Activision Anthology Remix Edition

[DrAzathoth]

The encryption of the ROMs is different than the PS2 version; they are all in SPN archives instead. Unfortunately, I have found no info as to how to extract the ROMs from these archives. The only solution I've discovered is to dump the ROMs from memory, but that is extremely tedious and prone to error. Furthermore, it doesn't allow me to dump the unused ROMs such as Rampage. Can anyone help me out at all? It would be greatly appreciated!

[shawngmc]

I just ordered a copy of this a day or two ago to look at. I'll let you know what I find. :)

[DrAzathoth]

@shawngmc, thank you so much! This one has been bugging me for a while.

[shawngmc]

So, this collection is a bit awkward:

• The installer seems to fail with a "An installation support file could not be installed – catastrophic failure" message. This seems to likely be some sort of InstallShield version mismatch. Per https://jarrodstech.net/fix-an-installation-support-file-could-not-be-installed-catastrophic-failure/, that can be worked around by renaming/removing the InstallShield support folder.
• The collection launcher fails in an annoying way. The 'Start Game' button closes the launcher with no errors. Going into the folder and running the aare.exe, it complains that the CD needs to be present. (On my main Windows box, I'm having issues with my USB DVD drive; in the end, I copied the CD from a Mac, but then the CD isn't present on my Windows box!)
• In the game's folder, the rpf1 and rpf2 folders seem to have a .spn file for each game. These look to be a proprietary format. They may be encrypted but they aren't random; each seems to have multiple 40-56 byte sections of an 8 byte string repeated 5-7 times (8D B0 C1 79 D5 93 A6 4C). This is likely padding. Given that an Atari ROM is typically 2-16K, these 500K+ SPN files likely contain things like manuals, box art, etc. Unfortunately, I don't see anything that looks like an Atari ROM (then again, Atari ROMs are headerless and not easy to identify).
• I did find this: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336118-how-to-extract-roms-from-the-activision-anthology-for-pc-and-a-request-for-info-on-the-included-roms/ It's a non-trivial process. It's done on Linux via Wine, but could be done on Windows with another memory dumping tool. The problem is that it would be tedious, requires a fair amount of technical expertise, and might be bypassing encryption (technically illegal in the US due to the DMCA).

Not giving up yet, but I need to come up with some other approaches. First thing is to dig out a Windows machine with a working CD drive.

[DrAzathoth]

@shawngmc, if you need any info, just let me know as the collection works perfectly fine on my Windows PC.

To bypass the DVD check, I just mount an ISO I made of the DVD. Much less annoying than to pop in the DVD every time I want to run it.

As for how I created memory dumps on Windows, I used Task Manager after I launched the game I wanted. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to batch extract the ROMs like the person did on AtariAge as the locations were different in every dump for me.