Clash at Demonhead: I can find the text. I can't find any of the code for the expressions, and the completely non-linear way this game works means there's no easy way to possibly be sure I get all of them even if I play through the game multiple times and take endless screenshots. I may need a different NES emulator, one with better debugging tools?
Fallout: The way this game does translucent overlays is completely impossible to understand. I have an idea for how to manually extract it out of the game, but it will require doing a lot of injection, repeatedly, with lots of restarting the game. And given how the game loves to fuck my resolution, it won't be fun. so in conclusion: UGH
Heroes of Might and Magic 2: I have the font, I have the backgrounds, and the way the two combine is not simple. The injection method I wanted to try with fallout won't really work here, and the open source reimplementation just gives up and pretends it's simple, when it's not. This one is going to be incredibly manual
And the last two games have the additional problem that I currently have ZERO SUPPORT for custom "lighting" in the Death Generator. It does simple alpha-blending and that's all. I would have to implement a whole dynamic-color-math system, in javascript. Ewww. I'm still going to have to do it, or do some really weird pre-baking of textures and get funky with layering and render modes.
ShiftKeyBoard: I'm rebuilding it for a version 2.0 that doesn't need any custom parts, so I can distribute the code and BOM for it. The idea will be you need a Teensy 3.5+, a USB connector + hub, then a shifter+keypad. Then you program it to type how you want. I've got the parts, haven't written the code yet.
Vtech Magic Star Learning Table: I need to be able to read the position of the center dial to make this into a functional keyboard. I've got an optical encoder for it and 3D printed a matching gear.
Remaining problems:
writing code to talk to the optical encoder. Haven't tested this yet.
Figuring out how to mount the encoder PCB so it'll stay in place
Smith Corona PWP220: Since I had no luck powering it up (it won't boot), my next step would be to desolder the ROMs and dump those. I just got in a replacement tip for my hakko so that should be doable soon
Laser Compumate 1: I did a partial reconstruction of the PCB in Kicad. It was pointed out that the Compumate 2 is in MAME, but it has a different memory map. I could possibly take my ROM and stuff it into mame with some adjustments to the memory map, but I haven't tried it yet.
Wii scanning project: My existing collection of Wii games wasn't terribly complete, so I'm getting a different one and rewriting my scanning scripts to keep more metadata.
The first pass was very generic, for the second run I'm going to build in some checks for certain filetypes and engines (such as python and pipeworks)
@stilescrisis unfortunately I'm processing a ton of files of various origins so I can't easily switch locales per-file. I'm gonna have to figure out some alternative solution
I wonder if the makers of this game got permission to ship Roland's general midi soundfonts or if they just yanked them out of the ESS AudioDrive drivers
@foone What I kinda find interesting about midi is that in the consumer space it rose and fell within a decade or so (for actual pretty good reasons), while in the (semi-)professional space it is still going strong (midi 2 is fairly recent even!). It makes for such an interesting history
DID YOU FUCKERS USE THE "MAKE A COPY AND CALL IT BACKUP/OLD" METHOD INSTEAD OF USING A VERSION CONTROL SYSTEM? AND THEN YOU SHIPPED BOTH VERSIONS ON THE FINAL DISC!?
okay the problem is not just one of not properly supporting the encoding. This tool is actively corrupting the filenames by trying to turn them into UTF-8, incorrectly.
So instead of using the perfectly fine (if a bit antiquated) Joliet extensions, which have been standard since, like, 1995?), they just hardcoded all discs to be either SHIFT-JIS or CP1252!
which explains why this shit makes no sense: it's not shift-jis, or utf-8, or even cp1252: It's shift-jis being interpreted as if it was cp1252, then turned into utf-8
@foone C2 and C3 would be UTF-8 for the latin 1 suppliment block. And that block starts at codepoint 80 and up. So basically that's roughly turning CP-1251 to UTF-8 I believe
okay this seems to be a hardcoded CP1251-to-utf8 converter. Lovely. I'm not 100% sure this even produces correct output in all cases, but it's probably "close enough" for most filenames
so I gotta figure out how to wedge a shift-jis-to-utf-8 encoder in here, PLUS how to plumb through the knowledge of if this is a japanese region disc, so I know when to activate this code
actually I think I'm going to punt here. I can call a DUMP --show INTRO command to determine what region a disc is, then I'll just process all non-japanese discs.
