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Dezaemon DD hardcoded to cart: now playable on console!

 
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zoinkity
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 PostPosted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 7:42 am    Post subject: Dezaemon DD hardcoded to cart: now playable on console! Reply with quote Back to top



http://www.mediafire.com/download/i525yo852ep0gwf/DezaemonXD.7z


If you, like all but one of the estimated 3-5 trillion people in the world don't have a physical copy of the prototype Dezaemon DD disks you're in luck today! This patch intermeshes the cart and disk content from the publicly-released 2nd Dezaemon prototype disk into a single cartridge image.
The patch is confirmed to work on hardware, and if your flashcart can be set in a writable state will function nearly-identically to the disk version.


Features (and Limitations):
All disk content normally available when using the original disk in a dev drive is available with this patch.
Disk content is accessed using the normal drive libraries. Changes are made at a low level, substituting drive hardware calls with standard cart PI access. Data is accessed using LBAs, loaded and saved as LBAs, and the cart addresses match LBA byte offsets.

If you are using a 64Drive or if your flashcart allows cart space writing, you will be able to save modified data back to the cart just like a disk image. Please note the modified cartridge data is not written back to the SD/CF card but can be obtained by uploading the ROM to PC via USB. Use 64drive_usb.exe from http://64drive.retroactive.be.
If your flashcart doesn't support writing or you're using an emulator available features will be limitted. You will be unable to save modified data, create new files, or copy existing files.
Emulators vary in their support of an unhacked Dezaemon much less one that's been modified. Refer to the emulator's documentation for basic compatability. For any HLE emulator you'll also need to copy the emulation settings used for the unmodified game and create a new entry for the patched version. This varies wildly from one emulator to another, so ask on their help forums and refer to their documentation for a better idea of what settings are necessary.
Note that regardless your setup you will be unable to use the disk-to-disk copy feature. The reason is both a logical falacy and a software issue but should be self-evident.


Danger Will Robinson!
The patch embeds data from a publicly-released 64DD disk expansion, the second of three known disks. There is only one known extant copy of this prototype, which may cause legal complications depending on your local and national laws.
Use common sense, and be aware of what limitations you may be under based on your locale.


Application:
You'll need an unbyteswapped (big-endian) Dezaemon 3D ROM. For the sake of legality I'll assume you dumped it yourself and didn't Google some ROM site someplace.
The patch comes in two flavours:
DezaemonXD.bps, which can be applied with Beat (http://byuu.org/programming/) or the python bps module.
DezaemonXD.xdelta, applied with, well, xdelta. It's a command-line tool but there are frontends for it on many platforms.

You only need to apply one of the patches. You couldn't even apply more than one if you wanted to as they're checksum-enforced.


Hoopla!
Dezaemon doesn't "reboot" like other expansion carts do. The cart accesses data from the disk but does not replace its system code. That allows a bit of magic that wouldn't be possible with other titles such as the F-Zero X expansion.
Obvious drive maintenance commands such as rezero, reset, etc. are disabled. Seeking sets a position which will then be used during read/write operation. Read/write function by converting disk request data (LBAs, sectors, sizes) to a byte offset in the ROM file. Reads and writes occur at their normal sizes in their normal buffers but use cartridge access.
Hardware register tests and confirmation are kept at fixed "good" values. This does cause a complication; if errors occur they can't be cleared in most cases. Most notably, disk-to-disk copy requires ejecting the disk which throws an expected error state. However, fixed values never allow that state and there isn't exactly a way to signal an ejection anyway--or a disk to replace it with.
To a degree the patch cheats. Originally it was going to keep track of "good" values for registers and handle the hardware register requests/writes. This proved a bit tedious and somewhat problematic so now most simply return static values.
The RTC is only read, and the value copied is not used (or for that matter incremented like a proper clock). For this reason it was set to static values. Originally the AF clock method was going to be utilized if the time was important or, minimally, stored.

Elsewise:
If you'd like to show your thanks to the collector who salvaged, dumped, and distributed the disk image please contribute toward willis82's fundraiser. Granted it's been some time since it's been run, but it only met a small fraction of the cost for acquiring these disks and preserving their higly-volatile, gradually-aging magnetic storage. It would also be a great way to coax them to release the other two images ;*)
If you have any questions and concerns that don't involve the F-Zero X expansion, please feel free to email me. I don't ever seem to have direct internet access, but presuming your mail doesn't hit the spam folder I'll try to respond to you somewhat timely.
If you're curious what the easter egg is this time, I'll give you a hint. It has more to do with this distribution than the code itself.

