User talk:Edness

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How to repack BLegends demo?Because trying replace files to final version it crashed at loading screen --From: UNKNOWNED (talk)

Uh, I haven't really messed with Legends myself, I mainly just helped a friend from the Burnout Modding community fix up the page a bit. Ask either AcuteSyntax or KabutoKun in the modding Discord. --Edness (talk) 09:18, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

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Hey, I Uploaded a better image, but it thinks it was a jpeg converted into a PNG, but It always has been a PNG, the site keeps thinking that the PNG images I upload were converted. And it has been saying that for days. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by GauntAthlete910 (talk • contribs)

Well, if you crank the exposure way up on your currently uploaded image, you can still see a ton of blocky artifacts, indicating that it most likely was a JPEG at one point. –Edness (talk) 17:04, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Burnout Revenge Texture Dictionaries and Binaries

Hey, I am wondering how did you access the texture files in the BIN and TXD file of Burnout Revenge. Whenever I access the BIN and TXD file, it just leads to binary code. Do you need an external tool to look into it? —From: Glitchedblood (talk)

Just manually extracting them by hand. The TXD files are very simple, just a counter of files with their offsets in the header, but as for the Frontend archives - it's slightly more complicated, and I've written more about it here. There's more minor weird stuff to do with the texture and palette headers, but that's eh. –Edness (talk) 19:47, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Edness! I knew I could count on you. -From: Glitchedblood (talk) 18:09, 23 July 2021 (PT)

Oh it's been a good while since this topic was made, and I now have a mostly complete texture exporter for all the textures in the Takedown era games and platforms. Not quite done yet, but almost there. WIP versions of the script can be found somewhere™, if you know where to look. –Edness (talk) 01:38, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Screenshots of PS3 games

Hi. i see that you take a better screenshot of the PS3's title screen. how did you do that?

--ScotttheAnimator1979 (talk) 20:16, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

With a custom build of RPCS3 that supports VSH emulation, and three hours of wondering why it doesn't work still. –Edness (talk) 20:37, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

DR 4 debug build

Do you have Dead rising 4 debug build?I saw recently there is a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_YlEjsXyjU&pp=ygUSZGVhZCByaXNpbmcgNCBiZXRh seem like they got this from other.If you have can you document this? Thank you —From: UNKNOWNED 8:09, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

There is one build that I know of from mid-2016, but it's roughly 50GiB in size which is kind of a limiting factor in motivating me. Don't know if it's debug or not. If I'm not mistaken, that build is also somewhat infamous for calling home, especially during development, which supposedly lead to people getting raided for launching it. Probably won't happen nowadays, but y'know. –Edness (talk) 13:30, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Quickstart Menu from bdominator and World Tour event ID

I loaded Quickstart Menu but i can't press any button and i only can change setting by pressing d-pad,can you give me World Tour event ID list?i want trying Oncoming Challenge —From: UNKNOWNED 4:31, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

The custom event IDs to allow for loading Oncoming Challenge were done by editing DiPrgDat.bin, for which I can provide patches later. Though it should be noted the track can't be easily changed, as the game becomes extremely unstable and crashes when I try to do so, meaning you're kinda stuck with the track that the replaced event was intended to have. But for now, you can change the Stage Logic value at address 0x654 in the PrgDat from 0x0D to 0x0B, which will replace the 2nd event in the Classic Series in Bushido Peak to load Oncoming Challenge. (Replacing the 1st tutorial event will still bother you with the brief annoying pauses of the game trying to teach you how to play the game. Nevermind, looks like the game just does that regardless of the event index?) –Edness (talk) 10:04, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

The Simpsons Game

Hello!

I'm contacting you because I want to explore the .wii files of the Wii game, but I don't know how to do it. Do you know how to do it?

