Hacking RB2 Customs - Proof of Concept

[Mrkinator]

The wii version of Rock Band actually has the music reduced in quality compared to the 360 and PS3 version plus the wii version does not have the crowd track.

The reason, in case no one realizes it, that the audio files are so big is because they are multi-track where each instrument has its own track. The reason for this is when you miss notes, just that instrument cuts out instead of the whole song.

EDIT: AerialX beat me to it.

I knew that. But I wanna save space, so I don't care about it.

Yeah, I see where you are going. It could work.

 

[SFenton]

Comp's still broke, and yeah, ArielX is right- he's the coder (tue too), I've mainly lost my FoF, HMX, and homemade (slightly overcooked) .midis that I've been investigating. Why the FUCK do the FoF mids work but not show notes, which animations need to be in, and whatnot.

Oh, but since I can't compile customs anymore... be prepared to be blasted with midis, mates
>

muahahaha

...that is, if you want them.

Uh, I kinda figured out the FoF midi stuff as of an hour or so ago

(though I could really use a decent MIDI editor... Anvil and FL Studio both fail miserably)

So hopefully I'll add that into the app tonight and then verbatim FoF-style customs should be fine in quickplay.

All I can say is Sham-fucking-wow.
Nice man! What was in there that I couldn't find?

 

[pj-uk]

Uh, I kinda figured out the FoF midi stuff as of an hour or so ago

(though I could really use a decent MIDI editor... Anvil and FL Studio both fail miserably)

So hopefully I'll add that into the app tonight and then verbatim FoF-style customs should be fine in quickplay.

FoF customs

Gonna need some more SD cards! You mention quickplay only - what is the problem playing these in campaign mode?

On a different note I was trying to get my RB2 save last night and the internet went down as I was d/l the savedump program...will try again this evening.

 

[SFenton]

It's not that they won't work in career. They just used to not work in quickplay (only practice).

 

[tueidj]

They used to work in practice mode but neither quickplay nor tour modes, or any other mode that tried to render the band in the background. Practice mode worked because all it displays are the notes. AerialX has worked out the minimum amount of information required in the midi file to make it work for all modes.

 

[pj-uk]

Ah I see. So animations are handled in the midi file? If so are you working on a method to prevent a static camera or some implementation to "randomise" the camera angle? Any clues on how RB2 interprets the midi file to an animation?

 

[Alternity]

There's 2 tracks for that, One called BEAT (I believe it's to sync the background video) and one called VENUE. VENUE is where you play around with the video, there's a bunch of notes and comments. They also make some comments and notes in the other tracks (Guitar, Bass, Drums and Vocals.) When this thing is out I'll play with that, and IF I figure out how it works exactly I'll probably write a tutorial on Scorehero about it.

 

[ExLex]

The wii version of Rock Band actually has the music reduced in quality compared to the 360 and PS3 version plus the wii version does not have the crowd track.

The reason, in case no one realizes it, that the audio files are so big is because they are multi-track where each instrument has its own track. The reason for this is when you miss notes, just that instrument cuts out instead of the whole song.

EDIT: AerialX beat me to it.

I knew that. But I wanna save space, so I don't care about it.

Yeah, I see where you are going. It could work.

What about doing that in form viceversa?

Explain:

ccfman2004 say the music of wii had reduced the quality, so can i take the music from 360 version and replace that in Wii DLC for good quality experience?

I dont care space, i had 2 SD of 2 gb

 

[ricflairandy]

where are you guys upto wit this, this sounds amazing.

 

[Robotic Earthlin]

ccfman2004 say the music of wii had reduced the quality, so can i take the music from 360 version and replace that in Wii DLC for good quality experience?

I dont care space, i had 2 SD of 2 gb

I suspect there's a limit of 200 blocks (25 megabytes) for each DLC file, since that's how much space it requires you to have free before you can play DLC from the SD card. Some songs probably had btheir quality reduced because they were over this limit. Though it's possile that RB2 is perfectly capable of playing larger files but Harmonix didn't want our SD cards filling up too fast. I dunno, I'll wait for one of the pros to answer. =P

 

[AerialX]

The wii version of Rock Band actually has the music reduced in quality compared to the 360 and PS3 version plus the wii version does not have the crowd track.

