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Quite funny, even if the PC-Engine CD/TurboGrafx-CD had a lot (And I mean A LOT) of games, the Wii's Virtual Console just had little (33 in Japan, 13 in USA and Europe). However, if that's a good or bad thing is optional, what I want to know is... Why no one hasn't ever cared that much in getting these games to be playable on emulators (Mostly Mednafen, you'll see why later)?

Like, they can be extracted, but the files aren't compatible at all, the audio is in a format emulators can't play them well, etc. And what's the .HCD format? A glorified .CUE? Anyway, I will post what I think they do, it will be very innacurate, but is just what I think.

First of all, how is the emulator's files handled? For Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, these are:

Well, what the hell are these? Config.ini seems ovbious, including the necessary files the emulator can handle, from overscan, to number of controllers compatible with it, etc. Home and home_nosave.csv... If I'm not wrong (Which I may be) just has messages related to the controller, game, etc., like controller disconnection or that.

The .HCD file, that goddam thing, well, it acts like the CD's .CUE files, handling the information of how the data of the "disc" is managed, except metadata. Opening it, you can find:

The heck is this? Well, the first and second are the track number and the data type respectively, saying it is Audio? Or it is Data?

KMCD3005_01.ogg, KMCD3005_02.bin and so on are the actual data the file reads, normally, inside the "rom", it lacks the last .BIN and the first .OGG files (Not important, the first audio file is the disc warning, while the last file tends to be a copy of the data files).

The numbers after all of these seem to be the frames to read... I may be wrong. Also, at difference of a .CUE, that fails if data specidied is missing, this one seems to ignore them.

Now, the .BIN files are compressed, but I don't know what kind of compression is. Extracting the RAM dump with an emulator shows that it gets decompressed, but the style doesn't match a lot a regular dump of the game, and more if it was modified to be played. And no, doesn't seems to be LZ77. And "forcing" it into a custom file, nope, doesn't read as a game, and just acts as a CD-Audio.

Ok, after all that verbose, the savedata.tpl will be excluded for now, again, no idea of what it is? SysCard3P.pce is the BIOS for it! Yes! You can use it! It is not a match with their own card, because it is modified to press the "Run" button automatically, rather than letting the player to do it. I don't know if it has more changes, outside being the Region-Free Japanse card (Even for US disc games).

The .OGG files is the audio, compressed in OGG Vorbis, compressed as heck (Around 64 kbps!!!), and according to Foobar2000, with "BS, Lancer, aoTuV b5, build 20061024". One can say "I'll copy to my disc dump", but no, the sample rate is 48000Hz, not compatible at all with Mednafen, so, for the use, needs to be converted to 44100Hz.

For now, that's all, wish someone can get more info of this to at least preserve the games, as it is still used uo to the TurboGrafx-16 Mini!

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