search

farmerbb / RED-Project

ROM Extraction Documentation Project
197 stars 10 forks source link

Metal Slug 1, 2, 3 and X on GOG #72

Open ccriddler opened 1 year ago

ccriddler commented 1 year ago

1. Links https://www.gog.com/en/game/metal_slug https://www.gog.com/en/game/metal_slug_2 https://www.gog.com/en/game/metal_slug_3 https://www.gog.com/en/game/metal_slug_x

After running the installers for these games, you can find their respective arcade romsets in game/mslug*.zip. You'll also need the game/neogeo.zip romset in order for the game to run.

I tested each of these games with MAME (Current) and Final Burn Neo in RetroArch, and they all boot and play right out of the box.

2. Dump Accuracy Note I'm a noob when it comes to arcade emulation, so I'm not sure if these are perfectly accurate dumps of the original files. Here's what's contained within the GOG version of metalslugx.zip:

Screenshot from 2022-12-21 18-55-37

I ran a diff comparison on the zipped rom files with another set I found on archive.org, and they all came back as perfect matches. The only difference was the file extensions being .bin instead of .c1, .p1, etc. Despite this, RetroArch still complains that it's a "patched romset." This might just be a RetroArch issue, but I wanted to point it out.

kjetil-f commented 1 year ago

All of the NeoGeo games from GOG can be extracted, but some of them are a bit well hidden. Using 7Zip I was able to find all of the ROMs.

Bad-Acetabulum commented 1 year ago

I got these for free from Amazon Games will this same method work?

ccriddler commented 1 year ago

I got these for free from Amazon Games will this same method work?

Short answer: no, but it might be possible with some tinkering.

If you decompress the .apk (I'm using the Metal Slug X version for this), you won't find the same *.zip rom files which GOG provides. The closest thing is the file res/raw/main.zip:

Screenshot from 2022-12-28 12-22-36

I think the original files are in here somewhere. mslugx_game_z80 is an exact match of 250-s1.s1 from the GOG version. But the rest of the files are sized and named completely differently. MAME is very picky about having the exact right files, so the apk version won't work out of the box. Someone would need to make a script which extracts out the original data (if it's there).