PS1/2 Reverse engineering "Kingsley's Adventure"

[TimzUneeverse]

Hiya guys. This is Tim Batarseh. For quite some time now, I have been playing retro video games through emulation with RetroArch. Sure you can play the long-forgotten PlayStation classic, Kingsley's Adventure, on any system using an emulator, but why not reverse engineer it? That way, we can port it to any platform and run it natively, rather than through emulation.

The idea for reverse engineering a classic video game came from the reverse engineering of the ROM image for the 1996 Nintendo 64 game, Super Mario 64. Thanks to that, we can now port the 24-year old legend to any platform of our desire. However, porting Mario 64 is only the beginning. In this thread, we're going to be reverse engineering the 1999 PlayStation game, Kingsley's Adventure, and show you how porting the game to another platform is done. We'll get into this later.

 

[FAST6191]

Mario 64 was fairly basic, generally well liked by many, extensively reversed engineered as far as asset changing for decades, done for a system that had some reasonable decompilation options available... and still took years.
This however is mostly not that (I like/know Pysgnosis for more than Lemmings and Wipeout, generally paid some attention to PS1 3d platformers, no idea why but I did, but had missed this entirely).
I guess some amount of decompilation is available (if the Mario 64 stuff is your inspiration) and the PS1 was not the furthest behind the PS1 on the dynamic recompilation front, or maybe an asset rip/interpreter approach (that Jet Set Radio thing looking like it would do well there, as would several of the earlier Mario 64 efforts that went in for recreation of feel rather than code systems).

 

[TimzUneeverse]

Mario 64 was fairly basic, generally well liked by many, extensively reversed engineered as far as asset changing for decades, done for a system that had some reasonable decompilation options available... and still took years.
This however is mostly not that (I like/know Pysgnosis for more than Lemmings and Wipeout, generally paid some attention to PS1 3d platformers, no idea why but I did, but had missed this entirely).
I guess some amount of decompilation is available (if the Mario 64 stuff is your inspiration) and the PS1 was not the furthest behind the PS1 on the dynamic recompilation front, or maybe an asset rip/interpreter approach (that Jet Set Radio thing looking like it would do well there, as would several of the earlier Mario 64 efforts that went in for recreation of feel rather than code systems).

Yeah, I know...