NESExplorer

A few of you might have checked out my other FDSExplorer utility for dealing with FDS-images. I've now released a new "toy" for analyzing iNES-ROMs. It's pretty early in development but I still think it has a few usefull features. It can display some usual ROM-information (including CRC32/MD5 checksums), browse through the banks in HEX-view or CHR-mode etc. But perhaps the most interesting feature (I think) is the palette-mode, which scans the ROM for palettedata and allows the user to browse through them.
Palette-hackers might find this usefull with the help of a hex-editor.
The download is here (Windows only, .NET 3.5 required):
http://nes.goondocks.se

Example screenshot:


By the way, anyone knows if NesCartDB has some kind of webservice? I'd love to integrate boxscans etc in this utility if possible..

Firefox can't find the server at nes.goondocks.se.

Please try again.

I will once this is fixed:

Right now I have only Mono 2.10.8.1 installed.

I've got extremly limited experience of Mono (and Linux).. Is it possible to run .NET applications in Linux (assuming you have Mono installed)? I thought Mono was working for websites only(?).

Broken link on the downloads page, both links go to FDS explorer. Still managed to download it though, since the correct filename was easily guessed.

Oh thanks, I've fixed the URL now..

I can't get on the site. And agreed, if it's not on Linux it might as well be useless to me, who's trying to make a NESDev tool set specifically for Linux outside of Nesicide. (Which is useless if you have a 64-bit computer) So...eventually!

Mono is an implementation of the CLR that also implements some of the .NET Framework, both the client and server sides. However, Mono is missing a lot of the calls introduced in newer versions of .NET. If you use Gtk# instead of Windows.Forms, your application is more likely to work across Linux and Windows.


Is there a reason that one can't install the 32-bit libraries to run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit computer, especially if the goal is to develop 8-bit applications for an 8-bit computer?

??? I've only been using it on a 64-bit linux install. (Compiled myself, though). Otherwise, on debian/ubuntu, follow the directions here: http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Implementation

I don't know of such things, but box art pictures can also be mentioned by .nes.ini file, and it might be used for other things too, so even if not connected to internet (and if it is connected to internet and such webservices do exist, it can use this format to make a local copy so that you can still load it even without access to internet).

You said this program is Windows only with .NET. Is it compatible with Mono? Is source-codes available? I am just wondering (I don't have .NET or Mono, but such things can be helpful to other people too ).

Never heard of this .nes.ini file until now..

Sources are not available. Not sure about Mono-compability since I use Windows..

Believe it or not, there already is! http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/getimage.php for usage instructions. Someone on this site integrated with their emulator some time ago. For the script to actually send image data, it requires authentication and also I need to add you as an authorized user (which I've just done).

I wanted to check out this utility, but the site is down. Will this be back up at some point?

Works for me right now...

The site is sometimes slow to respond but have patience.. Some US-residents have trouble reaching it because some DNS-servers are not properly updated (Use Google's.)

I've uploaded a new betaversion that enables you to rip PPU-data (titlescreens, cutscenes, objects etc.) from certain ROMS. Data can be exported to .bin/.asm or .png.

The PPU object viewer on the CHR side, looks wonky on my Win7 laptop, so the offset of the viewer's graphics needs adjusting for some computers like mine!

Screen is included

Wow that looks pretty terrible. I'm running Windows 7 aswell so I have no clue at the moment what's causing that behaviour. I'll check it out somehow..

Yes, both FDSExplorer and NESExplorer still show diagonally-warped CHR (for FDS) and PPU objects (for NES).

Also, the offset in the "hex" tab is really strange, showing decimal, for one, and weird offsets:

16
31
47
63
.
.
.

31, 47, 63 I can understand (last byte in a 16-byte group), but the 1st one should be "15", no?

Or preferrably: $00000, $000010, $000020...

Perhaps you're relying on hex/CHR/bitmap decoding libraries that suffers from different behaviour on different OS revisions?

Also, best to mention that NESExplorer requires .NET framework in your readme, as did the FDSExplorer docs.

Thanks for reading our feedback!

Thanks for the hex-related info Chris. I'll check that out.

About the imagebug. I'm using standard .NET-stuff, nothing out of the ordinary so it's pretty odd it doesn't work. I've tried it on several
machines here, no problem. All running Win7.

And yes, it requires .NET framework, but I guess most modern computer should have this installed already if you
haven't lived under a rock or so.

blah blah blah blah linux whining blah

In seriousness this is a cool tool.

Works once you install (debian) mono-runtime, libmono-corlib2.0-cil, and libmono-winforms2.0-cil.

Just adding that to the readme.txt would be good enough.

With my main computer 11 years old, kept because it can run old DOS progs and has a parallel port that works with several copier devices, yes, it is kind of in a self-imposed sublithication

I've uploaded a slightly updated version now. I've changed some bitmap-init-code so I hope the graphics-part works better(??).
Please let me know how it goes.

Still not properly working...

A friend has managed to recreate the problem, however it only appears when running the exe, not when running the sourcecode directly from Visual Studio. Very very odd.

EDIT: Problem located and hopefully fixed (new version uploaded). I can't explain the bug, currently it looks like it's related to the .NET framework itself.

I've updated this tool to v1.0 now, many fixes/bugfixes has been made. I hope there's more people than me that finds it interesting in snooping around in these ancient ROMs.