Perhaps someone else will help you directly, but I believe it is better if you understand what the various terms you are throwing around actually mean.
The file that you downloaded is an archive file. An archive file is a file that contains a bunch of other files, wrapped up into a single package (the archive file). Visually you can think of it as a bucket of files or a book of files. You take a file out of the bucket ("extract" the file from the bucket) in order to use that file. In your case, you have an archive of files, at least one of which is probably a ROM file. In order to extract the file, you need a program that can recognize the file as an archive file (rather than just another ordinary file) and perform the extraction of the specific ROM file that you are looking for. Windows comes with a program that will automatically do this for ZIP archive format, but you can find programs on the internet that will do it for ZIP as well as other archive formats (rar, tar.gz, etc...). One such program is 7zip (
7-Zip ).
What is a ROM file? A ROM file is a Read-Only Memory file. What the fuck does that mean? You can think of it as a file that contains a bunch of instructions. In your case, the ROM file contains instructions of a particular game (how the game should look, what is on the screen, how the player or players interact, the levels of the game... everything related to that game). In fact, every program on your computer is simply a file of instructions. The difference is that your other programs (pc games, notepad, whatever) have instructions for your PC's Operating System (such as Windows), while the ROM that you have has instructions for a GBC, NOT a PC. This presents a problem and requires a program called an emulator.
What is an emulator? An emulator is a program that emulates an operating system or hardware (GBC). In your situation, you want an emulator that will act like it is a GBC. You can think of an emulator as a translator. The emulator takes the instructions of your ROM that are written for the GBC and translates them into instructions for your PC's operating system (it actually does more than this, but perhaps I will explain that later). As a result, you can see / interact with the game on your computer.
To review:
An archive is a file that contains a bunch of other files. There are different types of archives (zip, rar, ...), but they all do the same thing: act as a container for many files. You need a file archiver tool in order to extract a file from an archive file.
A ROM file is a file that contains instructions on how to do something. Unfortunately, the instructions are written for a different device (like being written in some strange and different language that your computer simply cannot understand). In order to translate those instructions so that your computer can understand them, you need an emulator.
An emulator is a program that can translate the instructions found in your ROM. You can run an emulator program and have it load or open the ROM file, at which point it will begin to emulate the system that the ROM file was originally written for. Since each system is different (a Super Nintendo is very different from a Game Boy for example), you need an emulator that will pretend to be the specific system that you are trying to load a ROM from. This is why there are Nintendo emulators, Super Nintendo emulators, Game Boy emulators, and so on...
Hopefully that will help you understand what is going on and will probably help you to troubleshoot your problem by knowing what you are doing. I tried to simplify things as much as possible in order to provide you a basic understanding of what is happening.
07-01-2008, 04:08 PM
Linear Mode
