Hacking Wii VC Arcade Injects

[G0dLiKe]

Hey everyone,

I am working on Wii VC injections since the last 1.5 yrs, made about 250 injects for several systems like MEGA DRIVE, MASTER SYSTEM, NES, SNES, N64, MSX/MSX2, PCE-HU Card, GB, GBC, GBA and now I work on injecting Arcade games into existing VC wad files.

I managed to locate the files in the corresponding folders, seen on the pics below:

This shows a JPN host wad structure:

1.) This shows the extracted wad and whats inside, until now VC Arcade games have been uninjectable bc we did not know where the rom file is located.

2.) This shows the folder which holds the rom file, finally some progress on this heh?

Some more progress here, just unpacked a NTSCU VC Arcade wad and found that they are pretty similar to SMS wads lol.

This shows a NTSCU host wad structure:

1.) As above the extracted wad and contents.

2.) The folder which holds the rom file

Now onto the problem, the file which holds the game rom file(s) is definatly the zaxxon.rso.zlib(incase of the USA version of Zaxxon).

I need a program, or help in finding a program which can unpack and repack this kind of files.

I know about zlib library but as we inspected the file further, it came out that it has no compression at all, furthermore zlib itself cannot unpack it.

Next thing weird is that the .rso, I know that .rso files are commonly sound files which are changed to .rso, some kind of container I guess.

All in all it sums up like this: The file in question isnt zlib'd, ccftool just adds zlib to the end of file to show that it WAS zlib, the rso file just looks like some sort of container which we need to open up.

Your help is welcome, hope we can sort this out soon

If anyone wants to have a look, here is the file in question: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3565461/zaxxon.rso.zlib

Thx

 

[sr_corsario]

Some rso files.

http://uppit.com/x18t9ygejfvi/rso_files.rar


I had a look into them and looks like to have a header with a list of file sizes... and then ... start the data... allways talking in my ignorance of course...

 

[FGOD]

nice work godlike

i hope i'll figure out what is wrong with my n64 injects though...

 

[G0dLiKe]

Some rso files.

http://uppit.com/x18t9ygejfvi/rso_files.rar


I had a look into them and looks like to have a header with a list of file sizes... and then ... start the data... allways talking in my ignorance of course...

thx sr_corsario, always willing to help

QUOTE(FGOD @ Aug 1 2011, 09:17 PM) nice work godlike

i hope i'll figure out what is wrong with my n64 injects though...

whats wrong on your side f_god?

 

[giantpune]

i dont think the rso is a container for the rom. it is a library that contains common functions. you can probably verify this by finding the exact same rso file in multiple games.

i think the rom image is "Title00_bin_LZ.bin". i took it and un-lz77'd it and it came out to a file 0x16828 bytes. The magic word is "HWPK", i see some stuff that says "V25CPU", and there is the name of the game stored at 0xe8. I also see the strings used in the game like "Newplayer", "high score", "Continue", ect .It looks like a rom image to me.

 

[G0dLiKe]

i dont think the rso is a container for the rom. it is a library that contains common functions. you can probably verify this by finding the exact same rso file in multiple games.

i think the rom image is "Title00_bin_LZ.bin". i took it and un-lz77'd it and it came out to a file 0x16828 bytes. The magic word is "HWPK", i see some stuff that says "V25CPU", and there is the name of the game stored at 0xe8. I also see the strings used in the game like "Newplayer", "high score", "Continue", ect .It looks like a rom image to me.

thx for your reply pune, well this refers to the japanese host wad, i already know that this is the rom file, i wanted to decompress the ntscu host wads rom file bc the jpn menu in the jpn wads are difficult to uhm read and so

, this are two different wads shown the content extracted.

But I´m gonna check on it with lz77, thx for the hint.

 

[giantpune]

fwiw, this is the dump of the rso linked in the first post http://pastie.org/private/fhznld0n0pqkxve5scbbq

 

[G0dLiKe]

fwiw, this is the dump of the rso linked in the first post http://pastie.org/private/fhznld0n0pqkxve5scbbq

Nice, say which tools are you using to extract?

BTW, lz77 decompression failed on the title.bin you mentioned in your post but maybe this just wont work, i am using nintenlords lz77 decompressor.

Any hint which one i should be using?

 

[giantpune]

in the arcade VC im looking at, pretty much every single file that ends with "_LZ.bin" is compressed with the 0x11 variant. only the wwwlib, which is used to display the instruction manual html, is using the 0x10 variant. im not sure which tools support which variants

 

[G0dLiKe]

K, thanks for your input man

 

[FGOD]

nice work godlike

i hope i'll figure out what is wrong with my n64 injects though...

whats wrong on your side f_god?

well, they hang or have glitches while playing tried several roms and several base wads all same issue... really weird, but i only have that with n64 injects and a few nes injects... but i guess that's a bit off topic

we better pm about that

 

[s3phir0th115]

This may already be known, but I should mention it anyway just in case.

But, arcade injection will be vastly different than console injection. In the case of console injection, the games you're injecting to replace are made for the same hardware. There are a bazillion different hardware designs for arcade games. So if you do try to inject a game, try to make sure it uses the same hardware.

 

[techboy]

in the arcade VC im looking at, pretty much every single file that ends with "_LZ.bin" is compressed with the 0x11 variant. only the wwwlib, which is used to display the instruction manual html, is using the 0x10 variant. im not sure which tools support which variants

WWCXTool can pack and unpack LZ77 using both 0x10 and 0x11.

wwcxtool /? gives these as some of the options
/u -- uncompress the input file
/c0 -- compress the input file using compression method 0x10
/c1 -- compress the input file using compression method 0x11

I've used it to unpack an SM's wwwlib and the HTML files in iplsetting.ash without issue.

 

[Jacobeian]

This may already be known, but I should mention it anyway just in case.

But, arcade injection will be vastly different than console injection. In the case of console injection, the games you're injecting to replace are made for the same hardware. There are a bazillion different hardware designs for arcade games. So if you do try to inject a game, try to make sure it uses the same hardware.

Yes, but you could try to inject a game that uses the same hardware, using MAME or System16 website as reference.

Zaxxon for example is using a specific Zaxxon board (which I think zaxxon.rso is the emulator for, according to giantpune's pastie) but is compatible with a few other games:
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=68...p;gid=1797#1797
Games that use modified hardware or additional CPu won't work as the zxxon.rso emulator is probably not supporting them and there is no way for you to change that



ANother thing is that arcade ROMS usually does not came as a single ROM like for console, because arcade boards generally hold multiple chips (again, see MAME romsets as examples).
Here it seems the ROM image is a single file (maybe another archive containing the various ROMS ?) but once you figure how to extract data from the archive, you would still need to figure the ROM format they used.