Hey Jakeford, I found something pretty neat, when your on the main menu set the 0x8C7694D0 address to 0F, when the screens black set it back to 0B.
In the Japanese version? That causes an exception on my dev unit. Seems the bytes that follow from this mode controller byte are important to the characters textures. 4 bytes at 0x8C7694E3 affect Sonic's blue texture. If you set the first byte to 00... Chameleon the Hedgehog There's also some flags that affect rendering textures in the autodemo. Autodemo Texture Flags: 0x8C8A640A Render textures (Disables most textures) (On/off) 0x8C8A640B Render alpha textures (Disables most alpha textures) (On/off) 0x8C8A640E Texture scale value? Needs experimenting No texture rendering: No alpha texture rendering: EDIT: Just changed the byte at 0x8C9001C6 (The offset that it crashed reading from) from 45 to 00 and... It plays Tikals music and uses the loading screen from the Autodemo. Reverts to normal when the cutscene demo ends. And yes, it is backwards. Not sure why it used Tikals music. EDIT EDIT: Ah?
This is definitely interesting, thank you. What are you using to edit the memory? EDIT: That title screen has the same timing as the Autodemo one, in that it ends in 4 seconds. Pressing Y opens the level select.
Ah, there's a dump of the Japanese release out there? That would help tremendously. I can't search and edit in real time with the codescape debugger like you can in cheat engine.
I uh, I did something: It just displays a "Now Loading..." graphic after a couple seconds and then loads the title demo. There's definitely more there, looks like the TGS charsel and some debugging menus, I'm just not sure how to access it yet.
How does the PC version map buttons? Does it just map keyboard and controller buttons to what would be the dreamcast/gamecube controls? Because sometimes on that title, pressing Y would open the level select. I got the game to hang at a blue/orange/pink gradient screen after loading Sonic through the TGS charsel and then pressing all buttons to reset when it was loading his intro cutscene. Didn't work all the time. It would change the byte from 00 to F2.
So is this a better method of loading levels in the AutoDemo than using the save states? Because the save states have broken lighting and music. Dying re-activates the lighting and music in many levels but you lose the control input.
After extending the display time, pressing start does in fact bring you to the TGS character select. Pressing X and Y together causes the game to abruptly exit on any of the screens, probably because the level select WAS there, but was removed. To access the proto stuff, you can change the seven byte instruction at 40C53A (RAM) to seven NOPs (90). You may also want to increase the four byte value at 42E919, which tells the game to jump to demos after only 150 frames (2.5 seconds). Additionally, the four byte value at 3B2C44C seems to act as a debug flag for this menu set, which when set to 1, blanks the title screen and replaces the character select with a set of menus which you can flip between with the L and R buttons. The first menu is rather simple, allowing you to select a character. The second menu would also be rather simple, if not for all the level selections being invisible. From what it seems, they follow the order you'd expect: three acts of Hedgehog Hammer for the three test levels, three acts of Emerald Coast, three acts of Windy Valley, etc. This last menu... doesn't seem to have any effect on anything. You always start with the character and stage from the other two menus, and you always start in adventure mode anyway. I suppose it should be possible to reimplement the stage select text with a mod...
When I tried loading the downtown section of Speed Highway as Sonic in the Autodemo, it had messed up textures. I'm not sure how reliable it is really, I'll try some more when I get home if you haven't already tried by then. @MainMemory, how easy would it be to do the same within the Dreamcast versions? I'm not entirely sure how to go about it.
You'd almost certainly have to look into the game's code in order to find the proper flag (that's how I found it).
I have just completed a TGS Menus mod, which forces the game to load the TGS menus, and changes a few things: The title screen now lasts 15 seconds rather than 2.5 seconds. Pressing X+Y will bring up the debug menu, rather than closing SADX. The debug menu now puts you in Trial mode when selecting an Action Stage, so you can properly exit them. Restored the stage select text from the Dreamcast version:
Can anything be done about the mirrored title screen? I imagine you could just flip the texture unless it's stored as multiple images.