-Zoinkity
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 PostPosted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 8:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

Wow that's so cool!!! Impressive technical achievement as well. There just simply was no way to play it otherwise, so that's pretty fantastic. It's a good game too. I hope he releases the other discs now...
 
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 PostPosted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 11:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

This a game ? So what do I google for , this .xdelta won't patch itself .. is the .bps needed er
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 PostPosted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 11:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

I used this:
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/598/

Needs the original (J) ROM of game.
 
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Kerr Avon
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 PostPosted: Sat Oct 11, 2014 5:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

Wow! This is very impressive indeed! Will this save to the Everdrive 64 OK? The original won't, as as yet the ED64 doesn't support 768k save space.

Also, are you going to post about this on Krikzz's Everdrive 64 forum, and on the Assemblergames Nintendo forum? If not then I'll do it for you, but please let us know if saving will work on the Ed64 (I can't test it as I'm at work Evil or Very Mad ) so I can mention it in the post.

And many thanks for the doubtless hard work it took for you to manage this, it will be much appreciated I'm sure since I've heard that the game is a lot of fun.
 
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zoinkity
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 PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2014 5:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

It's already at Assemblergames, in the Dezaemon DD forum.

I don't have an Everdrive to test it on so can't say at all. Wager a guess it's probably going to have the same limited functionality as trying to use it on an emulator.

Saving to "disk" in this case writes back to the cartridge domain. (B/10000000) If the region is still writable after the Everdrive writes the ROM to it and starts the bootloader, it should be able to save your progress until you shut down. As far as I know none of these devices automatically writes the current ROM back to the SD/CF card, so to permanently save the edited ROM requires uploading it at runtime.

Surprisingly it took about two weeks to get this working, and much of that was just documenting the Leo library. Much of that wasn't really necessary, but the dev circles are eating up any info on the drives lately.
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 PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2014 5:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

It definitely loads on ED64, you can't see your ship in the middle option, but i'm not sure if that's normal or not. Might need a video of it running on the 64drive. It's definitely awesome having new levels, as the original Solid Gear was very cool, but very short.
 
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zoinkity
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 PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2014 8:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

A video of the original disk expansion running on 64DD, taken by the (former?) owner of the disk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnXakvNilXw

It's conjecture, but have reason to believe the first two disks were made against older versions of the game. The "common settings" offsets are refering to a different base image and omitted some settings like music.
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 PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2014 9:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

Unfortunately he didn't get past the cutscene in the video, heh, so I think I need someone to capture game video to compare.

It is really interesting (and awesome), but I also am confused why three different completely games exist, that don't seem to be the same in different stages? I really hope he releases the other disks and can do same because it is really cool but short, and making your own is not easy hehe, especially with language barrier.
 
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 PostPosted: Mon Oct 13, 2014 7:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

Maybe I'm using it wrong, but in the games on the left side of screen, the ship doesn't appear, and some texture corruption, no animations when enemy ships get hit, on both 64drive and ED64, once you get past cutscene for both 2nd and 3rd gamestart on disk (once past ship intro). I just want to make sure it's normal (may be). Is there a list of what is changed by expansion? Or does it require the latest firmware/bootloader or something?

btw I got through to second level, and this is definitely a version of Solid Gear. I would venture to say an early version of it - with colors, and placeholder icons, and things. First boss isn't even finished properly, no final dying animation. Second level has strange hammer thing that comes down randomly but don't think supposed to be there. Many textures are messed up though. Second boss is also super easy hehe. Game crashes as soon as beat second boss.

I have to wonder if they fine-tuned their editor over and over again and made Solid Gear game in the end (that's why so short). And were using N64DD too, perhaps because easier to edit/more storage?

All I can say is really want those other disks released and playable!
 
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zoinkity
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 PostPosted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 7:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote Back to top

Nope, those two games simply aren't right. It's exactly the same problems shown in the video the owner posted. Now that I've cracked the formats it's obvious this was an earlier version of the game.

Somewhat more user-friendly demo, embedding the three cart games into the disk. You can copy them from there to use as a base for new stuff.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/0mg1nui1fhc4eb0/DezaPelican.7z

Preview!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQudJR-0YRg

Also, did you notice that using the drive allows you to make games with 10 stages instead of 5?

In the disk 3 video there's a text file. It's probably named "MESSAGE.EXE", and those can run other kinds of code besides what they did there.
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