Thanks a lot for the files. Strangely enough, I've just run the extracted ROM in Kega Fusion and it still shows the Spider-Man copyright, and there's no "new title image" as noted in the patch... Are these things being applied in real time now, or am I missing something? =|
I guess you could do a hex compare the extracted ROM to the regular ROM and see if there's anything different. I would but I don't have hex workshop installed right now.
I've played about with these a fair bit, and yes, the patches do seem to be applied at runtime. The ROMs are usually identical - a few do differ, like Zelda 2, which seems to have a different ROM for every incarnation! Incidentally for anyone that didn't know, you just need to set your console's video mode to NTSC or MPAL and the emulator will run at 60Hz - it's actually region-free, unlike for instance the SNES one Note that the ROMs themselves may not be region-free - I've emulated more than one "Not for your system" screen Also WTF at the Shining Force II fixes. I have no idea what those do, but they're not on my list of things that actually needed fixing: - Battle search fix (0x004283: 05 > 07) - JP maps (allows Life Ring & Right of Hope to be obtained, copious hex editing involved) - JARO name fix (0x00FF63: 00 > 4F) - TALOS name fix (0x00FF0F: 52 > 4C) - Kiwi breath fix (0x0240C7: 20 > 0C, 0x0240CF: 28 > 14, 0x0240C7: 32 > 1E) - Caravan item-repairing bug - Several bits of dialogue - 3-digit stats (OK, more of an enhancement than a fix)
I guess so they can easily see what they've changed and why, to make it easier to modify the games further or reverse changes if necessary. Also this way they can build one file with changes for all regions' versions of a game and include that in all the WADs, simplifying version control.
Looking briefly at those SF2 changes, I think they're the standard anti-epilepsy measures. The notes translate as: "Akira Osamu magic light-sensitive" "Akira Osamu photosensitive lightning" "Palette of RGB values and add value to the table" "Back to the original brightness of the lightning" "Light off at lightning" "Flashing split" "Flashing split, remain persistent dark (original)" "Flashing split, sustained while dark (2008/05/01)" "Flashing split, sustained while dark (2008/05/08)" "Magic light-sensitive patch continued" And they seem to modify the RGB values (well duh!) of the colours that flash up onscreen when you use magic. So nothing actually interesting then Although they do seem to have tried a few times and noted the dates of their different attempts. The EU-only patch is labelled "Only hang patch" ??? Which was said in the original post, I just didn't pick up on why Looking at what that does...thought it might remove the region-check, but that's not it. Nor does it seem to be a checksum fix, that was my second thought. What is really strange is that the code at the modified locations is identical between the US and EU ROMs, so whatever the problem is, it must only occur in 50Hz mode. That or something else was changed in the EU ROM that broke an existing command.
By the way, here's the patch file for Fist of the NorthStar SMS: Code (Text): #>0x7ffc string " 323 077" >0x7ff0 string "TMR SEGA" >>0x7ffc belong 0x0313003f 0x000040: byte 0x3e,0x3f,0x3e,0x3f,0x3e,0x3f,0x3e # ???????????????? 0x005e00: byte 0x40,0x00 # ?????????(??0x5eb0) # leshort 0x0040 # ?????????(??0x5eb0) Strangely enough, the rom seems to be named differently from all the other roms in they have packaged for SMS games so far: Code (Text): country="jp" romfile="HOKUTO-B.SMS" Usually it's named just like you would find it in your goodsets and such, but here it's entirely capitalized.
http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/553/ I uploaded all the patch.zlib files I could find for Gen games that had been released up until a month or so ago here. I never did find anything as interesting as the PSIV patch, though. There's an Excel spreadsheet in this directory that denotes which games are coupled with separate patch files. "Blank" is listed when a patch file is there but has no contents. Bad checksums for the roms are denoted as well: "bad" if the checksum is incorrect and "bad size" if the checksum is correct but the expected size of the rom doesn't match the actual file. Some patched ROMs may be precompiled, but anything that's packaged with a patch.zlib file appears to load the original unaltered ROM and then apply the patch in real-time over top of it. The patch.zlib files are some of the easiest-to-read things I've ever seen. They're all basically "go to this memory address and overwrite the data with these new values."
One thing is a hack, another is buying it legit :P EDIT: oh, you mean that they made the patch. Nevermind.
Thank you for the list, it's pretty helpful. Also I checked Phantasy Star SMS, and surprisingly, no patch. Guess they were actually confident with that one? :P I'm also willing to take requests to checkout if a game has patch files. I can't check NES games though, not sure about SNES or N64, but Genesis or Arcade games I can look up. EDIT: The Forgotten Worlds patch file seems interesting, what's this thing they commented out? Code (Text): >0x180 string "GM 00004016-01" #30/ 12178 : org $012178 #31/ 12178 : 4EB9 0007 FFE8 jsr ending_irq_disable #34/ 169F6 : org $0169f6 #35/ 169F6 : 46FC 2700 move #$2700,sr #36/ 169FA : 4EB9 0007 FFF4 jsr segalogo_irq_disable #38/ 7FFE8 : org $07ffe8 #39/ 7FFE8 : ending_irq_disable: #40/ 7FFE8 : 46FC 2700 move #$2700,sr #41/ 7FFEC : 3C40 movea.w d0,A6 #42/ 7FFEE : 7225 moveq #$25,d1 #43/ 7FFF0 : 7017 moveq #$17,d0 #44/ 7FFF2 : 4E75 rts #45/ 7FFF4 : #46/ 7FFF4 : segalogo_irq_disable: #47/ 7FFF4 : 23FC 4000 0000 00C0 move.l #$40000000,$c00004 # 0004 #48/ 7FFFE : 4E75 rts
Nice, are all of those US releases? Wait, this can't be correct. I remember extracting the Alien Soldier ROM and it had the NTSC-U fixes already applied to it.
This is why M2 > Backbone folks! Are they still doing the VC ports? We're talking the same guys that remade Fantasy Zone II as a brand new System-16 game, compared to Backbone not even doing simple patching like Sonic 3 & Knuckles on Ultimate Collection..
Well... thanks to Backbone, PS3 and Xbox owners have Spider-Man in Revenge of Shinobi, instead of Ladybug-Dude. =P They did, in Live Arcade, something that M2 still haven't done on the VC... I so want to see that as a Virtual Console Arcade release.
By the way... I suppose there's no program out there that can apply these patches automatically to the ROMs? I just wanna check out what changes they supposedly made to the title, since nobody seems to have noticed any, yet the patch makes mention of them.
Indeed. Take WAD file from SD card, run through wadunpacker or similar, then use U8tool to extract the contents of 00000005.app and subsequently data.ccf. Then you end up with a folder with the ROM and patch in. IceKnight - you can just edit them in yourself with any hex editor - I've done this with my SF2 ROM to try and figure out what the heck they did.
Well if you really want to play Genesis VC roms - grab the WAD file and load it up in Dolphin. I can play Pulseman, etc. :P Some games may not work, but, the majority of them do. You need a nice PC to run everything, so just be sure you enable the lowest settings when you play. Also don't forget to configure the Wiimote plugin for Classic Controller usage (also - be sure to assign keys to the controller to). My pc's so good, I should be able to record video of games actually running on the emulator. Although, I don't really have patience to make it all the way up to the Spiderman thing in Shinobi. EDIT: Idea of the century, maybe you could run a VC game and run some kind of memory/process attachment program to manually pull the patched roms directly from memory? It worked with PCSX2 for getting the Phantasy Star roms out, and it also worked for Sonic Mega Collection (I think). So give that a shot...
