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Messages - Kranmer

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1
General Discussion / Re: Japanese Modding
« on: 2017-03-26 01:12:22 »
Thinking about it, I am not sure at all where he is from.  But I do remember Sweden popping up for some reason....  He's got to be the most elusive game forum admin ever.

Well i think
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=1346.msg20420#msg20420
Might be where you got the idea from :)

2
OK so you just want to replace the Hand icon above your head with something else ? As long as what you are trying to replace it with is in the same colour palette it should work but the .TIM you posted seems corrupt (at least no normal TIM viewer or editor will open it so i recommend you try editing the TIM with something else) so i cant really look at it but i spent 5mins trying a few things and i replaced the cursor above clouds head with the buster sword icon as shown in this picture

seems easy enough with a working TIM file, but with your TIM file it was really messed up.
Also i read through some of your old posts and you really seem to be making a mountain out of a mole hill when inserting the graphics into WINDOW.BIN there is a MUCH MUCH easier way to do it, lasyan's Tool Hack7 has a WINDOW.BIN tool that allows it to extract and reinsert the Graphics from WINDOW.BIN and also put it right back into a ISO for you so you don't have to mess around it does all the work for you, i really recommend it since you wont have to mess around with cdmage and stuff, you just open hack7 click Manage WINDOW.BIN then tell it where your ISO is (or extracted WINDOW.BIN if you don't want it editing your ISO) then click Extract Graphics and it will extract the TIM, and after editing click Insert Graphics and it will put it right back into the ISO for you, all the hard work done (I'm actually surprised no one else here mentioned this).

3
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away there was a patch for ff7 that made it windowed, what it was was patch the following bytes
Code: [Select]
    RAW Offset   | Old Byte | New Byte
-----------------+----------+----------
     002775A2         83         C7
     002775A3         B9         82
     002775A8         00         01
     002775A9         75         00
     002775AA         0D         00
     002775AB         8B         00
     002775AC         55         90
     002775AD         08         90
     002775B4         01         00
Hope that helps. I no longer have the original patch i just have the patched EXE but i'm sure it exists out there somewhere.
PS. Sorry i haven't been around much but depression and health problems have really gotten to me recently but trying to get back into things again.

4
Seems 0.14 source is no where to be found
You can still get it at the original location
https://sourceforge.net/p/q-gears/code/ci/default/tree/media/version_old/
0.14 src is the 2nd from bottom file named "2007-05_q-gears_v0.14r_src.zip"

5
Sorry yeah i did mean CLUT (I'm not used to image editing terms, sorry)

And i don't know that program but it should work fine (i used img2tim to do it but any program that can edit those fields should work), the boxes you have shown, enter the original values into those, leaving them at the default is what is causing the problems, to see the original values open the original TIM in "Tim2view" and at the bottom left corner it lists what the Image and CLUT vram should be, then enter it into those boxes (in this case you would enter 320   256 in the IMAGE boxes and 0   510 in the CLUT boxes) then it *SHOULD* work.

EDIT:-
OK i made a small video showing the me using img2tim to convert your sample picture into one that works ingame and showing it working
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_QBELkbaBs
In the video i use the command
Code: [Select]
img2tim -plt 0 510 -org 320 256 -o opening_17.data test_256_black_bg_left_chunk.png
in img2tim and that converts the sample PNG you provided into a tim named "opening_17.data" (i use BAT files to do it in the video, its the same as using the program in command line but saves time).
The -plt part sets the CLUT VRAM and the -org sets the Image VRAM to what the original opening_17.data is then the rest is output and input.
Let me know how you get on :)

6
Hello Kranmer.

Sorry for the late reply. I've been busy with IRL matters, and in a few minutes I will have to step away from the computer again. :(

Here is a sample image of what I am trying to replace the title screen with:

Eventually, I'll write up in detail how I inserted this into the game, and post a Fraps ePSXe recording of the failure. I just have a bad headache right now.

Thank you for offering your help! I wish to learn more about FF7 hacking, even if it is difficult.
Hey NERV Agent, no problem IRL matters should always come first :)

Anyway onto the matter at hand, i tried replacing the image just as you did and i saw what you mean, most tim converters produce a TIM that makes the screen either flicker or just black, or if you use tim2view it just uses the old cult and makes the wrong colours appear (but the image does display), after a few hours of testing i think i am getting close to a way of getting it to work (just need to run a few more tests), i will edit this post shortly if i am successful.

