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Group:
Tech Member: Tech Members
Active Posts:
1674 (0.43 per day)
Most Active In:
Engineering & Reverse Engineering (657 posts)
Joined:
30-December 04
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5775
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User is offline Jul 16 2015 09:57 PM
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My Information

Member Title:
Liquor in the front, poker in the rear
Age:
28 years old
Birthday:
April 18, 1987
Gender:
Male Male
Location:
Manchester, UK

Contact Information

E-mail:
Click here to e-mail me
AIM:
AIM  StephenUK 1987
MSN:
MSN  [email protected]
Website:
Website  http://

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National Flag:
uk
SA2 Emblems:
3

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Topics I've Started

  1. Rocket Knight Adventures Compression

    04 March 2015 - 08:49 AM

    Over the last 3 months I have been working on a disassembly of Rocket Knight Adventures and seem to be making decent progress. Just recently I appear to have located the main decompression routine, responsible for art compression at a minimum and possibly other things, and ran a quick test to make sure I had located what I suspected I had. A quick RTS replacement and run later, and sure enough all the compressed art failed to load, the uncompressed art loaded fine and the layouts remained intact (minus the art of course).

    Now here's where I hit a problem. As far as making tools for compressing and decompressing go (or anything involving modern languages for that matter), I have no experience or knowledge whatsoever. The question is, does anybody have the experience and interest to make a codec tool for this game, and if so, what kind of information is actually needed for it to be possible?

  2. Compression Problems

    24 March 2013 - 07:48 AM

    I'm not usually one for help topics, but this particular problem has me completely stumped and it's starting to piss me off.

    I have created a basic art file for a font and I'm trying to compress it in Nemesis format for use. I've never had any problem compressing things in the past, but this particular art file is throwing up problems. Viewing the uncompressed art in TLP or in SonMapEd shows it to be fine, perfectly readable and usable. As soon as I compress it in Nemesis, using either the Sega Data Compresser, Nemesis MD Programs or SonMapEd, it throws out complete garbage. A decompression afterwards confirmed that the art has been heavily corrupted during the process. I've attached pics below for reference. Adding 5 additional blank 8x8s to the end of the art file allows it to compress properly, but it's hardly practical to have to add redundancy to the end of a file just to get it to compress. I've tried compressing other files today and they work just fine, so does anyone have an idea on what's causing this?

    Posted Image

    Art before compression

    Posted Image

    Art after compression (decompressed again)

    EDIT: Tried using KENSSharp and it worked perfectly without the additional tiles. This leads me to believe that there is a problem somewhere within the KENS DLL files which is causing corrupted data. Feel free to move and/or lock this topic, but it might be worth keeping around to notify people of the potential problem.

  3. Marketing Research

    09 May 2012 - 10:20 AM

    To start, I wasn't sure if this was supposed to go in here or in E&RE, so feel free to move it in the wrong place. Secondly, although this may come across as a list topic, it is actually intended to be an in depth discussion which will hopefully be useful to anybody who wishes to create a hack or fan game.

    The idea of this topic is taken from a post which MarkeyJester made at SSRG, which is as follows:

    Quote

    For those of you who do not know, I'm currently making some major alterations to the engine in a Sonic 1 disassembly, it's almost as ready as I need it, and I have a very huge sprite sheet of improved Sonic 1 sprites with smoother animation which I plan to patch to it. The reason for me doing this is that, I plan to create a major hack of some kind on top of it, I mean major as in, turning it into a new Sonic game, but without going too mad (I don't plan to spend my entire life on it).

    However, I don't know what makes you all tick, sometimes I get lucky (See Pana Der Hejhog), sometimes I don't (see Sonic 1 50hz faster edition), but to do this properly, I want to get deep into your thoughts with a serious effect, what are you looking to see in a new Sonic Mega Drive/Genesis game?

    Before anyone jumps the wagon and says this is an ideas thread, in one frame of mind, yes you are right, but not in the same context, ideas threads are often created by those showing their ideas but not in action, and may never actually get to the stage of making them practical, not to mention that most of the time the ideas are either stupid or cliché, and the thread is only built around a conversation over "their" ideas and nothing more, hence why we trash them.

    Let's think of this as a community gathering of ideas, a provided marketing research of what the scene is interested in, this opens up room for more conversation. Of course, you are not forced to share your ideas at all, if you would like to keep them to yourself, then that is entirely your business and no disrespect to you. As most of you will have a lot of creative ideas, this will leave a lot of open room for multiple future hacks, and I think it would be great for those looking to make a hack, who are interested in knowing what people would like to see, will find it here.

    Hell play our cards right, we may end up with hacks congenial to us as a community rather than just the directors, like we usually keep getting.

    I would like to further ask that you don't be silly with your ideas, be honest, be straight, otherwise the thread will fill up with a load of crap, and will have to be deleted, I don't want to have to do that.


    Hopefully this topic does not fall outside the rules (if it does I apologise) and some decent discussion can come from this. The more original ideas, the better, as a lot of hacks these days seem to be based around the same few concepts (homing attack, making Tails fly, adding Knuckles etc). Many people claim this is due to lack of ideas, but with this I'm hoping that people less interested in the actual hacking aspect can still put their ideas forward and maybe see their ideal hack appear as a result in the future.

    So, what do you look for in a Sonic hack or fan game?

  4. RKA Lava Effect

    24 March 2011 - 04:09 PM

    I've been playing through Rocket Knight Adventures today, and upon playing Stage 3, I remembered the mirror effect the lava uses as shown below.



    My question is, does anyone know how this effect is achieved, as it certainly looks impressive and would be useful for some neat water effects? I've been trying to think how it was done, but I'm at a loss, so I'm pretty curious if any of the more technically minded members could throw out a few possibilities, or may even know the way it is actually done.

    EDIT: I realise this isn't technically a Sonic related question and I have posted it in the Sonic forum, but I think this is something that could be implemented into future hacks and could be a nice addition. However, mods feel free to move it to General Gaming if you feel the need to.

  5. Sonic 4 Genesis Edition

    20 March 2010 - 12:00 PM

    So as some of you know, I decided to start trying to recreate Sonic 4 on the Genesis/MD, in a bid to hopefully allow people to enjoy the game with the classic physics and controls we've all become accustomed to. At the moment, this is the progress I have:



    As you can see, it's not a lot, but as screenshots are limited and I don't know how to rip from flash files, I'm just working with what I've got. If anyone can supply some screenshots showing as much of the scenery and background from Splash Hill as possible, it will certainly help to speed this process up. Feel free to suggest improvements and stuff, but try to keep noobish crap out of this topic please, I want it to be serious.

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