Hacking ROM Hack Editing GameID in mod breaks save functionality

[Alexrose]

Just tried to play Phantasy Star Online EI&II: Return to Ragol, which is a mod. I added a custom banner for wiiflow, that obviously requires a new gameID, so I hex edited it to giive it a new GameID, but doing that broke saves inside the game.

Using the same game code, it has the same ID and thus my USB loader (Wiiflow-Lite, only one with good sd compatibility) shows it with the exact same banner art and name (which it grabs from a database and can't be overridden without a separate ID).

Anyone know how to change a game code and still have the saves work. I just downloaded a mod for Skies of Arcadia Legends and the readme even says the mod maker wanted to do the same thing but had the same problem lol

 

[XFlak]

See if changing the ID using tools like wii backup manager or wit.exe (from wiimm's tools) makes a difference

As a workaround if nothing else works you could have one game use gamesaves in real nand and the other on emunand

 

[Alexrose]

To be clear btw, this is for gamecube games on Nintendont. I haven't tried it on a wii game

 

[Maeson]

Funny to click on this out of curiosity and seeing my and one of my hacks mentioned.

Since then, I have learnt what to do: You only change the last two values.

You see, an ID is composed of three parts:

Let's use Skies of Arcadia Legends, for example. It is GEAE8P.

GEA is the code of the game, E is the region (E is NTSC-U, P is PAL, J is Japan) and 8P is the Publisher or Developer, in this case, SEGA.

Turns out that ALL you needed to do is change the last two values, the publisher/dev ones.

So if I did GEAEPP, or GEAE88, I would have gotten it to work, but I tried to change the entire thing. This is something I've learnt looking at the awesome Super Monkey Ball modding scene. Now that I think about it, all the games mentioned come from the same company, and all have 8P.

 

[lordelan]

GEA is the code of the game, E is the region (E is NTSC-U, P is PAL, J is Japan) and 8P is the Publisher or Developer, in this case, SEGA.

Turns out that ALL you needed to do is change the last two values, the publisher/dev ones.

So if I did GEAEPP, or GEAE88, I would have gotten it to work, but I tried to change the entire thing. This is something I've learnt looking at the awesome Super Monkey Ball modding scene. Now that I think about it, all the games mentioned come from the same company, and all have 8P.

Very interesting. Did you by any chance did something similar on the Wii U?
Because apart from a title ID, games there also have such a short product ID but it is only 4 characters long iirc.

 

[Maeson]

Sorry, I have not touched anything about the Wii U as I do not have one, but that's going to be a more difficult task now that you have to deal with games prepared for digital stores and such...

---

It's painfully unfortunate that RHDN is going down, I thought I was going to update my Skies of Arcadia hack with the new ID, but now I can't edit the hacks page, and even then, patches will be lost on the 20th of this month it seems...

Besides that, I had no knowledge about that PSO hack, a less grindy single player experience sounds pretty neat.

 

[lordelan]

patches will be lost on the 20th of this month it seems...

They are not lost. The way I understood their news entry it will stay up in it's read-only state thus allowing you to download things.
However they also released a full dump on the internet archive.

 

[Maeson]

As far as I know, several sections of the main web, including the patches, are to be removed on the 20th.

This image has been shared around these last days:

Spoiler

And sure, there is the Archive.org thing, but navigating that to find something is significantly more annoying compared to navigating RHDN itself, not to mention we still lose the descriptions and other info on each hack's or utilities' pages.

None of this has to do with Alexrose's question, anyway...

 

[lordelan]

As far as I know, several sections of the main web, including the patches, are to be removed on the 20th.

This image has been shared around these last days:

Spoiler

And sure, there is the Archive.org thing, but navigating that to find something is significantly more annoying compared to navigating RHDN itself, not to mention we still lose the descriptions and other info on each hack's or utilities' pages.

Okay wow, that really sucks. Why can't they just replace all download links with direct links to the files on archive.org instead to save traffic and space?

However descriptions and stuff are not lost since the database is on the archive as well. It's still annoying to browse something there you.

Man we (the community) really should start archiving every single RHDN page on the Wayback Machine. This way we at least know which rom hack has which ID in the archive.

None of this has to do with Alexrose's question, anyway...

While I agree, you already answered the question so it's ok I guess.

 

[Maeson]

If they are, I haven't seen them, looking around on the archive.org zip is a bit of a pain. But if they are there, that's good at least.

We will see what happens in the end but yeah, we are going to need to write down RHDN's ID system if we want to make any use of the archived zip without becoming a crazy time sink.

 

[lordelan]

If they are, I haven't seen them, looking around on the archive.org zip is a bit of a pain. But if they are there, that's good at least.

We will see what happens in the end but yeah, we are going to need to write down RHDN's ID system if we want to make any use of the archived zip without becoming a crazy time sink.

People on the Discord told me that the site will definitely stay online the way it is just minus the downloads. But you can use the ID of each site's url to find the hack in the archive.

 

[XFlak]

If all the downloads are captured in the same archive /date then you might be able to use the same archive prefix to fix all the download links in one go, you may want to tell the site owner to look into it, cuz if this is the case the download links can be fixed with a simple edit replace all

 

[Alexrose]

Funny to click on this out of curiosity and seeing my and one of my hacks mentioned.

Since then, I have learnt what to do: You only change the last two values.

You see, an ID is composed of three parts:

Let's use Skies of Arcadia Legends, for example. It is GEAE8P.

GEA is the code of the game, E is the region (E is NTSC-U, P is PAL, J is Japan) and 8P is the Publisher or Developer, in this case, SEGA.

Turns out that ALL you needed to do is change the last two values, the publisher/dev ones.

So if I did GEAEPP, or GEAE88, I would have gotten it to work, but I tried to change the entire thing. This is something I've learnt looking at the awesome Super Monkey Ball modding scene. Now that I think about it, all the games mentioned come from the same company, and all have 8P.

Haha, nice to see you. Looking forward to playing your mod

The thing that provoked this thread is a new mod called Return to Ragol for Phantasy Star Online. I did as you said here, and changed GPOE8P to GPOE9P. Doing that caused the game to crash instantly when trying to create a save file. Then I booted the base game and then tried the mod again, this time it booted but it says it can't find a card in slot A. So simply changing the 2 digits there didn't do anything, I don't know if this is a PSO specific problem

Post automatically merged: Aug 9, 2024

(I guess as a workaround I could just use the PAL version as my non modded version and use NTSC as the modded version)

 

[Maeson]

Darn, I guess some games do work differently than others. For stuff like Smash Bros or Monkey Ball seems enough, but I tried with Phantasy Star and yeah, it does not... Maybe it has something to do with being a Dreamcast game originally?

Another GC mod released not long ago, Shadow The Hedgehog Reloaded has a different ID (GUPR8P) and works fine, which is very weird as it actually changes the region value. Maybe asking the creator could help?

Sorry for that. I have tried to look around and I can't see anything.

 

[Alexrose]

maybe just a case that the devs hard coded the ID in as a const on PSO and other games pulled it from the game. gamecube dev was before my time though so I have no idea how the api works haha