| User | Post |
HyperLamer
Posts: 4341/8210 |
I'm pretty sure it doesn't, except possibly the bootcode. Somehow the N64 knows enough to copy a small boot-program from the cartridge into memory which is responsible for loading the rest (since N64 doesn't run from cartridge directly); I'm pretty sure it just loads code from a specific place in the ROM though. Most cartidge ROMs are just all the data and resources globbed together in a format, order and position known only to their own programming. (The exceptions to this being the NES which often stores graphic and program data separately, on different chips, and the DS which uses a real filesystem.) |
Kyoufu Kawa
Posts: 1487/2481 |
Originally posted by Kitty Jedi
Didn't the N64 have some filesystem too? Or i'm just misunderstanding things now? 
Hey, I only posted what I knew for certain. |
Ailure
Posts: 9463/11162 |
Didn't the N64 have some filesystem too? Or i'm just misunderstanding things now? |
DahrkDaiz
Posts: 623/885 |
I highly doubt that it is and if it were, I'm sure the format of it would have been changed some to fit the codec they would have written for the GBA, but MP3 isn't an ideal format to be using for cart based system. |
Ten
Posts: 114/198 |
Hm... I asked because Kingdom Hearts CoM has Simple and Clean on it. I was wondering if it was an MP3 or something. |
Kyoufu Kawa
Posts: 1483/2481 |
ROMs, ignoring NES for the moment, contain raw machine-language bytecode for the proper computer architecture, with various types of data mixed through it, hopefully in some logical order and more or less grouped together by type. The computer itself does not care about -what- it's (trying to) execute, so if you somehow leak into data, it'll try to execute something that shouldn't be, and crashes. The opposite is also true: code being interpreted as data, like MissingNo and most of the ROM as seen in a graphics editor like TLP.
There are two exceptions to this rule: NES and DS.
NES can have special CHR-ROM chips, which clearly disambiguate the graphics from the code and other data.
DS has an actual (but read-only) filesystem, rippable with DarkFader's "NDSTool". |
dan
Posts: 546/782 |
You can do that with CDs because they contain a file-system. ROMs (usually) don't have any sort of file-system. So, such a program is probably impossible. |
Ten
Posts: 113/198 |
If you want to view the files on a CD image saved on your computer then you need a program to mount the image on a false CD drive.
But I was wondering, are there any programs to do anything like that with a ROM image? Or are ROMs solid chunks of data? |