EDIT:-
OK i think i have got it fully working now, i would need more test samples to be sure but it seems to be working, i think i figured it out, other images aren't working by default because when you change the TIM or make a new one you change the CULT and IMAGE VRAM, these need to be the same for the image to work correctly, so after editing the TIM to have the same as the original it works fine :), so just make sure once you made a TIM image that the CULT and IMAGE VRAM settings are the same as the original (they are displayed in tim2view at the bottom left once you open a TIM).
Here is the example you posted above converted to TIM that works in FF7. (below is the opening_17.bin of the picture you posted BEFORE LZSS compression)
https://www.mediafire.com/?w69uhi9kar6ts7i
Hope that helps.

7
yeah it sucks that no other format works :(, i tried a lot of different formats a long time ago with Aali's custom driver but other then PNG none worked (even "Apng" failed, which was the format i wanted to work the most at that time which works a little like a GIF), I remember a long time ago Aali saying he used libpng but since its part of his driver there is very little we can do with that info.
You could try adapting  Tonberry to work with ff7 and to accept different formats but i bet that would be a LOT of work (it can already extract BMP's from the game but inserting them back is a whole other matter)

8
Can you show a video or a screenshot of what is happening when you try ? Also if you post a sample picture i can try (no promises) and see if i can insert it to opening_17.data like i did before (although previously i only used a edited original picture, if its a full new picture it may be harder)

9
Nice work :), Avast is detecting it as a virus (false detection I'm guessing) so I had to add a exclusion to get it to download, but thanks for the program :)

EDIT:- just built it myself with QT5.7.0 and avast didn't detect it as a virus, so i checked the differences and saw your EXE has been UPXed, after unUPXing it avast no longer finds it as a virus.

10
Congratulations on getting it working, It often is something small you miss that messes up everything else but its good that you have it all working now.
I hope you don't mind me asking but what are you planning on editing it too ? (I'm just curious but if you don't want too or can't then just ignore the question)

11
OK PMed you a video of me editing the file just so you can see how i did it exactly (and hopefully you will see what i did and if you did anything different). The PNG file was fine but the TIM file you sent i couldn't open at all, not sure what happened there.

12
So I used unbinlz on my new OPENING.BIN. Then I renamed the (supposedly) compressed OPENING_17.data to unbinlzmeOPENING_17.data and used unbinlz on that.

Unfortunately, this is the result:

python unbinlz unbinlzmeOPENING_17.data
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "unbinlz", line 68, in <module>
    archive = ff7.binlz.Archive(inputFile)
  File "C:\[my personal directory names]\ff7tools-1.3\f
f7tools-1.3\ff7\binlz.py", line 47, in __init__
    assert firstOffset % 4 == 0
AssertionError

I also noticed that OPENING_7472_0.data has suddenly gone missing after decompressing OPENING.BIN.

I would send you the modified file to reinsert it, but what I really want to do is learn how this is done. Can you PM me your e-mail address? I can send you the .png and .TIM files.

Thanks.

Sorry i think i wasn't clear in my last post (my fault, i am bad at explaining things) after extracting the OPENING_17.data decompress it with unlzss and not unbinlz, unbinlz doesn't seem to like modified LZS archives so it only extracts them and doesn't decompress them.
And i fully understand what you mean about doing it yourself, if you send me the file i will try it and see if i can insert the same image, and if i am successful i will record the process and you can see how it was done. Also PMing you my e-mail now.
And OPENING_7472_0.data doesn't appear when i extract from opening.bin (the original), but does sometimes appear when i make a error so i think its a error file and not part of opening.bin.

13
Oh i forgot to mention that unbinlz doesn't seem to like repacked LZS files so after it extracts the files again you need to unLZS the outputed parts you changed (so basically just decompress opening_17.data) and it should show back up in Tim2View, if you still having trouble send me the modified TIM via PM and i will see if i can insert it.

