Hacking VCFE Wip...

[RadioShadow]

Normally the color (and text value) for text in a brlyt for the title, year and number of players are stored in "T_Play_ENG", "T_Year_ENG" and "TVC_Title_ENG", where "eng" is replaced by the region for the entry. Well in the case of mega drive japan, the region section has been removed completely, leaving the titles simple "T_Play" and ect... Not a huge deal, I added a "NONE" region to the brlyt editor and aside from some minor tweaks it seems to have done the trick. Even though we can't edit the japaneese brlyts yet, I'm guessing this style of entry will become more popular now that brlyts don't contain all 7 regions in them anymore, so I went ahead and added it in to "future proof" things.

That explains why the No. Players, Year and Name Text display on the banner.bin in the Mega Drive Wad on a US/EU Wii but on the NES/SNES/MSX Channel, the No. Players, Year and Name don't appear on a US/EU since the Wii is trying to find the ENG entries but can't. The problem can be fixed by replacing the JPN entries in the banner with ENG.

Also you can insert standard ASCII text in the Japanese brlyt file (well using a hex editor at the moment) over the original Unicode text to make it look like an English one. It's just extra space is required.

 

[HowardC]

Actually, I doubt simply changing the region code for the header name will do it.
If you look at the bottom of the brlyt, different display options (basically which elements, text elements included to show or hide) are created via "groups" and there is a different group setup for the various regions. Changing/Adding a group should do it.

*edit*

I took a quick look at the mega drive japan as opposed to the msx and others and the difference for a region specific text option is the ADDITION of language groups to the "rootgroup" msx has "LJPN" group, while megadrive japan does not.

Because this could require some heavy hacking, the easiest way to use japanese blryts is to apply the logo and color scheme to a regular multi-region one, or better yet we need to hack up the UNI regional mega drive japan brlyt and simply deal with a single language that will display on any wii. I suppose I really need to look into how the tpls are positioned via the brlyt so we can swap the logos of any dimensions (or better yet use a tg16 brlyt which has a 512x512 tpl, which all other tpls can fit inside.)

 

[HowardC]

I took a few min this evening to make a little fe for broly's tpl viewer and tpl converter. This thing looks very similar and functions pretty much like the tplcon all the tutorials currently use with the following exceptions:

1. The viewer can display a tpl with any number of images (tpl con can only show 5).

2. The viewer displays images in their proper dimensions.

3. The viewer can load pretty much any type of tpl, not just a save icon.

So basically it's tpl con only it works better.

enjoy!

 

[HowardC]

Just updated the icon generator. Added support for the newly aquired files and hopefully this build contains all the stuff.

This app will need a major cleanup once we get the remaining images, but I'm too lazy atm.

Brlyt editor still needs testing unfortunately. I'll release it tomorrow if all is well.

 

[lolsjoel]

Works great again, HC.

Though one question, are the PC Engine images supposed to be the same as the Mega Drive (JP) images?

 

[marioxb]

No, there are no PC Engine images included. You are just seeing whatever icons you last selected. Here's some PC Engine icons (that I also PM'd HowardC) from Dracula X. Also in the zip is the 00000000.app from the game. Just put the pce*.bmp files in the save icons folder and it will work, until HowardC updates the program again.

http://rapidshare.com/files/146018678/pce.zip.html

 

[HowardC]

Thanks a ton mario.... for now this completes our set! Yeah, pce uses the standard snapshot positions, so it should work straight off the bat. Just uses the add-on for right now as it's finally time for me to clean up the interface/image folders/ect.

 

[HowardC]

Ok I had a few spare minutes today so I went ahead and did some testing on the latest build of the brlyt editor you can see below:



As you can see, the freezing issue is fixed at least. I changed the length of the title and console name and changed the text in every langauge with every field and it still loaded! Of course there are some issues as well. ....

The new game title is supposed to be "The Impossibly Long Game Title: Part II" but the last "I" gets cut off. This also happens with the console name with the "M" in system being lost. This will probably be an easy fix... either the header length or the text length entries are off by one. The reason it didn't effect the year and number of players is that they have more padding (4 spaces) and thus only empty space would get chopped off.

Also you'll notice that, unfortunately making the console title longer doesn't look so hot. It makes it longer just fine, the problem is it doesn't move the text and tab over like it should. By looking at the brlyt I thought that this was done automatically, but apparently not. Unfortunately, atm at least, this is beyond the scope of the brlyt editor's goals, so we'll have to deal with it in other ways (like using a snes donor banner).

Anyway, that's all for today. See you tonight!

 

[RadioShadow]

HowardC, what is the plan for the icon.bin files? There are too options we can take:

Easy Option: Collect all the necessary icon.bin files and just select the necessary one to use.

Hard Option: Just use one icon.bin file and have an option which Logo(whatever).tpl logo to use. Only thing that needs figuring out is where the lengths are stored for the image to be displayed.


At least the brlyt editor is mostly working. Keep up the good work HowardC.

 

[HowardC]

I don't think there's really anything to deal with. When someone is replacing a rom they have the original icon.bin that came with the wad. We'll replace the banner.bin and keep the original icon.bin in tact. (Editing the snapshot of course) They aren't related, so it should work just fine. And of course if you are making a custom deal, like you said, you can just swap out the entire icon.bin.

Now yes, it might be helpful to collect them when doing advanced things, but as for simple injection I dont' think it's necessary.

