ROM Hack arm9.bin compression issue

[Nagato]

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[FAST6191]

Is Crystaltile2 telling you it is compressed? If so I have seen some false positives from it before ( http://gbatemp.net/threads/need-help-with-arm9-file.354906/ being one such incident), and compressed being larger than uncompressed is usually a pretty good indicator of such a thing.

 

[Nagato]

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[jjjewel]

Did you change a lot of things in arm9.bin for the English version?

As far as I tried compressing the unaltered arm9 file with CT2 (decompressed arm9.bin and then compressed it back), the new compressed file is smaller.
But my card reader for DS broke so I couldn't test whether the newly compressed file worked on the real DS or not.

So far for games with arm9 compression, I always used CT2 and never ran into problem.

 

[Nagato]

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[jjjewel]

Yeah, tried it with no$gba v2.8b and it really crashed with the newly compressed arm9.bin even though it was unmodified. I have no clue why either.

Edit: There's one overlay file overlay9_0000.bin. Could it have anything to do with arm9?

 

[Lycan911]

Edit: It just occurred to me... did Nanashi no Game: Me have any AP? I don't know if AP could cause these errors though. Previously, no$gba was complaining about bad instructions and such when it would crash even though it worked fine in DeSmuME.

I thought of that too when the game froze, but a quick google search told me that the first game didn't have any anti-piracy measures, so maybe this one doesn't either. Also, if it were anti-piracy, the clean rom would most likely have the same crashes, which it doesn't.

 

[Nagato]

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[jjjewel]

I don't know much about debugging but the game seemed to crash where the bytes in original compressed arm9 and the newly compressed arm9 started to differ. Mine breaks at 02003FFC.

(Pic under spoiler)

Spoiler

 

[Nagato]

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[jjjewel]

Usually different programs give different results in compressed files, but they all should be the same after decompressed again. If you try other programs, I think they will give different compressed arm9 too. (Ex. Sometimes you have different algorithms that take more time but give you smaller file, etc.)

But the problem is this game seems to expect an exact compression algorithm, so anything besides the original file doesn't work. (But I don't know ASM hacking or debugging so this is merely a guess.)

Edit: Have you tried this program?
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/826/
I'm not sure if it'll make any difference or not but it might worth trying.

 

[Nagato]

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[Nagato]

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[Auryn]

Hi Nagato,
if you need to test a bunch of flashcards, you can send me the patch. I have 5-6different types laying around (starting from the old orignal R4 to Acekard to DStwo to the usually sold in Thailand last week )