Finally got GameShark N64 dumping working under Linux

Hi, after my earlier plans http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...n-consistent-successful-N64-dumps-w-GameShark didn't work quite the way I had hoped (yes you can dump N64 games with the GameShark under XP, but it's very fragile and highly-luck based), I decided to try to get the dumping process working under Linux.

After many tries in the past, I have finally succeeded in having the gscc tool recognize my parallel port configuration, and then was able to dump a copy of Army Men: Sarge's Heroes. Both ROMs (the one dumped in Windows and the one dumped in Linux) are identical (md5 matches for both).

Not sure how useful this actually is, but it's something I wanted to try doing, and am glad it actually worked (and the first time too!).

Steps:
Unlike with the DexDrive and the serial port, I'm less certain of how many of these need to be done, but I'm pretty confident I know which change made things work finally.

1. Set up the parallel port: sudo chmod a+rw /dev/parport0 && sudo chmod a+rw /dev/lp0
2. Create a symbolic link in ~/.wine/dosdevices with the name of the device: ln -s /dev/lp0 lpt1 *or* ln -s /dev/parport0 lpt1
3. Add this key to the Wine registry: "HKCU\Software\Wine\VDM\ppdev"
4. Add this string in the ppdev key: "378" with value "/dev/parport0" for LPT1 (I'm pretty sure this is what finally made everything work)
5. Run winecfg, and add gscc.exe as a Win 98 application (Win95 may also work, but definitely nothing higher than WinME)
6. You can now run gscc.exe using wine gscc.exe.

After this, you should be able to use any feature of the program- I've only checked the Cartridge dumping feature.
I'm planning to try and see if I can get other parallel cards and adapters detected, and use

Hope someone finds this useful!

 

Hey, I am finding this very useful, what flavor of linux are you running? This might sound strange but I'm looking into dumping ROMS onto the N64 (Imagine hooking the N64 to the PC via Parallel and loading the ROM off there), do you know if this is possible?

And sorry for gravedigging, there's just not too many posts like this

 

You can write to memory but there's nothing to load a whole game to unless you have some kind of flash cart. ROM maps to memory and resources only extract to RAM as needed (think: loading levels and such). Traditionally resource data stayed on the ROM and was accessed during run time as if it was memory but compression was necessary for most N64 games and there was no intermediary storage to decompress to.