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bs zelda ast on real hardware
Topic Started: Mar 8 2006, 10:17 PM (872 Views)
dforce
Hero Hatchling
hi there!
sorry for not coming back to you guys for so long.
as you probably guessed already, i pretty much lost interest in hacking ast because theres no possible way to restore the game to its full glory and this somehow defeats the the whole purpose of hacking it, at least for me.

maybe i'll do a proper version of the zsnes patch for all 4 weeks, dunno.
or i could hand over the stuff to euclid so he can combine it with his translation.

anyway, the reason why im posting here is that i finally got around getting my satellaview out of the toilet and patching an ast week to be recognized as a valid bsx rom.

sadly, the result isn't surprising, but at least you know how it looks on real hardware now:

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cent208
Heir to the Seven
Wow! this is a shocking pleasant surprise. do you have an original AST rom or did you transfer the roms on our site to a cartidge? so are the indoors just as poor as the rom we have on the site? do you have sound/music in your version? is that title screen the start up screen for the BSX or for the rom? also what is that second picture of?
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dforce
Hero Hatchling
first and second picture are from the bios cartridge, not related to the rom.
the first one is the intro screen, the second one is the flashcart selection menu.
most of the time, theres just one entry there, because the flashcart is 8mbit in size and most roms are 8mbit aswell.

the third one is ingame, just after switching on.

i didnt pick roms from this site, i browsed the net and tried to find the ones that didnt appear to be changed in any way.
i choose the week 2 rom from goodsnes.

if you look closely, theres a pcb with a cable inserted into the bsx base-cart.
that means i dont have an original dump of the game, i'm using socketed eproms to load the game.

i didnt apply any patch whatsoever, because i wanted to see what the original game looked like on real hardware.

the floor looks different than in emulators, but thats just because theres some other stuff in the region where the game tries to load the floor data from. (psram)

sadly, it "plays" just like the unpatched rom on emulators. no music, either.
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2awesome4apossum
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Who's your favorite possum?
I wonder how the first BS Zelda would play...

*shifty*
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cent208
Heir to the Seven
[/QUOTE]i didnt pick roms from this site, i browsed the net and tried to find the ones that didnt appear to be changed in any way.
i choose the week 2 rom from goodsnes.
Quote:
 


do you have the link for the site that had the ast rom. didn't know other roms existed.
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coinilius
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Pickled in time, like gherkins in a jar
Wow, that's certainly interesting suprise :) I don't have anything else to really add that hasn't been said already, though...
"You must be talking about Heaven... or the moon."

"It's a dog eat dog world... and there's not enough dog to go around."

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Duke Serkol
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Where'd that Princess go?
Admin
dforce,Mar 8 2006
10:17 PM
maybe i'll do a proper version of the zsnes patch for all 4 weeks, dunno.
or i could hand over the stuff to euclid so he can combine it with his translation.

Euclid is in fact interested in doing so, therefore I'm sure he would be very happy to receive your stuff :)

But besides that, what we would really love to have your help for, is streaming music into the game (while possibly retaining the sound effects), so it can play like in the video.
How hard would you estimate that to be?
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Garrett
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Oracle
mmm... streaming music... mmm...

Between that and the dungeon patches we're getting closer to the ultimate version.

And there's STILL a chance to get at least one of the two out before Twilight Princess... ;)

Cent, the dump he's talking of should be available from any common-or-garden ROM site. Really nothing special, it's just the purest form as it hasn't been fixed in any way. If you can call a bad dump pure that is. >_<
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Euclid
Following Mudora's Footsteps
Interesting.

Let me patch that week 2 room with a basic room layout to see what happens.

From what i see on that screen it's corrupted halfly by the first tile on the graphics bank, which is some japanese text i believe, the other half is... just a different palette of the same tile.

EDIT:
Picture of it, yay

I still wonder why the floor is always like that, there might be some data i haven't dug up yet.
Yayyyy
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Duke Serkol
Member Avatar
Where'd that Princess go?
Admin
I've been denied acces to that picture, can you upload it elsewhere? (Or send it to me by mail so I upload it on the site?)
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dforce
Hero Hatchling
Quote:
 
But besides that, what we would really love to have your help for, is streaming music into the game (while possibly retaining the sound effects), so it can play like in the video.
How hard would you estimate that to be?


well.
the concept is easy, but if someone wants to write an audio streamer on the snes from scratch, actual programming will probably consume 10% and desperately trying to get the timing right will consume about 90% of the time.
lets just say the snes audio system has pretty much the worst possible design when it comes to audio streaming, it just wasnt built for it.


