A script for producing a SNESticle ISO from a Fight Night Round 2 ISO.
Fight Night Round 2 is a boxing game by Electronic Arts. The Gamecube version of which includes the SNES game Super Punch-Out!!, playable through SNES emulation. Data mining has shown that the DVD contains the strings "SNESticle" and "Copyright (c) 1997-2004 Icer Addis", suggesting that this emulator is in fact SNESticle, the much anticipated but never1 released follow-up to NESticle.
This script extracts SNESticle from a Fight Night Round 2 ISO (US version) and produces a new ISO containing just SNESticle and any SNES ROMs you care to provide. It also patches the joypad emulation to fix some issues and create a more logical button layout.
fn22snesticle.py requires Python 3. Using custom banners requires the pillow (PIL) module, but this is strictly optional.
There are quite a few options but most have sensible defaults, just check the help screen:
./fn22snesticle.py --help
The simplest (and most boring) invocation would look something like this:
./fn22snesticle.py fightnight2.iso superpunchout.iso
This will take SNESticle and the Super Punch-Out ROM directly from
fightnight2.iso and use them to produce the Gamecube ISO superpunchout.iso.
More interestingly, you can use the --rom option to include other SNES ROMs. You
can specify a single ROM file or a directory containing multiple ROMs.
./fn22snesticle.py --rom smw.sfc fightnight2.iso smw.iso
This will produce an ISO containing SNESticle and the ROM smw.sfc (whatever that
might mean). It will launch right into the game when loaded.
./fn22snesticle.py --rom myromz fightnight2.iso snesticle.iso
This will produce an ISO containing all the SNES ROMs found in the myromz
directory. More specifically, it will include at most 506 files with the
extensions sfc, smc, or fig (case insensitive). The produced ISO will load into
a ROM selection screen.
For a single-ROM ISO, it's generally a good idea to also provide the full name
of the SNES game using the --game-name option:
./fn22snesticle.py --rom smw.sfc --game-name "Swell Plumber Place" fightnight2.iso smw.iso
The game name will be written to multiple fields inside the ISO, that can be
picked up by your loader. It will also be used to generate the banner image that
shows up next to the game in most loaders. If no game name is provided, the ROM
filename will be used instead. For multi-ROM ISOs, the game name will default to
SNESticle.
When producing a multi-ROM ISO, the script will out of courtesy include Super
Punch-Out on the SNESticle ISO, by copying it from the Fight Night ISO. If you
really, really dislike Super Punch-Out, you can use the option
--no-super-punch-out to leave it out.
If you don't like the generated banners, you can provide your own, using
the --banner option:
./fn22snesticle.py fightnight2.iso superpunchout.iso --banner mybanner.png
The image file should be 96 by 32 pixels. Most common image formats are supported, but something non-lossy, like png, is strongly recommended. The pillow (PIL) module is required in order for this to work.
By default, the script patches the joypad emulation of SNESticle to remap some
buttons (see the Controller emulation section). On a multi-ROM ISO, button
mapping can be configured from the ROM selection screen, but on single-ROM ISOs
the button mapping must be configured on the command line using the --p1,
--p2, --p3, and --p4 options. The possible values for each controller are:
sensible, the default, where buttons are mapped based on physical locationliteral, maps A to A, B to B, X to X and Y to Y.off, this controller will appear to be disconnected
There is generally no need to turn controllers off, though some games, like Super Mario World, will allow two players to take turns sharing one controller if all others are unplugged:
./fn22snesticle.py --p1 literal --p2 off --p3 off --p4 off --rom smw.sfc fightnight2.iso smw.iso
There is generally no need to care about the game id option, just leave it out and hope for the best. But if you are curious, or if you think the game id is causing problems for the script or for your loader, read on.
A game ID is a six character code present on every Gamecube ISO, its structure is the following:
- A single letter identifying the console type (typically G for Gamecube).
- Two letters (or digits) identifying the game itself.
- One letter identifying the region of the game.
- Two digits (or letters) identifying the publisher.
Fight Night Round 2 (the US version) has game ID GEYE69, where 69 is the publisher code for Electronic Arts, the E before that is for US region, the initial G is for Gamecube and EY is just the unique identifier for Fight Night 2 (unique among Gamecube games published by Electronic Arts in the US that is).
Some loaders will exhibit strange behaviour unless every available ISO has a
unique game ID. For this reason, fn22snesticle.py will try to generate a unique
ID for every successfully created ISO. The format used is "ZxxE69". E69 still
means Electronic Arts and US, but to avoid collisions with existing games the
first letter is set to Z. xx is a two character alphanumeric string, essentially
a base 36 number that starts at 00 and increments by one for each generated
ISO. So after 09 comes 0A and after 0Z comes 10. After ZZ (or 1296 generated
ISOs) it prints a warning and wraps back to 00. The most recently used code is
written to a file called .fn22snesticle in your home directory. If the file is
deleted, game IDs start over at Z00E69.
You can also freely choose your own game ID using the --game-id option. This
will not affect the .fn22snesticle file.
A banner is a 96x32 bitmap plus a couple of text strings describing the game. It shows up in the Gamecube OS, as well as in loaders like Swiss and in emulators like Dolphin. a2bnr.py is a Python module that is used by fn22snesticle.py to create a Gamecube banner file from a png, but a2bnr.py can also be used as a stand-alone program to create a new banner from an image file or to modify an existing banner file. A typical invocation would look like this:
./a2bnr.py --image myimage.png mybanner.bnr
This will convert myimage.png to the banner format and write it to
mybanner.bnr. If mybanner.bnr already exists, this will only overwrite the
bitmap portion of the file, leaving the text strings intact. Similarly, it is
possible to replace just (a subset of) the text strings in an existing banner
file:
./a2bnr.py --game-name "My game" --developer "I made this" someoldbanner.bnr
This will overwrite the game name and developer fields of someoldbanner.bnr
without touching the bitmap or the other text strings.
When creating a new bnr file, the --image option is required but everything
else is optional. a2bnr.py will accept any image format that pillow can
understand.
The ROM selection screen should be fairly self-explanatory. Choose a ROM by moving the arrow up and down, then press Start to run it. If you have a long list, you can press right or left to move to the next or previous page respectively. Press Z to go to the Preferences menu. Currently the only settings available are the button mapping settings for the four controllers. Use the A button to switch between the three possible values for each controller. Press Z again to go back to the ROM menu. When you are in a game, you can return to the ROM selection menu at any time by resetting your Gamecube, but do note that you will lose all progress in the game you were playing (and the controller settings will be reset).
Up to four controllers are supported.
SNESticle within Fight Night maps the Gamecube buttons to SNES buttons in a very literal way, ie A on the Gamecube controller becomes A on the SNES controller. This works for Super Punch-Out but is useless for most games, so by default the script patches the code to map buttons based on physical locations instead:
| GC button | SNES button |
|---|---|
| A | B |
| B | Y |
| X | A |
| Y | X |
| Start | Start |
| Z | Select |
Only NTSC ROMs are supported. Compatibility is generally good, with minor glitches in some games, and there seems to be no support for external chips like the DSP or Super FX (ie, no Mario Kart, and no Star Fox). Games that do not work at all (and files that are not even SNES ROMs) will typically crash the emulator. When that happens, there is no other recourse than turning your Gamecube off and on again.
More information on this project can be found at https://dataswamp.org/~josk/snesticle/
Footnotes
-
Except it has now been released: https://github.com/iaddis/snesticle ↩