Hacking VCFE Wip...

[RadioShadow]

I thought that was figured out? It's pretty easy.

 

[FGOD]

i did know how to do that with nes games, but i can't find it anymore (lost in the banner making topic) they should really update that topic so people don't have to go and search each page...

btw, i replaced the banner.brlyt with one from a original game and did the editing with hex editor and now it did work, so howard indeed it was a problem i'm having with your tool...

 

[HowardC]

i did know how to do that with nes games, but i can't find it anymore (lost in the banner making topic) they should really update that topic so people don't have to go and search each page...

btw, i replaced the banner.brlyt with one from a original game and did the editing with hex editor and now it did work, so howard indeed it was a problem i'm having with your tool...

No, no it's not. It's the u8 tool and ALL u8 tools have this issue. After the length of the brlyt is increased or decreased past a certain length it corrupts. Improper buffering that I described in the previous post only corrupts the image half of the time, which is why we all assumed the current u8tools out there worked when they actually don't work 100%.


RadioShadow: If it's been figured out then it is news to me. It isn't documented anywhere that I know of.

 

[FGOD]

strange cause i have still used your u8tools, but i just didn't edit the brlyt with your tools, and now it does work :s

anyway, i got the save icon to work to on c64 wads, but i still ahve to edit the images, i saved them from the tpl and the white parts show of transparent now :s so i think i have to color them white in photoshop...

 

[RadioShadow]

anyway, i got the save icon to work to on c64 wads, but i still ahve to edit the images, i saved them from the tpl and the white parts show of transparent now :s so i think i have to color them white in photoshop...

You're using the wrong type of compression. I can make a quick guide tomorrow on how to insert a custom Commodore 64 Save Icon.


QUOTE(FGOD @ Oct 13 2008, 09:30 PM) i did know how to do that with nes games, but i can't find it anymore (lost in the banner making topic) they should really update that topic so people don't have to go and search each page...

It's on Page 17 last time I checked.

 

[gundalf]

Making the Banners (C64) works just fine with VCIcon8.0.

And NES you find here:
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=91206&st=240

 

[FGOD]

Thanks guys. I used LZ77 compression cause it was LZ77 in the first place...

 

[gundalf]

Does someone know hot to unpack the master.pak from Workd of Goo which you can find in 02.app?

 

[HowardC]

Ok, I got the u8tool to make perfect files now. The thing is, gbalzss is screweing things up again. I took the original super mario bros wad and simply unpacked and repacked the files. When decompressed, the archvies look identical to the original (the original once it's been decompressed of course) but when lz77 compression is added, the resulting files differ slightly. As a matter of fact, it was this that was causing the icon.bin to screw up as I had described. The banner.bin appears to be unaffected, but considering how the icon.bin is acting, it makes me leery of using it. So basically, everything should work now so long as you don't compress the files (I might temporarily remove the option.) I've only tested headered archives though, so I need to test a "normal" one before the release. Btw the sound.bin always works now.

So with this issue and the issue with the c64 files we need a new compressor badly!

 

[FGOD]

or a better LZ77 compresser

 

[HowardC]

umm, that's what i just said

 

[HowardC]

Well, the u8 tool is working on normal archives as well.

I want to add a little bit of functionality first, so I'm adding the ability to re-pack the sound.bin. Again, nothing fancy as it just adds (optional) compression and a imd5 header to a sound file, but it would certainly makes things simplier and in the case of vc sounds, once you compress a wav file it's virtually the same size as a bns file. The only thing we are missing is the capability to loop the sound file.

Also the channel titles are now read when a imet archive is extracted or used for the "get settings from file" button.

So the release will probably be tomorrow as well as the updated save icon injector.

I haven't tested the effects of the fixed u8 tool on the brlyt editor yet, but thus far it seems to resolve the issues. In the event that it doesn't, I'll just make us a universal template with really long titles and a "old-school" option to the editor that allows a simple hex replace instead of a proper resizing.

 

[RadioShadow]

Good to hear about the U8 fixes. Now finding a suitable LZ77 Compressor is going to be fun.

I've been playing around with the MSX Wad and got one MSX Rom to work (well it's actually the Master System version converted to run on the MSX thanks to a patch at romhacking.net).

It's pretty easy to turn the WAD settings into English (just change the config file country setting to "us") but the FLASH file which on ALESTE, if the person presses '-' on the Wii Mote, a Flash Menu appears which allows to enhance the music and swap to buttons around. While EGGY doesn't use the flash file (but still located in the 05.app), it's possible to activate. Although it's pretty useless to use for the EGGY Wad.

See the spoiler file for screenshots:

Spoiler

MSX1 rom injections are possible but only a limited are going to work (Use EGGY for games that use just the SPACE and ALESTE that is set up to use a few more buttons). I did try injecting Frogger but the Channel didn't load the rom.

 

[HowardC]

I don't think it's going to be impossible, just difficult. The msx emulator seems to be setup to always use 256k roms. My guess is smaller roms will have to be padded and larger roms will have to be split up into multiple "carts". Probably the only game english speaking people are going to want on the msx is the original metal gear anyway as the system is virtually unknown outside of japan and most of it's games were ported to the consoles available at that time (metal gear included, which looks virtually the same on the nes with slightly crippled graphics and sound.)

Remapping will be difficult but not impossible. What I've learned from looking at all of these archives is that most if not all of the emulators have remappable buttons, it's just we don't know the syntax to access them. In the case of msx, aleste has a ton of remapping going on, enough to where we can probably figure out it's syntax.

Anyway, the u8tool is done. I'm going to leave the lz77 option in for now just for testing purposes. I'll up it in a few hours. I think the save icon injector is ready as well, but I want to go ahead and add command-line support back in, so that might take a while.

I guess it's time to work on the rom builder now and then (gasp!) vcfe itself!

 

[HowardC]

new u8 tool is up

btw... while I added in the sound.bin compression/decompression I went ahead and looked into the bns format. It's very simple and yet very complex as well.

From what wiibrew tells me, bns files are basically pcm files with a very detailed (and overly complex) header attached. This is good because pcm data is basically a wav file. The only dfference data-wise is that if the file is a stereo file, each channel is stored as a seperate chunk of data in the bns, while on a wav those two files would be interleaved.

There is an example bit of code on wiibrew, but as usual, it's essentially useless other than for understanding the format as it only extracts bns files and wont create them.

Long story short, I think it should be very possible to make a bns tool that turns wav or pcm files into bns files and with the command-line mp3 to wav tools out there, it should also be possible to plug in mp3 support. The only thing the user would have to do is determine the loop point. The bns header has a flag that determines if it's a looping file and somewhere in the header is the start and stop points of the loop as it is possible to have a bit of the sound file only play once.

This is low priority for me as we are concentrating on VC editing and the vc sound is identical regardless of the system and doesn't loop. With the recent additions to the u8tool it should be possible for the end user to make a custom start-up sound so there is no rush. That doesn't mean I won't eventually get to it though.

 

[FGOD]

Nice work howard. Going to test the new u8 as soon as possible.

 

[HowardC]

Thanks....

icon injector 3.0 is up as well. I fixed the command line switches and fixed the bug that screwed up nes injections. I still haven't gotten any feedback as to if it's working, but for now, I'm gonna assume it is.

Enough work for tonight and for the rest of the month as a matter of fact. Unless I get bored or you guys have bug reports, you'll see me after halloween.

 

[FGOD]

happy halloween

edit: u8tool extracting 05.app from C64 as a sound.bin

edit2: i tried packing with original settings (which was sound.bin settings he said, that failed and with IMD5 it fails loading the game... so i guess the new version has problems with the 05.app

 

[RadioShadow]

I'll try and test the tools this weekend.

EDIT: FGOD is right. Why is the U8 Tool uncompressing the 05.app in the Commodore 64 wad as 'sound.bin' and packing it as 'sound.bin'?

FGOD, just tell the U8 tool to pack the wad as 'Regular' header.

 

[FGOD]

Still strange that he define it as sound.bin file