locking Sonic 3 onto Sonic & Knuckles

RetrOkada

Hello,

Specific to Megadrive, was wondering whether there is a way to lock the Sonic 3 ROM onto Sonic & Knuckles in RetroPie?

I understand that combined ROMs are available. However, currently all of my games have artwork and metadata attached, thanks to the scraper. Presumably, the scraper wouldn't find anything for a Sonic 3 & Knuckles ROM, leaving a blank, unidentified game in my collection. Kind of a shame really. Obviously separate ROMs for Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles would be able to be scraped.

Is there a way to lock the two ROMs together, or is a combined ROM the only option? Is it perhaps best to use the Sonic 3 Complete ROM? I've heard positive things about it.

Any help appreciated, cheers.

simpleethat

If your scraping source is screenscraper.fr you should get results for the locked on games, That's how I got mine.

mitu

@RetrOkada What exactly do you mean by 'lock' ? What game are you referring to when you - Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckes or a ROM hack ? Best to give the exact ROM or game name.

RetrOkada

@mitu Hey, thanks for responding.

So, I was referring to the lock-on technology which Sega implemented on the Genesis/Megadrive.

To my knowledge, it was only used for Sonic & Knuckles. There was a compartment on top of the S&K cartridge which could accept other mega drive games. If you inserted Sonic 3, it combined the two games, essentially creating one massive game, containing the zones from both Sonic 3 & Sonic & Knuckles.

What I was wondering is whether there is a way to implement the lock-on technology for the Sonic 3 and S&K ROMs in RetroPie? If I obtain a premed ROM, my suspicion is that the Scraper won't be able to fetch metadata for it.

Does that help at all?

Cheers.

RetrOkada

@simpleethat Oh okay:) thank you, that's perfect!

I'll have a try at uploading that to my Pi later tonight and see how I get on.

Thanks again.

simpleethat

@RetrOkada the ROMs that exist out there that are Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 are scrapable. I know that screenscraper.fr as a source will return results for them and I believe thegamesdb does as well, but it's been a while.

mitu

@RetrOkada Sure, thanks for the expanation, I thought that 'locking' meant something related entirely to the gamelist and the lack of artwork for the game.

As @simpleethat said, the game is present in Screenscraper (as a ROM combo - https://screenscraper.fr/gameinfos.php?plateforme=1&gameid=1185), so it should be scrape-able. I think that if your ROM file is one of these you might find it with the internal ES scraper, otherwise I think Skyscraper should find it by checksum. Try it and report back if it doesn't work.

RetrOkada

Just as an update, I was able to get it to work. Strangely, "SCREENSCRAPER, wouldn't find it, but "THEGAMESDB" sorted it.

Thanks everyone for your help:)

Cheers.

simpleethat

@RetrOkada I'm glad you got it working! I'm not sure why it didn't find them on the screenscraper.fr, that's definitely how I scraped mine. Of course I have noticed sometimes it can be a weird source. Just out of curiosity did you use the built in ES scraper or Skyscraper or some other scraper?

RetrOkada

@simpleethat Hey sorry for the late reply.

I’m just using the built in ES scraper ... nice and accessible. Has managed to scrape all of my games, albeit sometimes necessitating changing the source.