Thanks in advance! — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lucas5201 (talk • contribs)

I used the QuickBMS Asura script, however I recall having to modify it slightly for it to properly work, because of some stuff not being detected properly and therefore not extracting anything meaningful. Sadly I've long lost that version and never bothered to recreate it since. Probably shouldn't be too difficult to do it again, though. –Edness (talk) 21:52, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Update: Just looked into it - quite a simple fix. On Line 140 change if CHUNK == "RSCF" to instead contain "FCSR". –Edness (talk) 21:58, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so munch! --Lucas5201 (talk) 20:10, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Dolphin Emulator 5.0-21364

Saw your comment on File:GameCube-title.png. Starting with Dolphin 5.0-21364, raw internal resolution is a possible way to take screenshots at true native resolution for GameCube and Wii games. Works very differently than dump at internal resolution, which I linked my experiences with that old method on Help talk:Contents/Taking Screenshots#Dolphin Screenshots Update. I had the help guide updated to reflect the change. From my recent upload experiences, it looks a whole lot better and compresses a lot better. I did overwrite quite a few of your Sims game uploads. --Wildgoosespeeder (talk) 01:55, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Yep, I'm well aware of the recent changes (both from getting e-mail notifications of your Sims screenshot replacements, and from you bringing it up on Discord) which is why I reverted that GameCube upload, since now the resolution I got was the same as the much older upload. I've since gone through the rest of my GameCube/Wii image contributions and also retaken most if not all of those. If you find more screenshots and have confirmed they aren't native resolution (not just from me) and they're too difficult or time consuming to retake, you can instead slap a {{replaceimage|Not native resolution}} tag on them.

In retrospect, I kinda should've known it was taking them wrong all along. At multiple points I took a much closer look at some of the screenshots I was taking, and saw lines and edges that should've been pixel perfect, but instead had one blurry side from being slightly stretched and resampled. I guess I was in denial and just didn't want to believe it.

P.S. I've updated the Sims 1 Rendering Information debug code because I saw your report in the replacement comment that the code was very unstable. –Edness (talk) 07:21, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

From personal experience, you did not not want to do that prior to 5.0-21364. It was very time-consuming and very trial and error. I knew for a long time something about screenshot taking in Dolphin was not correct no matter what screenshot method was told to me. My curiosity into faulty screenshots in Dolphin sparked with Spriters Resource looking at Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Paper Mario 2 title screens. Dolphin did not line up at all with the sprite rips. I don't fault anyone for uploading technically incorrect screenshots over the years. Nobody knew any better. I still feel that maybe the native resolution is still wrong since many screenshots do not match 640x528 exactly, but that is my suspicion into Dolphin rendering and excluding black borders. 640 x 480 could be NTSC while 640 x 528 is PAL. As for freezes, I don't have any way to confirm that on real hardware. I just thought emulator fault and moved on. --Wildgoosespeeder (talk) 19:11, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Some resolutions like 640x448/512x448 NTSC and 640x512/512x512 PAL (give or take a row) are very common on PS2, which also has variable resolutions defined by the developers. And sure enough, most of the games where I've seen these dimensions appear in GameCube/Wii screenshots so far are in multiplats that also exist on PS2. (Xbox is somewhat similar in that regard, with some asterisks.) Not to mention there are some games that internally still render 640x480 and then stretch them to 640x528 (see Neighbours from Hell, a PAL only title) as can be seen by duplicated rows especially on the button icons, but there aren't any blurry resampling artifacts. This same tactic is also observed in some PS2 games, e.g. GTA: San Andreas - internally rendered at 640x448 and stretched to 640x512.

Comparing some games that draw outlines around their characters kinda reaffirmed to me that this time it may actually be right. I took these screenshots like over a year ago, but never uploaded them because the GameCube screenshot looked so wrong due to the incorrect/resampled screenshot resolution. The Simpsons Game for the Wii is another game where that was very noticeable to me. –Edness (talk) 19:51, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Wario World was surprising to me when I discovered that resolution to be 512 x 448. I am seeing a few more games be like that, such as Hot Wheels World Race, so it is probably more common than I thought. I recently discovered that Mario Smash Football, which is PAL, does have a 60hz mode as well as a 50Hz mode, and that produces the screenshots you see here. I do believe if a PAL region game is capable of 60hz mode, no stretching to fit 525 scanlines since the display mode is different on real CRT TVs at the time. Same can't be said about The Sims 2: Pets for GameCube PAL. I can't trigger any true 60Hz mode for that game. Granted, I am not very knowledgeable on CRT TV technicalities. --Wildgoosespeeder (talk) 20:31, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Forgot, but the Pokémon Colosseum Bonus Disc has two resolutions: One for menus and the other for Jirachi --Wildgoosespeeder (talk) 21:13, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, not every PAL game supports 60Hz on PS2 as well. Depends on how the developers implemented it, still, I guess. On PS2, 60Hz mode just simply switches the output from PAL to NTSC, which many TVs (at least where I live) do support. The Super Mario Strikers screenshots you've linked make me think the same is occurring for GameCube, judging by the resolution. There's also progressive scan mode for PS2, which even fewer games support - its resolution is typically a "proper" 640x480 (Burnout 3: Takedown), but there are some that still draw it in 640x448 (Burnout Revenge/Dominator). Or maybe the 640x480 one is less common for progressive scan, I'm not sure.

