Patcher test: PSP sprites

[Drak]

I didn't just swap the monster sprites. I swapped the entire monster data archive files. This includes stats, AI data, sprites, and other crap. My wager is that some enemies have data that's different in the PSP version and the PSX version is not coded to deal with it. Thus, emulators and hardware = KABOOM when encountered.

Is it just possible to only patch the 6 characters into PSP sprites. If that happens,  would there still be bugs & crashes?

Cless, I have A Lot of free time everyday and would like to help in this project, but sadly i don't know programing. XP

[jajaswipo]

did you program in C, C++, or java? im guessing C

[Drak]

did you program in C, C++, or java? im guessing C

Unfortunately, none.....though i would like to learn. ^^

[Xiul]

I would like to remind everyone that ToP has issues in the psp, so even a clean copy sometimes crashes depending of the popstation firmware. (this is for any PSP tester).

[Einherjar]

Unfortunately, none.....though i would like to learn. ^^

If you think learning programming languages are that easy, there wouldn't be any university courses on it.

[jajaswipo]

it depends. Im a cse/me major and its easy for me. but one ge for all engineers here is a java class and the fail rate is pretty high.

[Einherjar]

it depends. Im a cse/me major and its easy for me. but one ge for all engineers here is a java class and the fail rate is pretty high.

For an average person that knows nothing about programming, learning by himself will take year before he gets somewhere. I learn Java and C++ myself and I feel how tough it is sometimes.

[Frogacuda]

Hey Cless, why don't you just release a UPS patch? It sounds like it was built for this sort of thing and will probably be better supported in the long run.

[habilain]

I'm away for a few days, and all kinds of things are said.

Anyways: For all those interested in learning programming. Programming is an art, just like writing or painting. You use different tools, but it's still an art (and very unappreciated as well). If you want to learn how to program, I recommend Python as a starting point - it's probably the easiest language to learn out there, and it's also one of the up and rising programming languages - i.e. it's going to be a useful skill to have in the near future.

As to why I say Python is easy: The skit editting tool took me 2-3 days to make, more-or-less, and that's including reverse engineering the file format. Of course, I wrote it in Python. It would probably have taken closer to a week in C++.

As to why languages such as C, Java etc. are hard: No dynamic typing, lots of syntactic characters, unintuitive and incomplete standard libraries/language features, and compiler-based rather than interpreter. I consider myself a good programmer (currently a CS/Maths equal student in the UK), but these languages are pretty hard for me to use - at least compared with Python. The older languages were written in a time where performance was key: nowadays, computers are powerful enough that for most purposes that hobbyist level people consider (and many professional level people), easier but less efficient languages are perfectly fine.

Frogacuda: UPS is not quite built for this. UPS is a replacement for IPS, which just is a set of offsets and what to change it to. For example, insert a single byte to the beginning of a file, and the corresponding UPS patch will be as big as the input, pretty much (assuming you don't have a really weird file), as it can't move the data around. Essentially, that's the problem. We're going to require to move data around, so UPS is not a particularly good option unfortunately.

[Cless]

UPS is essentially the same thing as PPF (simple compare of original file and hacked file), but with some enhancements (none of which are useful for file system hacking). It's useless when a whole host of files begin at different offsets inside of ISOs, which is the case for this project. Although I stated I created this patching application because of PPF's inability to work at the level we needed, that applied to UPS as well.

My patcher does a simple compare of each file on the disc individually. It's still not as optimal as it could be, but anything more complicated is a waste of time as the gain would be marginal. Not to mention, execution time would certainly be much, much longer.

[andwhyisit]

Nothing. Essentially, when you buy the game you purchase the media which the game is on (a CD) and a license to run the game. When you sell the game, you also sell the license to run the game (or commit an illegal act here). So if a copy of the game is made before it was sold, then when the game is sold the copy lacks a license. Hence, the copy becomes illegal.

Of course, it's pretty much impossible to enforce this, because there is no way of tracking the copy down. But on paper at least, it's illegal.

Also as a note, I have a Linux version of an older version of the patcher sitting on my computer, as well as a Windows one which doesn't require .NET/random DLL's and works on pretty much every windows platform since 95. I'm hoping to be able to rewrite the patcher for extra speed, or at least add a GUI to it, but that's pending on me getting other hacks to ToP done first. Major release critical hacks finished; Not so major hacks, still ongoing.

So if you bought a game and then lost it (I can't find my copy of Wario Land ) but had a rom file, is it still legal?

I would like to remind everyone that ToP has issues in the psp, so even a clean copy sometimes crashes depending of the popstation firmware. (this is for any PSP tester).

I'll experiment with popsloader when my copy of Tales of Phantasia comes in.

[habilain]

So if you bought a game and then lost it (I can't find my copy of Wario Land ) but had a rom file, is it still legal?

