By "patch it out" of course, I mean "hardpatch it out". The fact is: it's hit-or-miss whether you can complete Puggsy on a particular emulator - it depends on if the emu author was aware there was copy protection in the game in the first place. So I feel it'd be better if we could just kill the protection call in the rom itself, amirite? I know MD games use MC68000 language - the same language used in Amiga and Atari ST - but I'm unaware of any handy debugger in MD emulators that would allow me to track instructions live, piece-by-piece, like I can with WinUAE. Sooooooooo....... anyone able to help nip this one in the bud?
This may be completely missing the point of what you're after, but if you just want to finish the game, the Mega CD version doesn't have the copy protection.
If you just want to play it, just disable SRAM in whatever emulator you're using. (I know kega has this option, not sure about others)
Alas, not all emulators provide any SRAM-related options. Certainly not a good chunk of the ones for handhelds, for one thing. Take the Dingoo A320 for example. Precisely none of the three known MD emulators for it (the default one, DingooSMD and PicoDrive) can get past the post-1st-boss protection check to allow further access. To make it more problematic, the Dingoo/Dingux port of PicoDrive is based on an older version, without the later fix notaz applied to the GP2X/Wiz/Caanoo/Pandora versions to bypass the check. So yes, I think it's important that we force-disable it from inside the rom to make it universally-compatible with every emulator for every platform out there. Some emus will likely never receive another update, after all.
Hacking ROMs to use with emulators is much the same as messing with websites to get them to work with old browsers. Really the push should be to get the emulator to improve, as awkward as that might be. I'd have thought the solution would be to produce test ROMs and have developers work to get their emulators to "pass". But I don't know if anything exists which tests SRAM stuff.
TCRF explains it a bit well. http://tcrf.net/Puggsy In short, it's kinda tricky to remove it. The best way would really be to just disable SRAM saving on your emulator. Heck, the only emulator I can think off that doesn't have this is Genecyst!
I wouldn't know how to find it, but I wonder if there was a copier crack for Puggsy back in the day. Games weren't always 100% cracked but they got damn close. As long as the ROM is not redistributed (where people who aren't aware it's not a virgin dump might spread it around as such), but only a patch to hack it, then I see no problem with it as a stopgap measure. TCRF doesn't have the addresses, but if there are four SRAM write checks then it should be feasible to NOP those instructions out and not give a damn about the actual SRAM write. I don't have a Puggsy ROM handy to look at right now, though.
By "not handy" I meant it's on my back up DVD and not on my hard drive and I'd have to retrieve that disc. I know how to find ROMs, lol.
Ah, I see. Still, I'd imagine heading to a ROMs place to grab a quick copy of the ROM would be quicker than searching for the disc - at least that's how it is for me. XD
You might want to try your hand at any [f] "fixed" roms from GoodGen if they exist. IIRC those exist to hack games into working on emulators or 90s cart copiers.
Just had a quick look as well, definitely nothing in GoodGen 3.0. And while we are on the topic of Puggsy, have a look at this cute little Demo, an early Amiga program with Puggsy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kIqu_S0txc
Puggs in Space was the Sequel that was never made teased at the end of the game. Not sure if the Amiga demo came before or after Puggsy 1. (Guessing before.) Also, I w0d lik a Sonik 2 Baeta r0mz.
That demo came way before the videogame. I remember a nearby store that used to have it on display, back when Rainbow Islands was released for the the ZX Spectrum...
I believe the Puggs in Space reference in the ending credits is actually referring to this old test demo. Doesn't it say 'watch out for puggsy 2' or something like that in the end credits instead?
Actually it does. I commented on a YouTube video of that stage asking just that, and Tim Wright himself responded [to the video uploader's surprise as much of my own]. He removed his comment, but the response to the comment is still there [http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=SoEC2Ih9Ijo] I'm left wondering, what is stopping somebody from making a disassembly of Puggsy, finding the write checks [4 of them if the article is 100% right], and just disabling them? I mean, if that's all that it protection consists of, the write checks itself, it sounds easier than others are making it out to be? Wouldn't WHAT they do, where the look, read, write (?), etc, become irrelevant if we can just disable them outright? EDIT: IF the wikipedia article here is correct, and the check occurs "Before starting any level after the fifth [level]" [basically, from the first part of "The Red Woods" onward], then it could make things easier.