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From what i see on that screen it's corrupted halfly by the first tile on the graphics bank, which is some japanese text i believe, the other half is... just a different palette of the same tile.


are you talking about the screenshot i posted?
how the room looks doesnt say anything.
it just depends on the device in that area of the memory map the game is trying to pull its map data from.

emulators incorrectly emulating the bsx will probably return open bus there, so all the floor will be covered by the same tile.
the real bsx hardware seems to have psram mapped there, so the rooms look like whatever is stored in the psram at that specific region.
probably just uninitialized memory.

euclids host probably doesnt allow linking from external sites.
copy the url and open it in a new browser window, it will work fine.undefined
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Duke Serkol
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Where'd that Princess go?
Admin
You are the only one I know who knows about streaming audio into a SNES game, let alone one who actually pulled it off.
That's why we're asking you for help (or if you're busy and cannot, to introduce us to someone who may). I hate to do a Princess Leia impression, but you're our only hope! ;)

That worked, I had not tought about copying and pasting, thank you :)
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dforce
Hero Hatchling
yeah, maybe i'll try, but to be honest, i don't even have time for my main projects currently and it's been like that for at least half a year now, real life keeps me busy. thats why bof2 is taking so long, for example, over a year now.

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Cent, the dump he's talking of should be available from any common-or-garden ROM site. Really nothing special, it's just the purest form as it hasn't been fixed in any way. If you can call a bad dump pure that is.


i forgot to mention that, i dont think that these dumps are bad.

let me go a little in-depth here:

if you want to play a game on the satellaview hardware, you go into the corresponding menu(the one you see on the second picture above) and select it from the list.
before a game even shows up on that list, the bsx bios performs a number of checks, such if the company code matches and if the checksum and inverse checksum entries are valid.
after selecting the game, the bios performs a full checksum test on the first 4 banks of the game.
if the checksum fails, it overwrites the company name and the checksum/inverse checksum entries with -and this is important- $00.

that means the next time you go into the menu, the game wont show up on the list, you cant access it and its effectively deleted.

however, ALL four seemingly unaltered dumps of the ast weeks contain the value $ff in the company entry.
now what does this tell us?
exactly, the headers werent marked as "bad rom" by the bsx bios.
i find it quite striking that its like that for all four weeks, cant be a coincidence.
also keep in mind that all 4 weeks have the same internal name, "bs ゼルダ"
while other roms that had different weeks were marked accordingly.
my guess is that the ast roms were never meant to show up let alone be started from the normal menu at all.

of course, its possible the data got otherwise corrupted in places here and there, but overall, i believe the dumps we have to be good.

also, do you remember that loading screen from the ast video that doesnt show up in our rom dumps?

my current theory is that when downloading the game, a smaller rom containing the loading screen and the map data was copied to the 4mbit psram.
after that, the game itself was copied to the flashcart.
however, the rom you'd actually load up from the menu would be the one on the psram. after initializing, it would jump to the game on the flashcart.

my best guess is that they tried really hard to create some sort of one-time-only experience and hinder people from replaying it later.
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Duke Serkol
Member Avatar
Where'd that Princess go?
Admin
dforce,Mar 10 2006
09:49 AM
yeah, maybe i'll try, but to be honest, i don't even have time for my main projects currently and it's been like that for at least half a year now, real life keeps me busy. thats why bof2 is taking so long, for example, over a year now.

That's perfectly understandable, but we're glad that you'll try to help us out nonetheless :)

And yeah, it makes sense that they made it real hard for us, seeing how hard we are working to make the game truly playable.
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cent208
Heir to the Seven
dforce, since you are understandably very busy with your own projects and you own life outside of videogames, do you know of anyone else who knows how to stream mp3's? i recently posted a request for help on the acmlm board, zophar's domain and romhacking.net without any luck.
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