THEN I'll invert the logic and set up a variant that is hardcoded to shift-jis, and then process all japanese-region discs
okay my code now checks if the ISO is japanese and if it is, it marks it down under "certified japan" files, which won't be processed until later. And then it continues on to the next file
another game with elf debugging symbols:
Adventures of Tintin, The - The Game. apparently compiled as "D:\LynProjects\Tintin\WII\LyN\Sources\Wii/LyNmainWii.cpp"
so Bigs 2 I HOPE was put together with some kind of code generation. Their menuing system is set up in a function called cMainMenu::cMainMenu. I looked into the DWARF info to figure out how big it is, and the answer is 171 kilobytes.
this is annoying: I'm having the opposite of the usual problem. I can't find anything about how to activate the debug menu because there's just SO MUCH DEBUG STUFF in here.
I grep for "debug" and get SEVEN THOUSAND HITS
okay I think I have bad news: I don't think the debug menu is actually in the released game. It's on the disc, but only in the debugging executable, not the main DOL
so the debug version of the game is on the disc, but I can't get it to load. it throws "OS ERROR: This firmware is an improper version for this SDK. Please use a correct Firmware." in Dolphin
@foone I've spent more time than I'd like to admit using your generators to put "YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON $thing! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!" on non-SC2K backgrounds.
"it has been zero days since Foone has gotten irrationally angry at german programmers"
(the entire encoding mess I'm already facing is because the extraction tool I'm using hardcodes CP1252 and doesn't support shift-jis, and it's by another german. I assume. it better not be the same guy)
I just realized that alongside "data", this game has "data_prototype", which has a bunch of Interesting Files in it, like "Prototype.project" and a bunch of DLLs.
For a Wii game.
Did they just ship half their windows executable with the wii game?
it just crashed again because the game name was too long.
the folder layout has the game name twice and it's "Simple 2000 Series Wii Vol. 1 - The Table Game - Mahjong, Igo, Shougi, Card, Hanafuda, Reversi, Gomoku Narabe (Japan)" so I overflowed MAX_PATH
@foone this gives me a flashback to yesterday when I was trying to setup a Windows 95 VM. I installed it and found out it crashes because the CPU is too fast. So I tracked down an ISO that automatically fixes it. Then I tried to increase the resolution via SciTech Display Doctor, which somehow disabled the fix 😭
@michaln yeah, win95 is a bit of a pain to get running in a VM. you gotta be real careful about which drivers you install and when, and I can never remember the magic order
@foone Originally I wanted to use the VBEMP driver (because that worked a few years back with Windows 98), but that failed. Anyway, today I found a more updated driver and guess what, it works flawlessly!
Here's a link: https://github.com/JHRobotics/vmdisp9x
@foone it's really simple to use, you just download the floppy image from releases and put it in the drive. Then you navigate through Control panel > Display > Settings tab > Advanced properties > Adapter tab > Change > Have Disk > Browse, and then navigate to A:\ and select vmdisp9x.inf, select the appropriate display adapter and reboot. The driver currently supports both VBoxVGA and VBoxSVGA in Virtualbox, VMWare's SVGA-II adapter and QEMU's STD VGA adapter.
@foone now I'm just imagining a programmer coming up with this as just, the easiest and best form of copy protection and feeling so proud of themselves.
@foone That looks weird. Why would they not only mess up the operator, but also avoid using the obviously superior if message then expression? Your game archaeology keeps uncovering the strangest shit, I love it.
@Rairii it doesn't have to be a custom filesystem!
although on the other hand, that's even less excuse. if you're designing a filesystem from scratch, why not just make it UTF-8 or UTF-32 or UTF-16 or ANYTHING?
@foone could be you run your emulator+debugging inside a vm so it doesn't bork your resolution? You probably already thought of this because you're a genius, but I'm case you haven't it may be worth a shot
@bennyfactor certainly. it's just more work. and "more work" and "dealing with resolution changes" are about the same level of barrier to getting back into this project
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