Extracting Cowabunga Collection

[Bad-Acetabulum]

Will this method work on the newly released Cowabunga collection?

[farmerbb]

I installed it from Steam and all the assets are packed into an assets.pie file, which I haven't seen used in other collections.

[TheNametag]

Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 and Disney Afternoon Collection both use data.pie.

[themazingness]

Not sure when this happened, but it looks like Digital Eclipse has changed how the game assets are archived. The ones I've checked were once .mbundle and are now .pie.*** This means the wiki instructions for these are now obsolete and defunct.

Edit: I was mistaken it had been something else (see comments below). On Sun, Sep 4, 2022, 7:35 PM TheNametag @.> wrote:

Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 and Disney Afternoon Collection both use data.pie.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/farmerbb/RED-Project/issues/46#issuecomment-1236467641, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AQJBAFTVC2TUOE23AX22WN3V4VE7FANCNFSM6AAAAAAQAWQXGU . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: @.***>

[Computerlabrat]

Is it possible the file extension was just changed to mess with people and that they could just be rebranded mbundles?

[TheNametag]

That's odd. #16 mentions the data.pie file back in March 20, 2021.

[iGom]

Yep, it's always been data.pie file for Mega Man Collection https://steamdb.info/depot/363441/history/

[the16bitgamer]

The Github project https://github.com/Masquerade64/Cowabunga is capable of extracting the assets.pie, and the NES, SNES, Genesis and Game Boy games works in emulators. However the Arcade roms appear to be in their on proprietary format. Based on the file size they appear to have all the data however how to convert them to be usable in MAME or other emulators is another question.

[Bad-Acetabulum]

I keep getting this error running that script

cowabunga64.exe input assets.pie thread 'main' panicked at 'called Result::unwrap() on an Err value: Os { code: 2, kind: NotFound, message: "The system cannot find the file specified." }', src\main.rs:15:39 stack backtrace: 0: 0x7ff7a069ae3f - 1: 0x7ff7a06ae37a - 2: 0x7ff7a0698459 - 3: 0x7ff7a069cfdb - 4: 0x7ff7a069cc55 - 5: 0x7ff7a069d589 - 6: 0x7ff7a069d48d - 7: 0x7ff7a069b7c7 - 8: 0x7ff7a069d169 - 9: 0x7ff7a06b8715 - 10: 0x7ff7a06b87b3 - 11: 0x7ff7a0634230 - 12: 0x7ff7a06387d6 - 13: 0x7ff7a063510c - 14: 0x7ff7a0693c6b - 15: 0x7ff7a0634967 - 16: 0x7ff7a06b3660 - 17: 0x7ffcd71f7034 - BaseThreadInitThunk 18: 0x7ffcd8b826a1 - RtlUserThreadStart

[the16bitgamer]

It's trying to make a zip folder. Have the output point to a file which doesn't exist

[Bad-Acetabulum]

Thanks got it to work!

[themazingness]

Awesome! Anyone know how to work this thing?

On Wed, Oct 5, 2022, 7:15 AM 16bitvirtualstudios @.***> wrote:

The Github project https://github.com/Masquerade64/Cowabunga is capable of extracting the assets.pie, and the NES, SNES, Genesis and Game Boy games works in emulators. However the Arcade roms appear to be in their on proprietary format. Based on the file size they appear to have all the data however how to convert them to be usable in MAME or other emulators is another question.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/farmerbb/RED-Project/issues/46#issuecomment-1268420725, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AQJBAFQIRZU4W2R5BFYNO6DWBV5OZANCNFSM6AAAAAAQAWQXGU . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.***>

[Bad-Acetabulum]

Awesome! Anyone know how to work this thing? … On Wed, Oct 5, 2022, 7:15 AM 16bitvirtualstudios @.> wrote: The Github project https://github.com/Masquerade64/Cowabunga is capable of extracting the assets.pie, and the NES, SNES, Genesis and Game Boy games works in emulators. However the Arcade roms appear to be in their on proprietary format. Based on the file size they appear to have all the data however how to convert them to be usable in MAME or other emulators is another question. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#46 (comment)>, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AQJBAFQIRZU4W2R5BFYNO6DWBV5OZANCNFSM6AAAAAAQAWQXGU . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.>

1. you need to have the rust and cargo installed from here --> https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/getting-started/installation.html
2. Once that is done download the Zip from https://github.com/Masquerade64/Cowabunga
3. Click on the build.bat file and it will build a cowabunga.exe file
4. open CMD (on windows)
5. cd or (change directory) to the cowabunga.exe file. the command is cd
6. Should look like cowabunga.exe (your path to the assets.pie) (path to where you want it with .zip file at the end)
7. Example: \Users\test\Downloads\Cowabunga-main\Cowabunga-main> cowabunga.exe "T:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\TMNT Cowabunga\assets.pie" C:\Users\test\Downloads\Cowabunga-main\Cowabunga-main\Test.zip
8. Then open the zip and click on the roms folder
9. Roms are listed by system and file endings need to be changed to the appropriate .nes, .gb, .sfc etc

Good luck hope that helps. I'm not code savvy but was able to figure this out which took me a while. Hope that helps.

[farmerbb]

The Github project https://github.com/Masquerade64/Cowabunga is capable of extracting the assets.pie, and the NES, SNES, Genesis and Game Boy games works in emulators. However the Arcade roms appear to be in their on proprietary format. Based on the file size they appear to have all the data however how to convert them to be usable in MAME or other emulators is another question.

Awesome, thanks for letting us know about this project!

Regarding the arcade games, I just added a script that will convert them into MAME format from the extracted file output: https://github.com/farmerbb/RED-Project/blob/master/ROM%20Extraction/tmnt-cc-arcade-extract.sh

The script generates tmnt.zip, tmntj.zip, and tmnt2.zip files from the extracted assets.pie, but unfortunately, all three of these fail the RAM/ROM check when running them in MAME.

[farmerbb]

☝️Updated the above extraction script to patch the ROMs so that they boot in MAME even without valid checksums.

[Computerlabrat]

Think that could work for Splatterhouse 1 on the PS3 remake?

[the16bitgamer]

Tested new script. TMNT 1 was able to boot with Retroarch Mame - Current though no intro music. Stage music works. TMNT 2 boot loops on the Ram check on Mame Current.

Both boot loop with standalone mame

[TheNametag]

The intro music was one of the things that had to be replaced for licensing issues. It's likely they stripped it from the ROM and replaced it through the emulator directly.

[farmerbb]

The intro music was one of the things that had to be replaced for licensing issues. It's likely they stripped it from the ROM and replaced it through the emulator directly.

Yep, it's stripped from the ROM and a WAV file with the new music was put in its place.

[Computerlabrat]

Okay, I've tried the script for the Cowabunga Collection with my version of the collection using Cygwin. It says line 53: 'extract-rom': not a valid identifier. Is it because I've not extracted the assets.pie? If so, is there an alternative method of extraction I can use that is Cygwin compatible as I don't want to mess with installing visual studio just to use rust and cargo for various reasons.

Edit: Okay, I've extracted it, but the same issue.

[Computerlabrat]

Okay, Cygwin (or at least my setup of it) doesn't like it when a hyphen is used in the identifier. Of course, there's lots of lines with those, so you'd need to skim through it to fix that matter.

[PW5190]

I noticed in the roms folder for the Game Boy ROMs, there were files called agb_boot.bin, cgb_boot.bin, cgb_boot_fast.bin, dmg_boot.bin, sgb_boot.bin, and sgb2_boot.bin. Are these, perhaps, bootstrap ROMs?