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While working with Sonic 1, I got tired of having to edit the level select text in a Hex editor, when it's contents is just plain text in a non-standard encoding, I decided enough was enough, and set out to convert Sonic 1's level select to use standard ASCII text encoding. After a very small amount of work, I decided to compile it into a guide.

I am aware that many seasoned hackers will have no use for this, as it is an extremely simple edit, but I think it will help some newbie hackers.

This guide is for the SVN disassembly of Sonic 1. It should be VERY easy to port to other disassemblies as the code changes make no use of macros or equates.

First, download this file (menutext.bin) and replace the existing file in the "artunc" folder. This is the Sonic 2's menu font uncompressed to work in Sonic 1. It's what I use in my hack, and it's what my code expects.


Now open Sonic.asm and find the LevelMenuText label and replace this:

LevelMenuText:	if Revision=0
		incbin	"misc\Level Select Text.bin"
		else
		incbin	"misc\Level Select Text (JP1).bin"
		endc
		even

With this (Pastebin link)

As you can see, this is much easier as you can just edit the text directly.

Now we need to modify Sonic 1 to actually understand this text format, so scroll upwards to LevSel_CharOk: and replace this:

	LevSel_CharOk:

					add.w	d3,d0		; combine char with VRAM setting
					move.w	d0,(a6)		; send to VRAM
					dbf		d2,LevSel_LineLoop
					rts	

With this

	LevSel_CharOk:
                    cmp.w	#$40, d0	; Check for $40 (End of ASCII number area)
					blt.s		@notText	; If this is not an ASCII text character, branch
					sub.w	#$3,d0		; Subtract an extra 3 (Compensate for missing characters in the font)
	@notText:
					sub.w	#$30,d0		; Subtract #$33 (Convert to S2 font from ASCII)
					add.w	d3,d0		; combine char with VRAM setting
					move.w	d0,(a6)		; send to VRAM
					dbf		d2,LevSel_LineLoop
					rts	

Now to fix the Sound Test numbers, find LevSel_ChgSnd and change this line:

addi.b		#7,d0		; use alpha characters

To this:

addi.b		#4,d0		; use alpha characters

There is one more problem, the Sonic 2 font requires a different colour palette than Sonic 1 uses, so take this file, and place it in the palette folder, overwriting the existing one.

And you are done, build your rom and enjoy the easy to edit text.

EDIT: Gah, forgot to include the new palette.
EDIT2: Pastebin link for the level select text, as the forum keeps fucking up the spacing.

My main laptop is pretty poor. It's not overly old (2007) but it's basic hardware specifications are as follows:

Celeron M 530 at 1.73Ghz
2GB RAM
Sis Mirage 3 graphics.
Internal 20 GB hard drive (But that's not an issue, it's OS only, all data is on a 1TB external USB hard drive)
It's original hard drive failed so I pulled a 20 GB from an old laptop with a fried motherboard.


It's got a 'designed for Windows Vista Basic' sticker, but I am currently running Windows XP.
I'd prefer either Windows 7 (Hard drive space issue, so that's out) or Linux... However, it's graphics chipset seems to have support so poor that I can only run in VGA/VESA resolutions with no hardware acceleration.

I guess I'm just asking for suggestions to make it more usable, really. I have a more powerful desktop, but I like to use this laptop for web browsing and some programming on the move, so anything to make it better to work with would be amazing.

I have found a way to run Xbox 360 games on a standard PC, but it can only run titles developed in XNA Game Studio. (Still useful, as some XNA Titles lack Windows versions), for those interested in the details, read on.

After enjoying playing Fez on a friends Xbox 360 console, I knew it was something I would like to play myself, however, I currently lack an Xbox 360 console (It was sold to provide funds towards getting a Wii U).
After some digging around online I discovered that Fez was developed using the XNA Framework. Knowing that XNA runs on .NET, I acquired an XBLA package of the game, and extracted it.

This revealed a number of .XEX files with file names such as Game.exe.xex, FezEngine.dll.xex, and a Runtime folder, containing System.dll.xex, Microsoft.XNA.Framework.xex, among others. This confirmed my belief that this title used XNA and the .NET Framework. With this information, I used xextool to decrypt the .xex files, and load them in a hex editor. The part of the file was a dummy PE header, followed by nothing but zeroes, but I found that at offset 0x30000 in every single one of these files, were .NET assemblies.

I wrote a quick tool to trim the dummy data from the start of the file, double clicked the resulting Game.exe, and was given a RunTimeException from the .NET runtime, meaning that at least some code was being executed from it.

After patching the resulting libraries in .NET Reflector to remove code signing from the references, I managed to get it to run. After replacing the xbox System.dll with the Windows version, it ran, crashing shortly after due to missing library files named STORAGE, D3D and XINPUT, among others. I began working on implementing these functions, and managed to get Fez to execute further. After adding in some logic to convert D3DFORMAT parameters between what XNA expects, and what Direct3D uses, it executed far enough to create a Direct3D device handle, so I believe I this method will be successful, and I began work on an 'Emulator' to handle this patching automatically, and use my implementations of the missing run time libraries.

I'm not certain on this, but if XNA Game Studio uses the same system libraries as standard games (It accessed them via DLLIMPORT, rather than as .NET assembly references), my implementations of the APIs may be useful in the future for emulators that include emulation of the Xbox 360's processor to aid running native games.

TLDR:
I can run XNA developed XBLA titles, but they currently crash due to unimplemented functions, but I'm working on it.
I've created a google code project here, and will be uploading my code so far under the BSD licence in a few days time.

I'm posting here to enquire what people here think of this idea, as I know there are many technically minded people around that could provide their insight into this, and to possibly find testers in the near future.

I'll keep this short. I'm working on a 3D game engine for some projects of mine, and it is completely platform independant by design (Currently running on PSP and Windows, but should work on Linux too)

Three days into development, and I have just finished implementing a Wavefront OBJ Loader that supports most of it's useful features for games, however I'm sure many of you are aware, the OBJ format doesn't support bones or any other animation methods, so is only useful for static meshes.

So here's my question: What 3D model formats would you recommend that support Skeletal animation while being easy to parse and lightweight enough to not limit the platforms this engine can be ported to?

A long time ago, I began working on the basic structure ready for me to begin to develop for the Mega CD. I posted it over at SpritesMind, within another topic, I haven't worked on it since, so I feel I might as well release it here too.

Quote of post from Spritesmind:

Quote

For those of you who dislike MegaUpload, or just want a direct link, Kaneda mirrored it at http://gendev.sprite...e_ProjectCD.zip
This is very basic, and needs work to be used for a full game, however, if you wish to start developing for the MegaCD, it should at least be a pointer in the right direction. For an example of it's usability in it's current state, it was used successfully in the Mega CD version of Artemio Urbina's 240p Test Suite