I looks really really great. The music reminds me of game hero (which is not a bad thing). I searched for star wars midis when you asked me to look into your sound code but I could find one that worked well with my current converter. Maybe composing the music from the scratch is the better way to do it. As soon as I’m done with Faceball I will publish my converter and the Midi player code. It is about time.

I already did this on Thursday but forgot to post: I fixed one bug in the level editor causing the overview map in the game to screw up. I also added some functions so that the gui now shows what has been stored previously. Due to how I designed the editor this does not work for the enemies. Maybe I will find a work around for this… or I just leave ot as it is.

I also wanted to add a feature that allows the user to edit the credits.

Greg Stevens wrote:

what tool did you use to compse your midi?

I used a program called MuseScore.
http://musescore.org/en

It’s really great. You can just compose the musical notes on a score and it plays it for you. It will also import a midi file into all the different tracks and display all the notes/tracks so you can take an existing one and easily modify it. I also attached my java program source code that converts midi files to VB code for me. It works pretty well for my needs. I designed this to be able to play individual tracks of a midi file and then export those tracks to VB code with relative …

Hehe, that’s pretty much what I did as well, I really should polish and release everything… Could you publish your midi so that I can compare results?

Greg Stevens wrote:
As far as sound the answer is yes and no. I ended up abandoning trying to use wav data and just composed a midi file using Musescore. I wrote a simple midi file parser using java and used it to calculate the interrupt timing I needed to play my song on the VB with a 20 microsecond timer. Ben has been my tester and although I was happy with getting a wav file to play the midi file makes it much easier to perform other code while the music is playing. Ben said he thought it would be a better experience anyway comparing it to your Game Hero game so I switched it up.

Thanks a bunch for the source code it helped me to quickly change my philosophy.

You actually got the fishbone sound code which is more advanced. I can sent you my midi converter when I’m back in Germany as well. Maybe it will work on your midi. what tool did you use to compse your midi?

Argh, I was waiting for this and now I can’t try it out until Wednesday. Did the sound work out the way wanted in the end?

bigmak wrote:
Every time I ask thunderstruck if he can do something he tells me

‘ahh, I don’t know..that’s going to be really hard’

Then two days later..it’s done 😛

-Eric

I’m using the Scotty approach.

Could you please translate the comic strip from “Famitsu 352 p 169.jpg (2,671.29 KB)” first? It is so fascinating and disturbing at the same time.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

thunderstruck wrote:
I looked into how the game handles the GamePad inputs. It took some time but I figured the basics out. This allowed me to change how the games handles strafing. Usually you had to press left or right on both d-pads at the same time to strafe. I changed it that way that the right d-pad turns the player while the left d-pad allows him to strafe. This is much more convenient.

Is there a way to make it so that the player can swap the controls if he or she desires, so that the left pad turns the player and the right pad lets the player strafe?

I can’t think of any good way right now. I played through some levels with the new controls and it works for me.

And here comes (hopefully) the final change. As I said before, I looked into how the game loads BGMaps and Chars. Even though I didn’t fully reverse engineered the formats in the ROM I was able to replace the start-logo with something I created myself.

Basically, I created a CharSet and BGMap using Vide and copied the result into the ROM. After the game is done with loading all of the BGMaps I load what I stored in the ROM. It actually wasn’t that simple, but I think you get the point. After adding the BGMaps I tweaked the Window-Attributes a little bit to have all of the letters in the perfect position.

The letters don’t look perfectly clean if you have a close look. However, this is caused by the game (maybe scaling?) as everything looks fine on the BGMaps and Worlds.

I attached a screenshot. You can find an video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R9HyeI465E

I’m now done with all changes I planned for the game. The only thing left is doing the actual levels. Therefore I have to do some fixes/additions to the level-editor. However, I won’t be able to work on this for a week or so.