14
I'm not sure why the filesizes differ from unbinlz's reported sizes, it could be that unbinlz lists the filesize where mine just lists where the next file begins ? (by this i mean maybe the files are needlessly padded and unbinlz lists the true filesize, or maybe its just wrong ?) but in my tests the values i listed above seemed to work so i wouldn't worry too much about the filesizes reported by unbinlz.
The game loads, but my edits are nowhere to be seen.

Kranmer, how exactly did you pull this off? I've spent my entire Saturday afternoon trying to figure this thing out with no results.
Now this is odd, your game isn't showing any changes at all ? if you did it badly it would crash at the credits screen but if its showing no changes i can only think that its the program your using to replace the file or maybe the opening.bin you made is unchanged, what are you using to replace the opening.bin ? I used a tool called CDMage to replace my opening.bin with my changed one (i tried a few programs but that worked best for me)
also did you try extracting from your new opening.bin to see if it extracts your new TIM file instead of the original ? (this is incase you repacked the original TIM back in by accident)

15
OK what i found is the start of the .bin is the ToC (Table of Contents) which tells the game where files in the .bin are, there are basically 2 methods to deal with this.

Method 1 (easy way) - Use a hex editor to manually overwrite the old files with the new ones but the new ones MUST BE SMALLER OR THE SAME SIZE then the old ones (if they are smaller i recommend padding the file to the same size as the original), they can NOT BE BIGGER THEN THE ORIGINAL files, this is the easiest way since you can leave the ToC as is and also makes it easier to reinsert into the game since the opening.bin will be the same size.

Method 2 (hard way) - Completely remake the .bin using what was said above (a file joiner or just pasting each file 1 after another into a hex editor) will get the file structure correct but you will need to manually remake the ToC of the .bin, this is where you might find it hard (i will post info on the ToC below). Although this method is harder it will allow you to have files bigger then the original.

And here is information on the opening.bin (taken from the PAL version of the game but from what i understand it is the same on the NTSC-U version, I'm unsure about the NTSC-J version)
OPENING.BIN is a archive of LZS and uncompressed files, when extracted from unbinlz files 0-7, 17, 18, and 21 are lzs compressed and the rest are uncompressed files
If you open OPENING.BIN in a hex editor the first 92 bytes or 0x5c of the file are the ToC of the BIN, to read the table of contents you read it 4 bytes at a time and in Reverse.
So for example if you look at the start of OPENING.BIN the first 4 bytes say 5C 00 00 00 what this means is the first file in the BIN is actually at 0000005C
To save time i already wrote down where each file started so this should make things faster (it lists which file is which in the ToC and where the file is in the OPENING.BIN)
Code: [Select]
OPENING_00
5C000000
0000005C

OPENING_01
301D0000
00001D30

OPENING_02
683F0000
00003F68

OPENING_03
2C650000
0000652C

OPENING_04
E0870000
000087E0

OPENING_05
E8A60000
0000A6E8

OPENING_06
B8C80000
0000C8B8

OPENING_07
C4E40000
0000E4C4

OPENING_08
90FF0000
0000FF90

OPENING_09
74000100
00010074

OPENING_10
58010100
00010158

OPENING_11
3C020100
0001023C

OPENING_12
20030100
00010320

OPENING_13
04040100
00010404

OPENING_14
E8040100
000104E8

OPENING_15
B0050100
000105B0

OPENING_16
94060100
00010694

OPENING_17
541B0100
00011B54

OPENING_18
9CC50100
0001C59C

OPENING_19
18FC0100
0001FC18

OPENING_20
38FC0100
0001FC38

OPENING_21
58FC0100
0001FC58

OPENING_22
E8460200
000246E8

Anyway all this information should be more then enough to fully edit the OPENING.BIN, i hope this helps and please let me know how you get on (also the file joiner i used when testing was called "FFSJ" but it requires you to rename the files first, but i am sure there are lots of binary file joiners out there where you wouldn't need to rename files first)

16
I dug my discs out today and started messing with "opening.bin", looking at it in unbinlz it says only files 0-7,17,18,21 are lzs compressed, all the rest are uncompressed files so compressing them all with lzss is probably a bad idea anyway (use unbinlz with the command "--list" to see what i mean).
Looking at the opening.bin it does appear to be files just piled on top of each other with a header, the question is if the header tells the game where to look for the files like a lba, if it does it won't be simple to change files unless you can get files to be the EXACT same size as the originals so that might be something to think about, i have tested a few edits i have made but so far i am not having much luck editing any of the files, every time i try and insert the edited opening.bin back into the game it crashes at the credits screen but i haven't given up yet.

