Third Status Report, second official one.

This morning I had the bad feeling that the ROM corruption is even worse and more subtle than I thought. But, that did not turn out to be true since I'm an idiot.

I started the whole process again and this time, I actually pieced together the sound subroutine that I simply copied and pasted yesterday. And, yeah, turned out to be wise to do so. I also began to write a extensive digital notesheet for EVERYTHING I look into and compare 'n stuff in this ROM. This slowed down my process in an enormous way, but I don't feel comfortable without - I hate to figure out something for the second time because I did not take notes the first time, especially in this SNES stuff which always makes me feel like I'm at the limit of my mental capacity (I don't think it's actually that hard, I think I just put myself always under too much pressure for no reason on this topic).

So: Everything I did today was that Sound thingy, added the two skips for the Validity Check again and did the subroutine that I left out yesterday. I also began the next subroutine ahead, and it is about twice the size of everything I've done so far.

I spare you the lament that I wish I had a second or maybe even third screen so I could have all note pads (plus Youtube) on screen. This would be more comfortable, because I would not have to browse through all open windows to find the one I'm looking for. It's always the last one I check, anyways.

The non-sense I wrote about this morning happened this way:

In the sound subroutine, there was something marked that clearly must be the program for the sound chip. And, there was written (ACTIVATE BOOK ILLUSTRATION): "For this, go to the beginning of that chapter". So I went to the beginning of chapter 2, found a lot of text, compared it to the text in the complete, old edition (without actually checking its content), realized that there were several differences, and panicked. Either these differences where slight updates on the sound engine, or, more likely, broken bits in the part of bank $C2 of which I thought it wasn't affected.

Well, it took me a while to read a few "sentences" before that, and I realized, that the "book" refered to another chapter; another bank. Namely: bank $CC. Or $EC in the retail version. So I checked that, compared these two code segments, and well, they looked perfectly identical.

The things at the start of bank $C2 is some of the "abridged" stuff, and some subroutines that are specific for the Satellaview. So it is logical that they don't match everything in the retail version. Furthermore, I realized that my fixed ROM already executes some of that code in question and works without problems. Much ado about nothing, then.

The positive thing is that the data loss on this ROM seems to have hit the right bank. Nothing of actual "artistic value" is lost. It seems only the toolshed as burned down, not the gallery. So far, it looks like a very, very big part can be restored from the retail ROM and you can always be quite sure that it actually was like the restoration.
If the graphics were harmed, you'ld always ask yourself - were they maybe a bit altered from the retail version? The same would be true if it would have affected the music, or the game mechanics or so. But so far, you can be pretty sure, that if everything will work in the end, the ROM isn't so far from the Original.

Well, that's my hope so far. We'll see how it will turn out in the end.

By the way, I don't think I'll have that much time for this the next week, and the next weekend is also completely occupied by other things. So... we'll see when and how this will go on.