Wh-- where's my stuff?

I'm mourning a little today. I lost a whole bunch of ROMs.

I'm not sure how it happened, actually. In fact, I might have lost them before on my last hard drive snafu and just didn't realize that it took my ROMs down with it, so, I'm mourning AGAIN for my data loss.

I had every single GB and GBC game dumped. No, you don't understand. Every. Single. Cartridge. Ever. Produced. Like, did you know Super Mario Land 2 had three different versions? Pokemon Yellow had three different versions? Other games had multiple versions, too. They're essentially the same game but with slightly more optimized code, slightly more fixed, another release for a different save memory spec, another release for Player's Choice, etc etc etc. I had it sorted by platform (GB,SGB,Dual GB/GBC, GBC), sorted by territory, everything. All verified I had a raw dump and a trimmed dump for each rom.

And now it's gone, or, rather, I just realized it's gone. I mean, yeah, I could download them again but it'll never be as nice.

What caused me to reach this realization? I pulled my flash carts out of storage. I had driver issues and spent the last few days working it out. Literally a few days.

The trick with flash carts is that the companies releasing them try to hide away from public scrutiny. Thank goodness there are underground communities that hold reputation above all else so we can keep track of what sucks and what doesn't. (I remember a bunch of Flash2Advance clones out there that were really shitty, and PocketHeaven was the first place to really detail how to spot them in the wild.)

Turns out the drivers don't work under XP like they used to and I couldn't uninstall them because of the way XP shadows system files and to make a long story short my broken laptop turned out to be the key to get the program to write GB and GBC games on it so I can play them with the native GBC bridge. Now, the laptop is broken and the screen gives me a headache, but it works at least. Writing GBA games on the flash card with alternate programs works wonderfully so I'm not too upset.

So I go to set up my GBC games and I realize I can't find them. I do a global search on my machine and, BZZZ, gone.

Please please, a moment of silence. Too bad I don't have the time to redownload everything soon. Maybe in a few weeks.