The reason, in case no one realizes it, that the audio files are so big is because they are multi-track where each instrument has its own track. The reason for this is when you miss notes, just that instrument cuts out instead of the whole song.

EDIT: AerialX beat me to it.

I knew that. But I wanna save space, so I don't care about it.

Yeah, I see where you are going. It could work.

What about doing that in form viceversa?

Explain:

ccfman2004 say the music of wii had reduced the quality, so can i take the music from 360 version and replace that in Wii DLC for good quality experience?

I dont care space, i had 2 SD of 2 gb

You'd have to manually re-map the audio channels to the right instruments, so it'd probably be a bit of a pain to do... You'd also need an excessive amount of free space on your NAND. Besides that though, I believe it works fine. The only thing is it'd take some manual tweaking to get the volumes and balance and everything right from the 360 version. And the 360 audio might be out of sync, so you'd have to go and manually add/remove silence from the beginning to get it perfect... All in all, it'd be a pain to do IMO, but there's nothing stopping you from trying

QUOTE(Robotic Earthling @ Jun 11 2009, 02:27 PM)

I suspect there's a limit of 200 blocks (25 megabytes) for each DLC file, since that's how much space it requires you to have free before you can play DLC from the SD card. Some songs probably had btheir quality reduced because they were over this limit. Though it's possile that RB2 is perfectly capable of playing larger files but Harmonix didn't want our SD cards filling up too fast. I dunno, I'll wait for one of the pros to answer. =P

The pros say that anything goes as long as it fits on your NAND.

 

[Chlikaflok]

Here's my Rckbnd2.dat, I guess/hope it's useful for something...

Cheers

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=124ad2d...04e75f6e8ebb871

 

[pj-uk]

I finally got round to uploading the save too:

rockband2 save

 

[fubka]

Any updates?

Would it help if I posted my save file?

I have all of the free DLC as well as probably 10+ paid. Thanks`

 

[Mrkinator]

Any updates?

Would it help if I posted my save file?

I have all of the free DLC as well as probably 10+ paid. Thanks`

I think we're good for save files.

Yesterday I put Fuel from GH:M in RB2. It had some bugs, but it worked for the most part in Practice

 

[ShadowChaos]

I think we're good for save files.

i'm not entirely clear on what the save file is used for, and would it be hard to hack it? i'm still pretty new to wii homebrew

 

[Mrkinator]

I think we're good for save files.

i'm not entirely clear on what the save file is used for, and would it be hard to hack it? i'm still pretty new to wii homebrew

For RB2, it stores various info on DLC songs/all info on your characters and bands.

By hacking it, I'm assuming you mean extracting it? You can use Waninkoko's Savefile Extractor/Installer, but right now I don't think we need anymore.

 

[nicko68]

This is the first I have heard of this project, and wow am I excited. I am not interested in customs to be honest, but the idea of being able to import my RB1 tracks into RB2 is awesome. You guys are amazing, thank you for all your work!

BTW, has anyone else noticed when playing RB2 from backup (I do own it legally) such as USB drive, that the DLC doesn't authenticate? It says it's out of date and can't be copied to system memory, please download again. GHWT does the same thing.

 

[zapu]

It doesn't mean that DLC can't authenticate, Rockband displays that 'out of date' error whenever something is wrong with dlc - corrupted files, empty files, wrong files (hashes doesn't match) etc. etc.

 

[Robotic Earthlin]

BTW, has anyone else noticed when playing RB2 from backup (I do own it legally) such as USB drive, that the DLC doesn't authenticate? It says it's out of date and can't be copied to system memory, please download again. GHWT does the same thing.

For me, when I try to play DLC songs, it doesn't delete the old DLC from the NAND, so when I try to play another DLC song there's no room left for it to copy the song from the SD card to the NAND, and after that it gives me errors whenever I try to play any other DLC song. I was using Hermes' cIOS.

I can use the USB loader for all the other Rock Band games since they don't have DLC, but I'm stuck with using my retail disc for RB2.