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

NOTE: This is for schamp.zip, the US version of Sonic the Fighters. Things may very well have moved around in the sfight.zip ROMs. Further, these are the 15 and 16 ROMs. I haven't really looked much at the 7 and 8 ROMs, which are the second half of the program.


If you want to see these for yourself, you'll need a hex editor, and this zip file. It has the 15 and 16 ROMs, as well as the two combined, extracted from a memory dump of the Model 2 Emulator.



So, with the rerelease of Sonic the Fighters announced, I started looking in the Model 2 ROMset again, just to see what there is. Some things, though, just made me shit bricks. Here's some of what I've found.


First off, at 0DADE4, the data there, in both the ROMs and the dump, is a select screen hack, so the data isn't original (Sorry).

If you want to restore the original data, look below.

hack: 00 01 06 02 04 07 0A 05 0D 03 0E 0B 08 0F
(Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Nack, Espio, Bean, Bark, 'Eggman's Robot', Metal Sonic, Rocket Metal, Eggman (Mech), Eggman, Honey)

(Note: 0D is the number of entries in the list as well as the 'Eggman's Robot' character)

original: 00 01 04 0A 05 07 02 06 07 07 00 00 00 00 00
(Sonic, Tails, Nack, Bean, Bark, Espio, Amy, Knuckles)


Now, go back up to 097CA0...

This area deals with the 'High Scores' screen. At first, you'll see some of the default initials, and later on, you'll come across this:

Quote

Yes, you see that right. Each name has a full 10 characters, even if only 3 get used, and there are a whopping 13 blank slots. However, before you get too carried away, unless a hack can be done to point other characters at these blank spaces, most are going to be useless for now, as both Rocket Metal and 'Eggman's Robot' use the first blank space.



At 097EF0, you'll find an initials filter and replace scheme.

There are 8 that will trigger a replacement. These are:

('bad' initials first, then replacement initials; an underscore is a space)

Quote

The first few are fairly self-explanatory, but later entries are, well, a bit strange. Why 'YOS' or 'HAC' is filtered, I don't know. 'HAC' is an even odder case, as it gets changed to the number '894', despite there not even being numbers available normally. The final one is also a real headscratcher, as it apparently 'changes' the initials to exactly what you entered, making it a pointless entry.




But for a real 'WTF?' moment... go to 090C80. This text apparently is in with the Bookkeeping data. Again, it's a list of character names, but check them out:

Quote

'SHUN'? Like Shun Di? 'LION'? I mean, considering Fighters was built on Fighting Vipers, 'PI[C]KY' might be reasonable, but Virtua Fighter characters? And just what the hell is a 'KOTAILS'? Oh look, some extra blank slots.


I'm not quite as technically inclined as other members here, so maybe other things can be dug up.

Things to note:

This game uses a strange interleaving pattern, where if the first 16 bytes of the 'whole' are:

Quote

then the .15 file will have its first 8 bytes as:

Quote

and the .16 file will fill it out with its first 8 bytes being:

Quote

Pointers are backwards. For example, the first high score character name entry ('SONIC .') is at 097D84. In order to search for the pointer to it, you would search for: 84 7D 09 00.


If anyone else learns anything, post it up here. My hope is this initial set of finds turns into a concerted effort to bend this title to our will.

So, I finally went and grabbed a copy of SF4 (yep, vanilla) arcade edition, and the X2 loader.

Now, I'm having some issues.

1) Game is far too fast. For a system that stutters slightly when on Drive-in at Night in the PC release, this is surprising. Is there a frame-limiter somewhere?

Edit: Solved by switching desktop to 60hz before playing.

2) I can't hit diagonally up-right or down-left when using a stick (MadCatz SE stick for 360). How can I overcome this?

Edit: Solved by using Joy2Key and using the arrows for movement.



3) I tried to use memory editing to play as Gouken (he was in, but not normally playable, and I thought a memory poke would fix that), but the game craps out, even though it shows his profile image (note this isn't normally seen in-game). Is there anything I can do with donor PC files to allow him to be played?

Edit: Only question left. Seth plays normally.

Any assistance is appreciated. Thanks.

Basically, would anyone be interested in having me document my findings in regards to this build of the game?

Most of what I have is in regards to the unselectable characters and stages, but it could be worth getting out there.

Being that this is the best of the 3 versions (in terms of character balance), might be interesting to see what was going on.

It's owned by someone on another forum I frequent.

Listing is as follows:



I directed him here, but not sure if he'd actually show, so figured I'd post up here.

Also, if this's the wrong forum, please let me know and move it.

If you remember my "Holy Hell! Lots of Fighter Hacks!" thread, this is from the same site. This time, it's for Street Fighter 2 (World Warrior), specifically the sf2jc set.

Problem is, there's no .ips. All there is is a .pat.

It opens in Notepad as plain text, and after the first two lines, the format is easy enough to understand, but I'd rather not have to apply this thing manually.

Here's a sample of one of the two files:


(there's much more after this, but I'm not gonna quote the whole thing)

It seems to be a 'smart' patch format (as opposed to the 'dumb' IPS), since the first byte is what should be at the address given, and then gives the patched value.

Given this information, I could probably apply this manually, but it would be a pain in the ass to do, and take a decent amount of time.

Anyone have any ideas what this is supposed to be run with?