Author Topic: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)  (Read 9544 times)

halkun

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Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« on: 2007-05-20 18:05:54 »
Hi there...
    I have some good news, and some bad news.
    First the good news, I have a fully functioning win32 computer. It was given to me as part of my job. Now I can do windows-ish admin of things on the q-gears side.

    Now the bad news...

    I have been contacted by someone in the "industry" about the win32 Q-gears release. It wasn't someone at Square-Enix, nor was it a C&D. It was, however, one of the original PC port programmers who wishes to remain anonymous.
    As much as he like what we were doing with the project, I was strongly advised to remove the data that was copied from the FF7 PSX disk. I agree that this is probably the best thing to do.

    I'm pulling the win32 releases and purging them of the binary Square data. This means that q-gears will no longer run "stand-alone" without a PSX disk.

    The good news...

    I'm getting a license for an installer that will prompt for the PSX disk when you install q-gears on a windows computer. This will copy over the needed files, except for the movies. (We need an extracter for those) Whe I have the new install package built, I will upload it to sourceforge.

    Sorry, I want to see this grow as much as you. The problem is it's a little too close to being illegal. If sourceforge or the company I'm getting the installer from finds us distributing copyrighted content, I can lose both. I hope you guys understand...

    I'll post an update when I get the installer license.

===EDIT===
SVN is still open. I'll need to get a copy of the .13 code from akari and I'll update SVN with that so you guys aren't in the dark. Also, I have a copy of the .13 win32 release local here. I didn't delete anything. I'm just fixing up the IP issues.
« Last Edit: 2007-05-20 18:18:25 by halkun »

Aali

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #1 on: 2007-05-20 18:44:02 »
finally

that stuff should never have been in there in the first place

halkun

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #2 on: 2007-05-20 18:54:44 »
blame me for that one, I don't run windows so the most I see is stuff in SVN. When it was brought to my attention that the movies were being packaged, that's when I realized that we are pretty much "giving away the store"

nope

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #3 on: 2007-05-20 19:45:58 »
I'm all for stripping out the original data, as this protects the project, I'd like to see a list of the files from the disk that are needed to run the betas, this could be put in the release notes or something, or it could be completely avoided by loading from the disk directly although I don't think this has been implemented yet has it?

LDJosh

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #4 on: 2007-05-20 20:50:35 »
What you guys most likely could do is go get squares publicly released ff7 demo ( http://www.download.com/Final-Fantasy-VII-demo/3640-7538_4-891018.html ) and use the data from that. it's only the battle arena, but it might not be such a bad idea for distro.

Salk

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #5 on: 2007-05-20 20:53:20 »
If I understood well, Q-Gears for Windows 32-bit will require the user to own both the PSX and the Windows version of the game ?  :?

halkun

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #6 on: 2007-05-20 21:26:13 »
On the PSX version for now.

halkun

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #7 on: 2007-05-21 15:49:43 »
New news!

I got the installer license. It's by an awesome company called Bitrock. I'm going to be coding the installer tonight. I'm going to need some things..

G, if you can, I need the program you use to extract the .mov files off the disk so I can put them in the installer. All I need is the extraction tool and the source (So I can put it into SVN) I hope to have the .13 binary up soon...

G

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #8 on: 2007-05-21 16:53:30 »
source of my utility is in the svn (q-gears/src/utils/moviedump/) it requires one argument - path of binary image of any ff7cd. But it's only for cd-image :( - I'll try to write code for direct reading of cd through ioctl for Linux tonight.
If there is a need of Linux GUI extractor - say me, I have skills in GTK2+.

halkun

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #9 on: 2007-05-21 19:06:15 »
Can you write a quick win32 program that reads off the disk via ioctl? The installer, right now, is just for windows. I don't need a gui, it's all taken care of by the installer. I need an executable that I can with a script call to copy the movies over.


