Decreasing rom size?

I couldnt find any other section to put this in exactly because its not much sonic related but more related to all roms.


How do i detect and delete any excess empty space in the end of a rom to decrease its size? (Dont post answers like winzip or winrar because i have my reasons for asking a question such as this)


Trash if topic is incorrect in any way.

 

You have to disable ROM padding. Rating by your wish to reduce the size, I'm guessing you already did this, but it's always worth mentioning it. You do this by removing a certain line in build.bat, requesting the program ROMPAD.EXE to, well, pad the ROM for you.


If, however, you still have any extra wasted space that does not come from padding, I can't really help you until I see excactly how your ROM looks like.

 

im not talking about sonic rom hacks. im talking about roms downloaded from the internet like socket that may have empty space in the end.

 

lol


I don't know, all I can think of is Zipping it.

 

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but you just open the ROM with a hex editor, go to the end, and if there's any empty space/padding at the end, then delete it.


Though you may need to fix the checksum afterwards.

 

Just editing the build.bat then putting a REM before the rompad.exe will solve the problem.

 

For the record, ROM padding is generally needed (not necessarily for hardware or emulation's sake), but some flash cart software may require it (or at least require some form of cleaning of the rom before dumping), my one for example refuses to write the end of the ROM if not padded correctly, say the ROM is 90356, the software may only write 80000 unless padded to 100000.


As far as I know, no emulators require the rom is to be padded, however, most emulators do have ZIP support, I recommend as mentioned before to either ZIP the rom or open with a hexadecimal editor and physically search for the end padded section and remove.