Now I'm collecting the background logos for banners, as you know, but that's because they are related to editing the banner.bin and thus are needed. With a little but of luck I should be able to figure out enough about the image format to hack those in without major distortion.

 

[RadioShadow]

I've found the width for the Logo.tpl. It's located in the icon.brlyt at address: 000002BD

MEGA DRIVE (JP) logo is 72 Pixels wide. Hex value is 90. In decimal that is 144. Now divide that by 2 makes 72.
FAMICOM logo is 112 Pixels wide. Hex value is E0. In decimal that is 224. Now divide that by 2 makes 112.

Basically, for the logo's width length, find the original length (in pixels), double it and convert the value to hex.


The same principle might be the same for the logo in the banner.bin file.


EDIT: It worked. The height doesn't need to be changed. The only thing that needs to be edited is the length.

^ The image's width has been changed to 20 Pixels but the height is the same as the logo.tpl.

 

[HowardC]

Well that would explain why I couldn't find them before..... I wonder why they are doubled?


My guess, based on my experience in 3d programming, is that what you've found is the texture size and that the tpl's actual dimensions are irrelevant. Nintendo probably saves a few bytes of space by storing half-sized images and then stretching them upon display.

**Edit**

Ok I fgured it out (I think). Take any texture name (note I said TEXTURE not tpl), find it in the Rootpane section (it's mentioned several times). The name of the texture is buffered to 24 bytes. After that we have 32 bytes of more unknown data and then the next 6 bytes or so contain the positional data.


**Edit 2**

IF and this is a big IF we figure this out a little better I should be able to fix the console name issue. I can determine the left and width of the pane tab of a given brlyt, divide that by the number of characters in the title and then when the title is changed I can calculate the new width and left for the text and pane tab and adjust them accordingly. It shouldn't be too bad.

 

[HowardC]

I have re-releaed the u8 tool and updated it to 5.0. The only real difference functionality-wise, from 4.0 is a ton of noob protection and the ability to simply read settings from a file.

UNDERSTAND THAT ALTHOUGH I HAVE DONE AS MUCH AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE TO PREVENT YOU FROM PACKING 00000000.APP WITH THE WRONG HEADER, IT MIGHT STILL BE POSSIBLE FOR YOU TO SCREW IT UP. I HOLD NO RESPONSIBILTY FOR BRICKED WIIS!!!

Considering all the traffic caused by the iso loader (YAY!) this will probably be my last update for a while. Brlyt editor still needs more tweaking, unfortuantely, but it is now in a working state so I can hopefully get it out sometime this weekend or early next week.

Our toolset is nearly complete... almost time to Merge to form Devistator!

 

[HowardC]

Did some testing today..... I tried adding one to the header length to fix the cut off text with the brlyt editor and that resulted in a freeze, so that's not it. I also tried adding length to the text length and something interesting happened..... When I made it too large I got a corrupted banner like how a neogeo banner looks when you re-pack it with different images. While this doesn't solve our problem in the least, what it does do is give some insight into what causes the neogeo banners (and others, like the tg 16) corrupt. It might be that when I release this it'll automatically fix the corrupted banner issues as the app now "fixes" improper text lengths!

Something else of note is that I've yet to be able to screw up the year or number of players, so something odd is going on there. Could it be because both the smaple title and console title I made have two lines (the console entry automatically goes to the second line.) If so then it'll be an easy fix.

I'll keep you all posted.

 

[marioxb]

I just purchased (Super) Wonder Boy for the Japanese Master System. The banner and save icons are exactly the same as the US/PAL, (Well, I haven't seen US, but I assume it's the same as PAL.) except of course the system title, game title, year and number of players are written in Japanese. It's called Master System, but when Super Wonder Boy is started, the screen first displays "Sega Mark III". Yeah, I know, the Japanese system name changed later. Unlike Japanese Genesis, where you can see the Japanese text in USA mode, on SMS, like all other Japanese consoles, all fields are blank in US mode.

 

[HowardC]

What about the logo that scrolls behind the background in the banner? Is that the same? If it is then we've confirmed that it's essentially identical and therefore we don't have to fool with it.

 

[marioxb]

It's exactly the same. "Master System" logo in English. Here, take a look:

http://rapidshare.com/files/147042630/00000000.app.html

 

[HowardC]

Excellent!

I suppose I need to clean this app up then and get a finalized version out.

1 down, about 4 or 5 to go.... thanks for all the help guys!!

 

[HowardC]

Ok, what should be the final version of the icon generator is up. I cleaned up the interface a lot, which was really needed.

I also added a little feature that I wanted for myself and hopefully you guys will enjoy as well. I added the ability to use an alternate set of templates for icon generation. I did this, because, quite frankly, the neogeo, nes, snes and n64 save icons look like something a nintendo fansite would make with the generic text that it fades into. I included new icons for said systems which I personally feel are at least an improvment. While you might argue with me on the nes and snes ones, there is no doubt in my mind that the neogeo and n64 alternate sets look 1000% better than the originals.

Anyway, enjoy and please let me know if you find any bugs. Barring any this will be the first of the tools to officially make it out of beta!

 

[marioxb]

Cool! How about the brlyt editor? How is progress on it coming? Will we ever be able to have fully editable banner that won't freeze or get "blurry" for all systems? Even if it means using a base SNES banner or something (I recommend Zelda Link to the Past, as it has a pretty long name)?