Attachments:

1. 

   startscreen-2.jpg
   

I looked into how the game handles the GamePad inputs. It took some time but I figured the basics out. This allowed me to change how the games handles strafing. Usually you had to press left or right on both d-pads at the same time to strafe. I changed it that way that the right d-pad turns the player while the left d-pad allows him to strafe. This is much more convenient.

I also removed the options menu from the start screen so that the arena mode can’t be started anymore. This was easy.

Well… during the last days I looked into how BGMaps are loaded. I did this because I wanted to have the hidden image I found in the ROM back in the game.

My first idea was to copy the respective part of the BGMap to another part in the ROM. This didn’t work out because of the way the BGMaps are stored in the ROM.

The next idea was to copy around the BGMaps after they are loaded. That’s not to complicated. However, it would have been a bigger piece of asm code to write (and I’m getting sick of writing asm).

While writing that code I realized I was thinking way to complicated. I realized that I can simply manipulate the World-Attributes instead of hacking around in the BGMaps. Took me around half an hour or so to find the place in the ROM where the world attributes are stored (0x1D3870) and change the respective values. In the end it was just changing 2 bytes and the hidden image was reactivated.

I also made a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7RFnHaHKjw

morintari wrote:
Your Music engine is really impressive but I wonder what we could learn from reverse engineering the music? Hmmm I just wonder?

Huh? Nothing. I just looked at how it is loaded.

I looked into how the game loads the BGMaps today. I can see how they are loaded and where they are in the ROM. I can even change elements by playing around with the values. However, the Maps a stored in a compressed format in the ROM. Repeating values are for example only written once into the ROM followed by a number that tells the game how often they are repeated. There is more stuff in there which I have no idea what it is good for.

I don’t know if it makes sense to fully reverse engineer it as there are other ways to change the maps.

morintari wrote:
Benjamin Stevens wrote

Excellent work, Thunderstruck!

It looks like you have the ability to eventually hack absolutely anything you want if you put your mind to it.

Soon… you’ll be hacking the Pentagon. 😉

While your at it Thunder could you hack the big “N” and get us the two lost games? JK

Sounds complicated… but if someone sends me the uunfinished dragon hopper rom I will finish the game for him for free.

bigmak wrote:
?????????? Is that a high score ending screen ?????

-Eric

Well, it is the credit screen that used to show 1234567890. I don’t think it was ever supposed to show the score. I can now write whatever I want in the credits now. So I guess I will put some thank yous there. What’s the name of the guy who bought the game again?

I swear it is not a photoshop…

Attachments:

1. 

   credits.jpg
   

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

thunderstruck wrote:
I got bored so I looked into the what the game writes into the BGMaps. I already saw once that the levelmenu has the numbers 1 to 5 on a BGMap. I thought that was strange because there are only 4 stages. A closer look showed that there is also an additional image for a fith stage. I attached a screenshot.

That is a gem of a find! Thanks for sharing that.

Yeah, and it fits even better in the game then the image with the mirrors. I didn’t saw anything else hidden though. Only some text I didn’t saw in the game (like ‘TEKI’ and ‘FLOOR’).

Well, there is not allot of stuff left I want to change. So far I can:

– add 14*4 new levels
– add any kind of enemy to those levels
– change the behavior of every enemy
– use the hidden Face2000 enemy
– use every available (hidden) song in every level
– display a fixed score
– deactivate the debug menu (Thanks to HorvatM)
– do all of this using a pretty simple to use level editor

The only other thing I want to do is fixing some of the typos in the credits and reactivate the hidden image (the one I showed in my previous post). I checked how the game loads and graphics. Unfortunately they are stored in a compressed format in the rom. I made a plan how to handle all of this. It will be some work but I’m confident that it will work out in the end.

However, I’m not in the mood for it right now. I guess I will take a week or so off before I really start on this.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Now here is a nicely made review (in Spanish) for VB Faceball:

http://www.9esferas.es/2013/01/unreleased-niko-chan-battle-de-virtual.html

Wow, that’s and pretty awesome review. My Spanish is pretty bad so I only understand like 20% of it… still, cool stuff.