EDIT:- Finally had some success
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrqkJ11dvtc&
its just a quick edit to see if it worked (i only edited the background and producer name quickly with a editor just to see if it works so i apologize for the ugly editing)

17
Troubleshooting / Re: Editing Xbox Controller Buttons
« on: 2016-05-01 20:45:38 »
Just looking at that it appears your tex file has a corrupted pallet, possibly caused by biturn ? a normal .tex file has pallets (basically the same picture in different colours) but if you just convert a tex to bmp you are only doing 1 colour probably, try using a different tool like "textool" and see if that helps.

18
OK i don't know much about the PSX version of the game (not as much as the PC version atleast) but i am assuming the OPENING.BIN is probably like "window.bin" on the PC version (window.bin is a file made up of multiple gziped files but looking at the unbinlz name i would guess that OPENING.BIN is made using LZSS instead of GZIP)
And "lzss" program doesn't support folders or multiple files so your way of trying to force it using + signs is wrong (some windows programs might be fine with that but this program isn't).
If you know C# you could try editing the source to FF7dec to do LZSS instead of GZIP (you can get it at Lasyan's site at http://lasyan3.free.fr/index.php?page=ff7-autres it comes with the source code.
Or you could just try compressing each file with LZSS and then reinserting them using a hex editor manually, or if it really is like "window.bin" you could just compress each file then use a filejoiner to put all the files into 1 then get the headers from the original file if needed.
I will go find my CD's tomorrow, i have the original PSX PAL CD's somewhere (i live in the UK so i only have access to the PAL version but the OPENING.BIN should be similar or the same)

19
Well lets start with the problem, First post your App.log so we can see why the game is crashing (in the game folder it should be there after u ran the game and it crashed), This should give us a better idea of what is going on and hopefully it will be fixable without you having to install another OS,
But if you do decide to install another OS i recommend using Ubuntu, you can install it inside windows and dual boot with windows so you can still keep your W2K3 OS and have Linux as well.

20
General Discussion / Re: Old FF8 Trailer
« on: 2014-08-04 20:45:41 »
I remember back when FF8 first came out in the official playstation magazine was a few screenshots of Rinoa on the first Seed mission in Dollet, but when the game came out this wasn't so, i have never seen the FMV version of this though so this was quite a interesting video for me (the magazine only had still screenshots), Thank you for posting this.

22
General Discussion / Re: anyone have asmodeon's shader?
« on: 2014-07-08 19:48:47 »
The link that was posted last time you came back is still up
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=14330.msg200378#msg200378

23
Troubleshooting / Re: hard drive mod path
« on: 2014-07-03 17:18:10 »
Well 1 question, does the file its trying to load exist ? if not then thats why the error is happening,
And the reason for 100's of failed lines in the app.log are usually because of a line in the ff7_opengl.cfg
show_missing_textures = yes
just set this to "no" and it usually stops all those messages in the app.log
Hope that helps.

24
Troubleshooting / Re: hard drive mod path
« on: 2014-07-03 08:08:53 »
Reason this happens is because the registry for FF7 sets the path like this
g:\game\ff7\
but Aali's Driver uses
/mods/
for the mod folder, so the registry is being read then Aali's driver uses that info and adds /mods to the end of it so you end up with the odd path name but it still works it just looks odd.
And if you really did want to fix it i suppose you could just alter the registry from
g:\game\ff7\
to
g:/game/ff7
and that would fix the mod path name problem (although it really doesn't need fixing, like VGR said its always been this way and still works fine)

In the registry its at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Square Soft, Inc.\Final Fantasy VII
on X86 machines and on X64 machines its at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Square Soft, Inc.\Final Fantasy VII

25
Normally the LZS header should be the compressed data size (file size - header size <=> file size - 4).
I just compared the sample TIZ file halkun posted to the FF7 PSX TIZ file for the Sub Minigame and the header was very similar (excluding the first 2 bytes) so i removed them and then decompressed the LZS.
Also Halkun are you planning to do something with the game ? Translation ? or just a personal project ?

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