On technicalities, maybe. You still own the license (and the original cartridge). So if the license uses the term "this copy of the software" then it is illegal (it's tied to the copy you bought). If the license uses the term "a copy of the software" then no (it works for any copy). Then again, most licenses prohibit "making permanent copies of the software" so if you're in a country which doesn't have fair use laws, then making the copy was illegal anyway (though you almost certainly wouldn't be prosecuted; in Britain, it's technically illegal to rip CDs, so you can imagine how many people are breaking the law on that one, but it will never come to court). And if you downloaded said copy from the Internet rather than making it yourself, then it was definitely illegal to download the copy - though depending on how the license is worded, may not be illegal to use it... The joys of computer law...

I'm afraid I can't tell you what License Nintendo pushed Wario Land out under, so I can't tell you for certain if it's illegal in this instance.

[SlicerSV]

Hmm my iso / .bin file is 641mb but if you want the exact size its 656,950KB
~[ TESTED WITH PSP ]~
By the way, does both translations and sprites work for you since you know what to do? And how big is your iso / .bin file?

I just tested it awhile ago and this happens.

With Translation = Works flawlessly!!
 
With PSP sprites and Translation = Crashes..

With PSP sprites = Crashes.....

Without both sprites and translation = Crashes....Nah just kidding, it works for awhile that is........*Yay, walks happily out of the forest* and...............Crashes!!! And yes....sadly it crashes yet again when you try to get out of the forest. [After u kill the boar]

My copy crashes near hourly. It's possible it's the same phenomenon. I have just the Absolute Zero translation. I find that if I make sure to save frequently I can start over from my last save. I made a savestate that's just at the load screen so I can quickly skip the loading scenes, and I just reload before each hour.

To rephrase what I do: I load the game in ePSXe (rather than the console I don't feel like modding), and then press my quick buttons to load my savestate just before loading my save, load my save, play for roughly an hour, but never a full hour, saving frequently, when I notice it's gotten close to an hour, but I still want to play, I hit my emulator reset shortkey, hit my load state shortkey, load my save, and play some more. Rinse, repeat.

I've made it as far as where I'm about to go to Lone Valley with Klarth, who just joined my party using this method without too much incident.

I have no idea if this phenomenon presents itself on actual hardware: I don't have any actual hardware that's modded to play backups.

I also haven't actually tried the game without the translation either, I suppose I could do that once and report what I find...

My OPINION about this phenomenon is that it'll exist in any emulated copy, but not on any actual hardware.  Because of other behaviors and phenomenon I've noticed while playing, my bet is that the glitch is somewhere in the sound system, because SPUasync won't work no matter what, and the sound glitches frequently right before the emulator freezes.  I admittedly haven't toyed with the sound too much after getting it to sound decent.

BTW: I just graduated from lurker to registered poster...  HI ALL! heh.

[throughhim413]

There's no reason that the translation should be crashing hourly on an emulator.  Nobody else has had problems like that.  The PSP is a flawed emulator and has the same crashes that the game would without the patch, so there's nothing we can do there.  However, the game should work perfectly with the proper emulator and emulator settings.  It could also be a flaw with your hardware, though that seems less likely.  You may want to try using pSX (which people have reported almost no problems with).  If you think that it's a sound issue, you could also try using the Eternal sound plugin for ePSXe.

[Gamesoul Master]

I've played through the entire game, start to finish, with the Absolute Zero translation patch with absolutely zero problems. Played on pSX of course. At some point, I tried ePSXe just because I like to occasionally play with it. The initial screen where you pick the naming language for techs was almost enough to turn it off. With every plugin except for the software renderer, the text looked horribly ugly. Of course, this tends to happen on most RPG's I try playing with ePSXe (I'm sure most people don't notice for the same reason that most people don't seem to care/notice when a 4:3 image is stretched to fit a 16:9 screen). And yes, I tried all kinds of settings, good and bad, and they all have that same problem. It's just me being picky about accuracy and text actually looking like it's supposed to look.

Anyway, yes... The game plays perfectly fine, start to finish, on pSX, so you should definitely try that out. I haven't tried the "PSP emulator" yet (I notice a lot of people use POPstation... I just use the "built-in" emulator and it's played every game I've tried perfectly fine), but I'll be giving that a try sometime soon. Also haven't tried the translated version on actual hardware, as I'd have to pull out and dust off my fat PS2 to do something like that (I have no method for booting PS1 back-ups on my slim PS2, and my PS1 isn't modded to do anything like that either). Don't know if I'll ever get around to testing much more than about an hour on the hardware though, since I'll already be playing through a second time on the PSP and won't want to do a third time so soon just to test the actual hardware.

Sort-of off-topic (but sort-of related to this in a way)... Any reason so many people prefer using one of the crappy PS1 emulators on the PSP instead of the actual built-in one?

[habilain]

Mainly 'cos POPs is the PSPs built in emulator for PSX. There's also POPSloader, which loads versions of POPs which aren't the default in your firmware (i.e. POPs from 3.71 on firmware 3.9). Only Sony has made PSX emulators for the PSP; no-one else.

In any case, bugs with the AboluteZero translation should go in Gemini's forum. URL is in one of the readmes, I think. If you've got savestates of this phenomenon, then it should be easy enough for any bugs to be found. (Although it sounds like it's a problem with emulator settings on your computer, to be quite honest...)