Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: evilhamwizard - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

Hey all, I need some help.

For the past two or three days, Direct3D Acceleration has been disabled on my PC for some reason and I have no idea how to get it to enable itself again. I ran dxdiag and noticed that while Direct3D acceleration is disabled in 32bit dxdiag, everything was enabled and supposedly working fine in 64bit dxdiag. I believe the problem occurred while I was changing the properties of an old program to run in 256 colors or by switching the display to 16bit mode. Obviously I turned these off since then, so I don't know if something messed up in the process.

I tried the following:

1.) Reinstall video drivers, did nothing.
2.) I disabled System Restore, so no rolling back.
3.) I noticed that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Direct3D\Drivers doesn't exist, but the 64bit equivalent in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\ Direct3D\Drivers exists.
4.) Redownloading the DirectX setup, says everything is fine.

I could provide the dxdiag output, but it might not help with anything. They're almost exactly the same except that D3D is obviously disabled and the things that go along with it are unavailable.

I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ card.

I've looked online for solutions but found nothing other than the typical "update your drivers" answers. I'm kinda at the end of my rope at the moment since all my games are 32bit and require Direct3D, so I basically can't run anything.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Fixed it. I had to go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow646432\Microsoft\ Direct3D\Drivers and change SoftwareOnly to 0 from 1. I believe this was added in while I was messing with compatibility settings for the old program. I believe one of the settings disables D3D for the desktop, so maybe the setting was left there. SoftwareOnly didn't exist before (double checked with a friend of mine with a similar machine), so it all checks out.

Hey all. I was wondering if anyone knew of a program that could take a MIDI file and split any patch changes in a single track and output each patch along with the notes for each program into it's own separate track? For example, it'd be converting something like this (with patch changes within each track):



To this (each program change has it's own track):



As of right now, the only way I can do this is to manually create new tracks and copy and paste notes for each patch change. This can be very tedious and annoying if your song has like 2039846204620 program changes throughout the song. I heard of a script for REAPER that can do something like this, but I don't use REAPER. I've looked everywhere for something that can do this for me automatically but to no success.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Not sure if this is the best place to ask for help, but I figured that maybe someone around here knows a possible way to fix this.

I got pretty lucky this time around. I managed to install OSX on my custom built PC using a retail copy, and everything works fine with the latest vanilla kernel. The video card, the sound card, internet, the resolution, 64bit, everything works great in OSX. All it took to make sure everything worked was to modify the com.apple.Boot.plist like this:



Later down the road I decided to install Linux Mint 10 on my PC on a separate partition. Of course, this means that GRUB would be installed over Chameleon as the default bootloader. Even though GRUB listed OSX 32bit and 64bit on the list and I could still boot into OSX, I noticed that GRUB ignored the parameters listed in com.apple.boot.plist. This means that it booted up to verbose mode, didn't acknowledge my video card, and the resolution was 1280x800.

I don't want to mess around with reinstalling Chameleon, as I like using GRUB a lot better, so I want to try to refrain from reinstalling Chameleon if it's possible. I'm wondering if there is a way to get GRUB to boot OSX with com.apple.boot.plist by modifying a file of GRUB of some kind.

Currently I do not know what my partition table looks like, so let me know if it's necessary to provide it here.

Thanks!

Decided to make a post for this because maybe someone else who's interested can have a crack at this.

As some of you know, Sonic 1 was ported to the iPod Video (5G and up I suppose, the click wheel stuff) a few years a go. In comparison to the other "ports" to the GBA and mobile phone platforms, this is the most accurate. The physics are virtually identical to the Megadrive version, all original graphics are present, and the original music and sound effects are used. Now of course, this port still does things differently in comparison to the Megadrive version. But first, let's break down the data files you can find in this port.

Folders:
a.) Executables - there are two executables in this folder, both are encrypted and can't be read for strings. You can also find the digital signature file for both executables in here as well
b.) Resources - the description and instruction pages are kept here in multiple languages

Every other data file is kept in the root directory of package:

Files:
a.) z#a#map.bin files - the mapping files for each act for the six zones, the first # stands for the zone number while the second # stands for the act number.
b.) rserver.bin - no idea, appears in every iPod game I think.
c.) Manifest.plist - used for backing up the game in iTunes?
d.) Manifest.plist.p7b - same as above
e.) ##.m4a - music files, the ## correspond to the number in the original version's sound test, the zone/special stage plays for 10 minutes, for some reason the 1up bgm isn't here and the emerald get bgm is track number 94, not 93, track 93 is missing all together.
f.) 8B.mp3 - for some reason the game ending cutscene bgm is the only mp3 file here.
g.) sonicicon.raw.lcd5 - icon that appears while selecting the game from the iPod menu
h.)sonic.raw.lcd5 - the load screen, I think
I.) z#m - no idea what these files are, there's no file extension there's one for each of the six zones, all have the same file size 41kb
j.) iTunesMetaData - data for iTunes
k.) iTunesArtwork- artwork for iTunes

