Help playing .FDS games on VirtuaNES

[OldSchoolGamer]

Yes the bios that I have works on all of the nes emus that I have.

IIRC, a while ago, you had told me that you don't have VirtuaNES or Nintendulator downloaded on your computer. So what I meant was did you / could you download both of those emulators and see if FDS games will run on those two emulators. I ask you because we have identical computers. I did everything I was supposed to do, and it doesn't work...

I downloaded the emulators from their official website. I downloaded and tested the disksys.rom BIOS from multiple websites. I downloaded and tested various FDS ROMs from multiple websites and with various sets (GoodSet, No-Intro). I've placed the BIOS in the correct directory. I made sure it was named properly. I tried putting everything in a new folder just in case.

And it still doesn't work.

[ReyVGM]

I have virtuanes and it works fine. So I don't know really what's happening on your end.

[lee4]

I am trying to play .fds games on VirtuaNES. I have placed the DiskSys.rom file in the same directory as the VirtuaNES executable. But when I try to load a .fds game, I get an error that says "Unsupported Format". Can anyone please help?

your disksys.rom file need be 40KB not 8KB

[OldSchoolGamer]

your disksys.rom file need be 40KB not 8KB

I didn't realize there was a 40KB BIOS file. I checked the BIOS I was using and it was 8KB. So I was excited to download the 40KB BIOS and test it out. But unfortunately, it still didn't work . Nintendulator still gives the error message of "FDS header signature not found!"

By the way, the 8KB BIOS is the "official" FDS BIOS according to nesdev.com

[rimsky82]

I didn't realize there was a 40KB BIOS file. I checked the BIOS I was using and it was 8KB. So I was excited to download the 40KB BIOS and test it out. But unfortunately, it still didn't work . Nintendulator still gives the error message of "FDS header signature not found!"

By the way, the 8KB BIOS is the "official" FDS BIOS according to nesdev.com

You want the one that's 8Kb with a CRC32 of 5E607DCF.

Also, make sure your fds roms are headered (eg. 131,016 bytes instead of 131,000). No-Intro roms are not headered. A good way to tell if it's headered is to open it up in a hex editor, and the first three bytes should read FDS.

[ReyVGM]

My bios is 8kb, doesn't have a header and it works fine with all emulators.

[rimsky82]

My bios is 8kb, doesn't have a header and it works fine with all emulators.

You want the one that's 8Kb with a CRC32 of 5E607DCF.

Also, make sure your fds roms are headered (eg. 131,016 bytes instead of 131,000). No-Intro roms are not headered. A good way to tell if it's headered is to open it up in a hex editor, and the first three bytes should read FDS.

...

[lee4]

Definitely make sure your fds file are headered

[ReyVGM]

Again, mine is not headered and it works fine. And I was mostly replying to lee4 who said that you needed the 40kb one and not the 8kb one.

[rimsky82]

Third time's a charm.

The bios file (disksys.rom) is not what needs to be headered. The disk images, the games themselves, need to be headered to work in virtualnes.

Whether or not the games need to be headered is up to the emulator. Nobody is putting a header on the bios file.

[OldSchoolGamer]

What good, simple program do you recommend that adds headers to FDS ROMs? I did a search, and I didn't see any that adds FDS headers, just iNES headers. For example: http://www.zophar.net/utilities/nesutil.html none of these mention FDS headers.

[Mezmorize]

I can't say I know anything about this subject, but this one would be worth a try:
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/nesaud/fds-spray.html

And here's a little info if you would want to attempt editing a ROM directly with a hex editor:

The FDS format (file name suffix .fds) is a way to store Famicom Disk System disk data. It consists of the following sections, in order:

    Header (16 bytes)
    Disk data (65500 * x bytes) 

The format of the header is as follows:

    0-3: Constant $46 $44 $53 $1A ("FDS" followed by MS-DOS end-of-file)
    4: Number of disk sides
    5-15: Zero filled 

Note: Most games are an even number of sides. Ports from NROM were one side. No commercial FDS game had an odd number of sides greater than 1. Disk sides comes in the following order :

    Disc 1 Side A
    Disc 1 Side B
    Disc 2 Side A
    Disc 2 Side B
    etc...

http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/F...er_Disk_System

-----

I tried this for myself, the application does indeed work.
All I did was click the start button.



And here is the comparison of the ROM before and after:

[OldSchoolGamer]

I got it working. The problem was with my ROMs being headerless. Thanks to everyone who has tried to help.