this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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Emulation - Retro Gaming In Style

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A community for discussing emulation and preservation of retro games. This community is intended for discussing the art of emulation, the tooling involved and retro gaming in general; it is not intended as a dump of ROM files.

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A bit of a YSK for noobs (like me).

I was setting up the RG35XX-SP with Knulli last night. They have an excellent little tool in the menus for checking for any missing bios files for the emulators. A few of the files I couldn't find anywhere, but I had similar (but not exactly) named files. For example, a DS emulation bios I was missing was dsi_bios7.bin but I had biosdsi7.bin.

Amazingly, the (I guess Batocera) developers include an 'MD5' hash of the required files in the message with each file name, so I was able to confirm these are actually the same files. eg for the file dsi_bios7.bin the MD5 was given as 559dae4ea78eb9d67702c56c1d791e81.

If you're not a software developer, you might not be familiar with hashes. They are basically a big number computed from every byte in a file such that if two files have the same hash, for practical purposes, the files are exactly the same.

To find the MD5 of a file in mac or Linux you just type md5 <filename> in the terminal (ed: md5sum <filename> on Linux - thanks @[email protected] ), or for little files like these, just drop them in an online MD5 calculator.

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[–] lath 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

A real noob would have assumed those files were the same and renamed them from the start.

Only a newbie with the desire to do things right would bother to check.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

To find the MD5 of a file in mac or Linux you just type md5 <filename> in the terminal

Not sure if it's different on Mac or other distros, but for me on Linux Mint it's actually md5sum <filename>. Surprisingly, that wasn't a listed suggestion when trying md5 --help - just offers 'mdp, mda, cd5, mdu' to install with apt.

[–] thirdBreakfast 2 points 2 days ago

My bad - thanks for the correction!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

looks at screenshot

Wait, we need BIOS files for GB and GBC?

When did that happen?

[–] RegalPotoo 2 points 2 days ago

Iirc it's only used for showing the logo on boot

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Great information to share. Great link too that works for all types of hashes, not just MD5.