GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[S Murder]

I heard that there was this 3rd party software that you can use to back up your N64 games with if you connect your Gameshark to your PC with a serial cable. Anyone know where I could find it?

[moonraker808]

well this would be just as illegal as actually downloading roms. For this reason I think you should just download the roms, just do a quick search on google for n64 roms, or go on romhacking.net and look at their sticky that has a list of sites they have with roms.

Oh and it is illegal even if you own the game. You are only allowed to back up PC games in that way, not roms. However it is unlikely you will get caught, only the owners of the sites should be worried and they usually only are forced to remove the roms when they are asked to by the company under threat of a law suit.

What you do it up to you.
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-moonraker

[SubDrag]

Your gameshark can, if you download the "Hacked official utils". Though I can't remember it ever actually working properly, but maybe it did.

This might be it, but not sure.
http://doc.kodewerx.net/tools/n64/patch_n64_utils.zip

If that's not it, I can't find a link to it right now, but it's a hack of the official tools released by Datel.

[S Murder]

Yup, it has a "Grab ROM" option in it. Now I just need to get a serial cable. Thanks a ton.

[GE MASTER]

Okay, just as a side note... I've done the above mentioned GS method, however my Gameshark died a short time later. It takes quite a lot of time to dump and must be a heavy load on the GS. Just do it with caution. Personally after killing my GS I won't do it again. These devices are just too valuable these days.

Actually now that I think about it, I believe there is an option in GSCC utilities to dump rom or something along those lines. Select "ram edit" in the GSCC utilities and there is a rom dump option.

[zoinkity]

Actually, I dump all my own games with a GS. It is one of the easiest ways to do it. Heck, somebody dumped the 64DD IPL with one.

It does take an abysmal amount of time. There is one problem with it though. Chances are if you are using a Win XP, VISTA, and possibly 2k system most comms programs have a nasty tendency to hang. You can probably use some magical comms utility to circumvent the problem, but I've never found one of those that works well. On Win 98 it works wonderfully though.

Also, it is total nonsense to say you can create backup disks of one kind of game but not another. Read up on the fair-use regulations for your area. US copyright law does permit code can be dumped in certain conditions. In most cases it is safe to assume so long as you don't distribute content in full or part (like all of us do...) you're probably safe. Besides, it is completely impractical to enforce anything on individuals.
_________________
(\_/) Beware
(O.o) ze
(> <) Hoppentruppen!

[madlink1990]

I just bought a serial cable and a gameshark pro 3.2 for the n64, but everytime I use the N64 utilities version 3 program, it crashes when I do anything related to the cartridge. Am I doing anything wrong? Do I need a memory card?

[radorn]

I guess you are using windows 2000, xp, vista or 7 (that is: an NT kernel based windows OS).

These apps are made for 9x kernel windows (95, 98, me).
The difference is that 9x kernels allow direct access to ports like printer/parallel and serial and NT kernels are protected and you can only access them through a driver.
You could say ports are "blocked".

You need some app to "unblock" them such as UserPort
http://hem.passagen.se/tomasf/UserPort/
If you don't, any app trying to access ports "the old way" will most likely crash

[madlink1990]

radorn wrote:

I guess you are using windows 2000, xp, vista or 7 (that is: an NT kernel based windows OS). These apps are made for 9x kernel windows (95, 98, me). The difference is that 9x kernels allow direct access to ports like printer/parallel and serial and NT kernels are protected and you can only access them through a driver. You could say ports are "blocked". You need some app to "unblock" them such as UserPort http://hem.passagen.se/tomasf/UserPort/ If you don't, any app trying to access ports "the old way" will most likely crash

ok, i got the program, but now i'm confused because i'm not sure on how to run the program. am i supposed to get the hex code to grant access to the port? if so, how? because I'm not sure how to do so.

[radorn]

first, always read included documentation. there's a shiny little pdf in the program's archive. if you haven't read it, do so.

the "hex" that you have to enter is the memory range/s that correspond to the parallel/serial ports that you want to enable acess to. you can check those either from the BIOS/CMOS menu or from Window's Device Manager.
On XP you can access it by rightclicking "My Computer" -> Manage -> Device Manager -> Ports (COM & LPT)

[madlink1990]

ok, so i got it to not crash on me. I am aware of the program hanging though, so i'm not sure if i need to do something about this, but i am noticing the gameshark freeze and the LED stop moving after some time. the rom file tends to be about 4kb. should i just wait?

[madlink1990]

madlink1990 wrote:

ok, so i got it to not crash on me. I am aware of the program hanging though, so i'm not sure if i need to do something about this, but i am noticing the gameshark freeze and the LED stop moving after some time. the rom file tends to be about 4kb. should i just wait?

Allright, nevermind all that. I finally got the dumping process to work. On an unrelated note, has anybody got the grab video function to work?

[radorn]

not sure what to say. my AR died long ago and I can't try this anymore.
I know I could dump all the carts I had back then and that it was an slow process, and sometimes it did seem to stop, but I don't know if it was at 4k or what. just leave it and see what happens in an hour, for example.