Sonic Retro: Hackers of...Leapster?

Awesome, I hope you find one cheap, would be nice to get those new Sonic 3 style sprites.

 

Haw, it runs linux eh? In b4 frozen bubble port

 

I have a Didj and Sonic Didj secured from a friend who tests at Leapfrog. He just hasn't sent the thing out... if someone can dump the Sonic game (without mutilating my cart, as I still would like to collect it) I'll send it out to them, given they are trustworthy of course.

 

you don't have to mutilate the cart. I just modified that one so I could get into console.
I modified another Didj for cart dumping

Got a leapster 1 cheep on ebay.
After some research it runs a linux kernel but I have yet to find a console port yet. by law Leapfrog is required to give the source for the kernel might have to bug them

 

Got my Didj and Sonic game. The sonic game has wacky physics, but I love how they mashed aspects of all four of the main Genesis titles into one monstrosity.

 

Sonic Pocket made the same, but it's better lol.

 

Sure did, but it wasn't a monstrosity.

 

OK lest say I dumped the game... what happens now?
I don't want to violate any forum rules

music? images? tile sets? who gets what

 

My understanding is that we are only forbidden to post roms of pre-releases. This should be fine to release.

http://medialib.leapfrog.com/didj_opensour...429-1631.tar.gz

 

I'm pretty sure it's ok to post a children's educational flash game that's been out for like a year or more.

 

Someone needs to hack that Leapster game into a tutorial on how to make good Sonic games, and ship it to Sonic Team.

...

What? Someone was going to say that eventually...

 

(removed )

 

thank you very much

 

Pretty nice stuff, but I'd like to get into those .spr and .tex files. It seems like there's around 20 different games that use the .spr extension for sprites, but none of the viewers/editors I've found work on these. By the way, ever notice how, in the internal files, they actually used the right names for the levels, like Death Egg, Sandopolis, etc., even though they called the levels different names in the final game? What really impressed me is getting all of the Flickies' names right in the "Criters" file. The sprites actually have names like Becky, Sally, and Locky instead of Bear, Chipmunk, and Eagle. Whoever made this game knows their Sonic!

 

The .spr files are for telling the game which .tex files to load for the .anim files so they will contain no images. The .tex files is what we need to look at.

 

Argh, this is driving me nuts! It seems that those .tex files aren't compatible with any opener/editor program. I even tried opening the .fnt font files (in hopes of getting the Sonic font) with no success. I did, however, manage to dig up some info about the company that developed the game, Realtime Associates. They do mainly educational software and helped developed Tails and the Music Maker. They also developed Bug! for the Saturn.

 

I've been looking at the TEX files in an hex editor trying to figure something out. Apparently there is some kind of 36-byte header (which seems to include the image's dimensions and things like that), followed by a pair of bytes "78 9C". I looked this pair up on Google and it seems this indicates the start of ZLIB compressed data. Now if someone can find/make a ZLIB decompressor we might be able to decode the images.

EDIT: I found a ZLIB decompressor and I'm getting something out of the images... Here's what I got from "Digit0.tex":


See, after messing with the brightness and contrast I can see a 0 in there, very Sonic style. But I can't say why the image is concentrated in the blue channel, why it's so dark, and why the red channel has some crap in it. I'll keep trying to make sense of it, and maybe decode something more interesting than a zero.

EDIT2: More findings: the decompressed data appears to have a 512-byte palette, followed by an indexed image. I mistook the palette for the red channel in a 24-bit image in my tests with the digit 0. Now I just have to find out how this palette is encoded (it uses 2 bytes per color, have to find out which bits are R, G and B). Here's something more interesting: