Ever since I got a copy of the Rockman DASH beta I've wanted to crack it open and see what's still in there. Well looking at the ROCK_NEO.exe it references some weapons and the helmet. Considering the model for Rockman is a bit different from the final I'm curious how the weapons look in the beta. I think it should be possible to view these different weapons by swapping the models for the different arms. In the DAT folder there are files with a format of ARMXXY.bin. XX= the arm style or weapon, and Y = right or left arm. Here's where my problem begins the initial ISO is 147MB and plays in the emulator fine. Using PowerISO's virtual drive I mount the ISO, swap two files, and then using PSx CD-Gen compile a new ISO. The problem is the new ISO is only 93MB and does not play in epsxe at all. Is there a method to editing psx isos I'm not aware of. I've tried searching on google the past few days and have had little luck at all. I also tried creating an iso using CD-Gen without swapping files and it's still the 93MB filesize and doesn't play. Thanks for any help anyone has to offer.
If it were me, I would avoid those tools. Just rip everything from the disk into a folder, edit, then burn it all back to a CD. I've done this with games (maybe 1 or 2) before and it seems to work.
I tried this method without modifying any files and it didn't work at all for me. Plus I don't exactly have a ton of cds laying around to waste for minor changes like this so I figured emulation would be a better option. I tried Uberham's idea of using Magic ISO to edit files, and that was a no go as well. I tried editing files, saving it, loading it into epsxe and all I got was a black screen. I tried loading the normal iso into epsxe and using the change disc menu in the emulator and that seemed to have no effect at all. I also know it's not just my disc or my drive giving me a bad iso to start with because I've used my own ISO and I've used the ISO Protodude posted over on his Rockman blog quite a while back.
That's interesting; I would have thought that, if anything, CDs prepared in such a way would be even less likely to work, due to e.g. boot sectors/files such as the Saturn's IP.BIN, etc. [person who's never owned a Sony console shuffles out of thread]
PSX games weren't so secure. The file size drop must be either a separate track not seen by some programs (like with DC games) or some nulled bytes from a 1-1 rip.
There is also a chance this game in particular could do the same things the Final Fantasy series for PSX do, and that is address CD Sectors directly while ignoring the actual locations of the file on the disc, so rebuilding the ISO shifts data, making the game no longer work.
I wouldn't be surprised that this is the problem. It seems some communities have overcome this problem with FF games though. http://lasyan3.free.fr/index.php?page=ff7-outils&lang=en That site has a tool for reinserting .dat files into a FF7 iso. So I guess to edit this disc I'd have to find a method similar to what they did with FF7. (aka I'm shit out of luck. :v