Then the rest are data files that store data like graphics:

Data files:
a.) z##tbnk.dat - graphic bank files for the tiles, can be viewed in tile molester, one for all the playable stages (sp = special stages, the 7th "zone" is the final zone and the game ending cutscene, z0 is the title screen)
b.) z##at.dat - unsure what these are
c.) z##bgtbnk.dat - graphic bank files for the background in each zone
d.) sndbnk.dat - sound effects bank, the sound effects are recorded in .wav format, the naming scheme for each file in the bank is similar to the audio banks used for the collections released by digital eclipse.
e.) logobnk.dat - Sega logo and Sonic Team Presents graphics
f.) gentbnk.dat - "common" graphics bank, Sonic's sprites, the hud, the rings, tv boxes, etc are here

Like I said there are differences between this and the original version:

1.) There are no gameplay demos after the title screen, it just sits at the title screen until you press start.
2.) The music doesn't speed up if you get the speed shoes.
3.) Even though the BGM for the end credits exist, I don't remember there being an end credits (yes I played and finished this port).
4.) There is no parralax scrolling in the backgrounds. The background is just one layer.
5.) I feel as if Sonic moves a bit fast through the air if he does a normal jump while moving, but it could be just me.
6.) While the "Sonic Team Presents" graphic is the same as the MD version, the Sega logo doesn't have that light blue wave thing like the original does (but oddly enough the uncompressed Sega sound from the original version is used instead of a higher quality one, the pitch is a little higher too)
7.) There's a how-to-play screen when you start a new game that shows how to play the game with Sonic in GHZ Act 1.
8.) Pressing any button on the title screen will move the title screen logo up and display options to start a new game or finish where you left off.
9.) There are no cheats (confirmed, I asked the original developers of the port and they said that they didn't put any cheats in the game).
10.) The screen fade effect is different.

These are the only differences I can think of for the moment.

Now here's some more interesting things about the port in general.

All the unused graphics that were present in the original version (the goggles, the monitors, the extra Sonic frames, etc) are present in the graphic banks. The only thing I couldn't find was the "PRESS START BUTTON" graphic for the title screen, but it might be around somewhere. One thing I noticed, as far as the naming scheme for the zone files go, it uses the original zone order that was set in place for the game like the original MD version does (GHZ first, LBZ second, etc). Like I said before, the game says that zone 0 is the title screen and zone 7 is the final zone and ending cutscene. But here's the odd part, z71tbnk.dat is the graphics bank for the Final Zone (which for some reason includes all the tiles used for Scrap Brain instead of just some of them) while z73tbnk.dat is the ending cutscene. Now, where the hell is z72tbnk.dat?! I don't think this is anything too special, but maybe someone with knowledge of the internals of the original game can think of something better than I can.

Oh, and remember how the mobile phone port included unused tiles such as the planets/ufos in Marble Zone? Well, they're present here as well:

http://I.imgur.com/qyw32.png (it's the middle of the black circle I drew)

Another interesting thing I noticed is that the unused wrecking ball is in the Marble Zone graphics bank as well! I checked some of the other zones besides GHZ and it's not there. So maybe they had the wrecking ball in other zones at one point?

There's probably some other cool stuff as well. But as you can see from the picture above, I can't get the correct palette to show up in Tile Molester. I do have an image of what gentbnk should look like though:



As for the music being recorded to loop for 10 minutes, I think they did this as a way to optimize performance. Whenever the music changes (like for invincibility, etc) the game will hang for like 3 seconds. And then it'll hang again to put the original zone music on again. The same can probably be said as to why the 1UP BGM isn't present, because that could probably make the game way more annoying than it already is with it hanging almost all the time.

With all that aside, I do know that source code was given to the developers of this port from Sega of Japan. Either the source code was similar to the mobile phone port, I don't know, but either way - they did a pretty good job on it.

I think I might have more on this, I just have to refresh my memory again. This whole topic was kinda a "last hour" type of thing, so I didn't really organize the content. So I apologize if some things don't really make sense.

I would like to post the data from this port without the music so people can look at it, but I'm afraid to.

So yeah according to this.

http://vgmdb.net/album/2070



But the game/music cd itself isn't featured in any set, as far as I'm aware.

Does anyone know more about this?