Using an old .dat file to apply a ROM 'hack'?

indecks

YEEEARS ago, someone named Allo released a .dat file for the arcade version of X-Men Children of the Atom. What the file did was make the game feel and play more like Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men Vs SF, etc etc. I always thought it was just a hacked ROM but it turns out it was a .dat file. It was a really cool hack-like mod that made the game feel less 'stiff.'

After some searching, I found the .dat file available for download (his Geocities site was still up - http://www.geocities.ws/allo.rm/), but back then it was used in the Nebula emulator. I'm using the FBA core on my retropie set up to run CPS2 games. Does the Retropie version of the emulator use these types of files? I'd like to try and play the game with this 'hack' enabled again.

mitu

This looks like a cheat file, though it's a bit more extensive and the author refers to it as a 'mod'. It seems is specifically created for the Nebula emulator, so it won't work with other emulators.

You can use Cheats in RetroArch - see the Cheats doc page. I see that RetroArch includes a cheat file for the game you mention (xmcota), but looking at the .dat you mention, it certainly doesn't include all the features present there.

fCIbX6r1uN

I was curious about trying this out.

You can download Nebula from their website as mentioned by the mod. The version of xmcota it requires is the same MAME 0.78 requires; place it in Roms.

You can run Nebula in Wine (but make sure you're in the same directory as Nebula); wine nebula.exe xmcota launches xmcota directly.

The mod is loaded as a cheat as @mitu says; from what I can tell it uses conditional logic to set specific addresses to specific values.

For example:

FF40A3==4,FF44A3==4,FF4065==A0,FF404E!=4,FF40A1!=22,FF453B!=FF,FFFFF2==0,FFFFF2,1,FF404E==4,FFFFF2,0,FF4065!=A0,FFFFF2,0,FF40A1==22,FFFFF2,0,FF44A3==4,FF40A3==4,FF4465==A0,FF444E!=4,FF44A1!=22,FF413B!=FF,FFFFF3==0,FFFFF3,1,FF444E==4,FFFFF3,0,FF4465!=A0,FFFFF3,0,FF44A1==22,FFFFF3,0

I don't know if libretro cheats support that kind of logic, but if it does it should be simple to port over.

(Edited to fix my interpretation of the mod.)

indecks

Yeah I was able to find the right ROM (at least for the Euro parent) and get it running in Nebula on my windows PC. Is there any way to get this running via Wine, but in Retropie? I know I'm talking out of my ass here, I have no idea of the complexity of Retropie/Retroarch, etc. But I figured it was a decent question to ask :D

fCIbX6r1uN

@indecks I should have clarified when I was making that post that I was running wine on an i386 machine; I was just excited to write down how to try the mod out :)

I think because it's an i386 binary and Raspberry Pi is ARM, wine won't be able to run it; you'd need something else. ~~I haven't tried it but maybe box86 would work?~~ (Edit: box86 definitely don't work because it only emulates Linux i386 binaries, not Windows ones.)

indecks

@mitu

Again I wanna preface this with "indecks is talking out his ass" but, would it be possible to open up say xmcota.cht in notepad, and copy/paste everything that is in the Allo file? I havent tried it only because I don't have my PiCade put together, Im currently using my pi for something else until I get a spare.

mitu

@indecks The format is totally different, it will not work.
Unrelated, but we try to keep this forum an all ages place, can you try and 'talk' normally ? Thank you.