The variable resolution after the game has loaded is also something I've seen, albeit very rare. And in the rare cases I remember seeing that, it'd only switch when playing an FMV. (Manhunt - normally renders at 512x448, but switches to 640x480 for FMVs) –Edness (talk) 21:19, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Some very insightful commentary here. Do you have anything to say about Rocket Power: Beach Bandits on the talk page? My emulator knowledge is mostly working with Nintendo consoles. Some PCem for those Win9x programs and DOSBox for MS-DOS. --Wildgoosespeeder (talk) 21:38, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Seems like they didn't have the storage for it likely due to the GameCube's unfortunately small disc size. On PS2, the game data takes a little over 1GB of storage, and the episodes are 1.7GB on top of that (~855MB each). On GameCube, the game data takes about 680MB, leaving around 780MB left to spare. Maybe they could've compressed at least one episode if they tried, but eh. (Also, I only just now realised that GCN discs have a smaller capacity than PSP discs... Wild) –Edness (talk) 22:08, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I knew for a long time it had to do with not enough space to fit on a GameCube disc. The specifics though? Didn't know just the kind of margin of error THQ was dealing with. Probably overworked employees didn't bother seeing if their game could be optimized to squeeze in the video goodies on GameCube, including video optimization or trade-offs. That's speculation. What isn't speculation is the concrete details of the discs' contents. Is it worth documenting the difference, including screenshots? Not the episodes, but what is presented in the extras menu on both PS2 and GCN? I am still getting a feel for what is allowed and not allowed on The Cutting Room Floor, since I joined May 25, 2024 (lurked for years though). What about the 60Hz prompt for Mario Smash Football? --Wildgoosespeeder (talk) 22:47, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Sure, revisional differences like that can be documented. Usually a page covers multiple platforms if they share at least some of the same unused content. I just checked the GC version's files, and can confirm (apart from the PS2 master disc info) the same text files on the page are also found here. So if you're up for it, the page title will need to be renamed to include GameCube (can't be left without any title because there's still a GBA version, which is unlikely to be anything like GCN/PS2), and update the BOB accordingly by listing both platforms and tagging that it has revisional differences. –Edness (talk) 23:38, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't consider writing my strong suit. You have more accurate documentation. Just write in what needs to be written in, including redlinks to the files needed as well as BOB inclusions. I'll move the page and upload the GCN file. I know you can handle that too, but I thought I would bear some of the workload. --Wildgoosespeeder (talk) 04:06, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

No problem. I've updated the page accordingly.

(I overlooked the 60Hz toggle question, oops) - that one probably isn't necessary, and would fall under common things applicable to many games. I don't know how GameCube handles them, but PS2 doesn't have a built in BIOS switch to force PAL games to load 60Hz, so every time you load a game that does support it you'll be greeted with an option to choose 50Hz or 60Hz, along with a Test button to see if your TV can display it in the first place. Some games also include a 50Hz/60Hz switch in the game options. (Progressive scan is similar, except you have to hold Triangle + Cross while booting to be given that prompt if the game supports it.) –Edness (talk) 11:37, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

You did it all? Wow. Thanks man! I'll be sure to talk to you again for anything PS2 related. --Wildgoosespeeder (talk) 12:34, 9 June 2024 (UTC)