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News: Apr 27 2010

A large refresh of The Vault is currently underway. Here's a little background on what's changing and why. The NES Vault was first started thirteen years ago way back in 1997. Back then NESticle was king and it ran in DOS, which meant it could only read eight letter file names. Most other emulators ran in DOS too, so all the games in the NES Vault were given eight letter names. Since then, DOS emulators have fallen out of favor (no surprise) so there's no need to keep such short file names. One part of the refresh is to update every game to use a long filename, most of which will come from GoodNES. The NES Vault was originally built by collecting ROMs from various sites, then along came a tool called GoodNES. It allowed you to list which games you had and determine if it was a "good" copy. This was very helpful in identifying missing games or replacing bad copies with good ones. There was also a companion tool which could fix NES headers to their "correct" values. While this was very helpful it sadly rendered Jigsaw's Gallery obsolete, so that part of the site was closed. This was all completed back in 2000, however those "correct" headers have changed over the years in subsequent releases. The header fixer is now included in GoodNES, so the next part of the refresh is to update all of the headers that have changed over the years. The next part was rather controversial at once time, but after setting eight letter file names, using GoodNES to locate missing games and replace bad copies, and then fixing all incorrect headers, some new tools and emulators came along which supported a new title field. Using one of these tools, every game in The NES Vault was reviewed and it's title added to the game. It turns out this title was part of the new iNES 2.0 header. Unfortunately this new format was not adopted by the community and it caused headaches for the GoodNES folks, however it didn't seem to cause any harm to the games themself. Since the custom titles won't show in any modern emulators, and likely never will, the iNES 2.0 headers are being removed from all games. The final part of the refresh is to update all of the English translations. There have been many Japanese games translated to English over the years but most have never found their way into The Vault, and some that have need to be updated. The translator's readme files will also be added if they are missing. The ultimate goal is for The NES Vault to once again have a perfect copy of every game released in the US as well as every complete Japanese to English translation. So that pretty much covers the four parts of the NES Vault refresh. Much of it is already complete and the translations are currently being reviewed alphabetically. Everything should be finished gradually over the course of the next few weeks.