This is a demo of the installer I have as a flash movie.
http://www.bitrock.com/videos/pengupop/pengupop_video.html   

G

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #10 on: 2007-05-21 19:17:57 »
I don't know, whether ioctl method is supported on windows. I'll try to write win32 program.

halkun

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #11 on: 2007-05-21 20:02:27 »
I can build an installer that will just copy over the data files for now. If there is an easy way to do the movie extracting in windows without ioctl, then go ahead ^_^

G

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #12 on: 2007-05-21 20:06:14 »
I am already writing some code to test Direct I/O access to CD-ROM on windows uising Win32 API.

Borde

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #13 on: 2007-05-22 18:46:46 »
This may sound like a very stupid question for some of you, but why did Q-Gears required any original data that couldn't be read directly from the disks?
Anyway, I supose we should thank this anonymous developer for the advise.

halkun

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #14 on: 2007-05-22 20:06:13 »
The PSX disk is not a real CD-ROM. It can be compatible, but sometimes the disk can change to a special format. The movie files are put on the disk in this special CD-ROM format that can't be read by normal CD-ROM means. (This special format allows more data to be put on the disk, but you lose the error-correction) We have to extract the movies off the disk and put them on the hard drive so that...

1) It will be faster to access (The PSX CD-ROM drive is always spinning, a PC CD-ROM drive does not)
2) It makes it easier to do read the file.

gigaherz

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #15 on: 2007-05-23 22:54:15 »
Actually it IS a standard cdrom. FF7, just like VideoCD movies and other multimedia cdrom-based formats, uses Mode2 Form2 sectors to story non-critical data (movie frames) that won't break the game if they get corrupted. Mode2 sectors were introduced with the CDROM/XA specification.

The problem is, normal cdrom parsers just assume all the sectors use the same format, and get confused when they see a mode2 form2 sector. So you need a program (and file format for image dumps) that supports raw sectors.

While copying the movies to the disk will be faster and probably more compatible, there's always the option to link with cdr plugins for ps1 emulators, or use opensource code from one (or more) of them.

Cyberman

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #16 on: 2007-05-24 02:53:15 »
Actually it IS a standard cdrom. FF7, just like VideoCD movies and other multimedia cdrom-based formats, uses Mode2 Form2 sectors to story non-critical data (movie frames) that won't break the game if they get corrupted. Mode2 sectors were introduced with the CDROM/XA specification.

The problem is, normal cdrom parsers just assume all the sectors use the same format, and get confused when they see a mode2 form2 sector. So you need a program (and file format for image dumps) that supports raw sectors.

While copying the movies to the disk will be faster and probably more compatible, there's always the option to link with cdr plugins for ps1 emulators, or use opensource code from one (or more) of them.
I wondered why the mention of stuff being included with Q-gears was being done.  This has been discussed repeatedly before as a not to do thing.  What's done is done, I suggest all binaries that have such material be removed from circulation and repackaged as well. This is not only jumping off the cliff it really puzzles me why it was done to begin with. It was even discussed I remember that we had to have an install utility for the project to work legally (I remember because I believe I mentioned it).

Now for a word on something interesting (LOL). Exactly right gigherz.  For win32 one can use CD-ROM plugins from the PS1 emulation scene with the 'file system' reading interface.  This probably is a better option than me 'building' and ISO file system interface (which I finished but never got around to putting it in with the existing code base).  The problem comes in that many files must be read from absolute addresses (the field files are this case).   I think all that really is needed is a 'translation' module backend for working with the CDROM plug-in for the Playstation.  I don't know how the file system works currently (since I got lost in ... august of last year and Real Life is too busy for me to work on such things at the moment), anyone who has a clue I can provide some information on the current DLL 'stuff' for reading the PSX disk data (LOL).  It's likely that ISO image reading knowledge will be needed (I suppose I know a bit about this).  Anyhow that's basically that.
The Linux version I believe would have the least dependency on a library because you can directly read using the ioctl functions etc.  I believe there are CDROM plug-ins for Linux as well.

Stephen

halkun

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Re: Pulling the win32 release (temporary)
« Reply #17 on: 2007-05-24 02:58:19 »
I finished the installer... new post to follow.