to quality issues with the products they released that used those.
Of course, Sega never attacked the ROM scene to anywhere near the extent Nintendo has, so when they were caught it was mostly just a "ha ha" moment for the Sega fans.
I wouldn't be so sure... They did remake the BS Fire Emblem content for New Mystery of the Emblem; so they must have had something to use as reference.
Considering how good they've been at archiving their content (both in terms of ROMs, including unreleased ROMs, and in terms of development material), I would actually expect them to still have an archive of their BS Satellaview content somewhere. They might even still have the SoundLink audio content (after all, they did rebroadcast them several times) locked away somewhere!
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