Today's new beta release is an unknown preview build of Sonic and the Black Knight. (Missing ESRB notice?) I've never played the game so cannot say if there's any major changes within this. I had a review build but apparently only 1 file was different which I shall add to this post later on. Picture of the original disk. (Click for a larger version.) This is a raw RVT-R image meaning it will not boot in emulators. To get it working you have to decrypt the image then extract the files with WiiScrubber. This version has been edited to decrypt RVT-R images. When you open it will error saying "Doesn't seem to be the correct key.bin Do you want to use anyways??" click yes and select the iso. This happens as WiiScrubber wasn't designed to do RVT-R images and I replaced the retail key with the dev one. Once you have done this you can set the file paths in the dolphin emulator and load the files. Tool to extract/decrypt the iso/data: https://mega.nz/#!OwE1FbJT!RDi3gbeB0kUuNtp54Evebl2pCKv9WouAy-Rt2wi4x4A Black Knight Preview Build: https://mega.nz/#!blklBLDI!_UmTGMIoxXklnNbUqxqeMflBXT2rO0Mr37FnnAexrdI FileList from above Build: https://mega.nz/#!ihUTmSrL!Q7u7fL25Rs77CDAiJ6czvdK81OJm4q92xYFrhEAaITA Hope you enjoy! More to come but not all can be posted on SonicRetro. Don't forget to share any findings!
So seeing as all the builds/previews after this aren't going to be posted here, where exactly are they going to be posted?
Don't really want to link off site but it will be on assemblergames, Unleashed will be posted here (On the 9th) as that's over 7 years old. AG allows stuff as long as it's 4 years.
Funny, I felt like playing Black Knight after watching Arin have a meltdown over it. I wonder how it looked early on.
Sadly seems like it doesn't run in Dolphin, at least not without messing around with settings. just get a black screen. EDIT: Nevermind I can't read.
Something I did notice, /movie/e0312.sfd and e0313.sfd / e0314.sfd seem to contain concept art for random games. I think some might even be fan drawn artwork. You can open the .SFD files with VLC but no sound plays and you have to leave it to play as you can't skip.
Makes sense. Don't know much about the newer Sonic games really. I normally stick to pre dreamcat era games myself.
FWIW: It *should* be possible to hack in support for the RVT-R dev key in both Dolphin and USB Loader GX. I'm going to try adding it to USB Loader GX tonight. If that works, then I'll try Dolphin later. Only hard part is that IIRC dev-encrypted discs still use key index 0 (same as retail), so extra heuristics will be needed. And by that, I mean "try decrypting the first 64 bytes of the partition and see if it has a valid magic number". (Incidentally, this is why it's not working in Dolphin at the moment. It has key index 0, so Dolphin tries using the retail common key, which results in garbage.) EDIT: The "top-secret" keys: Code (Text): RVL retail (0): ebe42a225e8593e448d9c5457381aaf7 RVL Korean (1): 63b82bb4f4614e2e13f2fefbba4c9b7e RVT dev (0): a1604a6a7123b529ae8bec32c816fcaa
So, here's the results of last night's ULGX and Dolphin hax: USB Loader GX: The loader can load the banner now (previously it crashed when attempting to read from the disc image, probably due to reading garbage because the key was wrong), but attempting to load the game causes the ARM9 to crash. I'm thinking it's because no one bothered to patch the certificate chain and/or disable signatures entirely, so replacing the certificate chain with retail, re-encrypting the key with the retail common key, and using "Trucha" signing should work. If I can get this working manually, then it shouldn't be too hard to automatically generate a temporary certificate chain at runtime. Dolphin: Adding the dev key worked, and the game loaded, but it hung at the "spinning ring" screen after the intro video. Not sure why. (Loading in the contents of my Wii's NAND resulted in it complaining about 0 blocks being available, which makes no sense.) Going to try ULGX again tonight, this time with a hacked disc image using the retail key and certificate chain. If it works, I'll also post an xdelta that, when applied to the full image linked in the OP, turns the disc into a fakesigned "retail" disc.
Thanks for your efforts trying to get it working without the need to extract files. I was trying to find a way myself on Assembler for like 5/6 months but gave up in the end. Not a Wii expert and to be totally honest never even played one haha. (Ps. Builds I can't post here are being posted there. I done two more since the threads here. I go by Demon on AG. )
Turns out the reason it didn't work in Dolphin was due to some changes that broke IOS HLE on non-Windows systems. (These were fixed in commits between last night and now.) I retested it and it seems to work fine with my RVT-R key code, so I'll submit a pull request. On hardware: It still didn't work after injecting a modified ticket, TMD, and certificate chain. Wiimm's ISO Tools report incorrect H3 hashes, though cIOSes are supposed to ignore this. I haven't been able to repair the H3 table yet, so I'll try the M&S 2010 prototype tomorrow instead and see if that works. EDIT: Here's my Dolphin pull request: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/4479 - apply this patch and you should be able to load RVT-R images without any issues, assuming they don't need special debug hardware with more memory than is usually available. EDIT 2: The missing ESRB notice could be due to the fact that this is a PAL image. (Game ID is RENP8P.)
While doing some tests with the RVT-Rs, I found that Black Knight's H3 table seems to be corrupted (according to wit and other tools when modified for RVT-R). Is this corruption present on the original disc? (The M&S 2010 prototypes pass verification without any issues.)
I'm not sure sadly. Unfortunately the drive isn't with me at this time. Was sent away to see if it could be cloned. It should be with me in a week or two again. Would you like me to upload that review build to see if that's any different? I can send a direct private link via PM if you wish? The review only had 1 change from what I remember. EDIT: Just had a look in hex and there's more then a few changes. It might have been a bad disk, Some of them were pretty marked up but nothing major. Going to upload it to Mega in a few but also doing a direct link for you incase.
You know what they say: the more the merrier. Sidenote: I'm currently working on adding RVT-R support to "Wii Ultimate Unscrubber", a tool that restores the "garbage" data that's removed when converting a Wii game to WBFS or CISO format. It turns out the "garbage" data is not actually random; it's generated using an algorithm that takes the game ID and disc number as inputs. If this works, then you can shrink the disc images while still maintaining the ability to convert it back to the original format. (Also planning on adding support for CISO format and GameCube disc images.)
Didn't know about this tool at all going to download it in a few, Thanks for sharing. It'll take about an hour and a half to upload this review build. Will get you a direct link then do Mega. I only checked extracted data not the iso's. If you also want direct links to any of the other builds posted here and the one's I couldn't which I put up on Assembler just say and I'll sort some direct links for you. I should make a list of all my builds at some stage lol.
RVT-R unscrubbing appears to work. (The disc images seem to be slightly overdumped: 4,707,319,808 bytes, when they're supposed to be 4,699,979,776 bytes. The last 7,340,032 bytes of each RVT-R image are all 00.) EDIT: This appears to be a difference between DVD-ROM (or at least Wii discs) and DVD-R. DVD-R format is defined as 4,707,319,808 bytes, whereas all retail Wii discs are 4,699,979,776 bytes. I guess that since RVT-R is based on DVD-R, they just left the remaining 7 MB empty. (not even encrypted empty)