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Messages - halkun

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126
WIP / Re: Halkun's new Project... Introducing N-gears
« on: 2011-08-02 08:21:59 »
Well, I have good and bad news...

It seems the ROM is a pain to work with because there is next to no documentation on the mapper. It's the only mapper I can see that goes to 2MB, so I'm a little stuck.

127
Q-Gears / Re: Q-Gears v0.19
« on: 2011-07-31 00:14:43 »
What? She's not even that pretty :P Have you seen her Noodle commercial, you know... the one where she's "behind the cup"?

Dou yo!


128
Q-Gears / Re: Q-Gears v0.19
« on: 2011-07-30 21:33:28 »
On a slightly off-topic topic... Akari, is that that Rin Aoki as your avatar?

129
WIP / Re: Halkun's new Project... Introducing N-gears
« on: 2011-07-30 07:11:35 »
They are already doing music for the original ROM...

However, the ROM I'm working with has quickly become unwieldy, retooling.

130
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: FF7NES. Fire up the wiki guys!
« on: 2011-07-26 21:37:29 »
RHDN?

===EDIT===
Oh Romhacking.net

Yea. I announced it there

131
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: FF7NES. Fire up the wiki guys!
« on: 2011-07-26 13:51:12 »
I'm a step ahead. Because the NES splits each bank into high and low sectiions, ($8000-$DFFF and $C000-$FFFF), I've broken the rom furthur into 128 16k blocks. Makes it easier

132
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: FF7NES. Fire up the wiki guys!
« on: 2011-07-26 12:22:02 »
yea, IDA pro is a $500 program. If you have it, more power to you. I don't so I have to do it the old fashioned way.

If you have the ROM, what you need to do is remove the 16 byte iNES header, and then next 16384 bytes make up bank $00. That's the bank that initializes the game. Each 16K bank sits in NES memory from $8000-$FFFF. Careful, there is a memory section @ $400 (NES memory, not the ROM) that is used for relocatable code. so some parts of the ROM are relocated into RAM for execution.

133
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: FF7NES. Fire up the wiki guys!
« on: 2011-07-26 04:40:38 »
well, first everything needs to be taken apart, I have the rom split already in 64 chunks of 8K banks each. You wanna run some though da65, or some other 6502 disassembler, more power to you. If you know of a better diasm then da65, let me know.

134
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: FF7NES. Fire up the wiki guys!
« on: 2011-07-26 03:58:23 »
it was originally a scratch build.

135
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / FF7NES. Fire up the wiki guys!
« on: 2011-07-26 02:31:17 »
Ok, I as I announced in the projects thread. I've decided to disassemble and reassemble FF7NES so it's more like it's PSX counterpart. The thread asking for help is there, but I decided to to a memory dump of what I have so far so you guy can see how it's put together. These are pretty much my notes off the top of my head. I may add more, but it also may just go in the wiki.

Here's how it works...

The FF7NES game is a ROM weighing in at 2MB in size. This is split into 64 banks of 32K, labeled $00-$1F. Each bank is a module onto itself. On reset, bank $0F in switched in and boots the initialization code in bank $00. (This is as far as I've gotten). Each bank resides in NES memory from $8000 to $FFFF

There are some Key things that I have discovered that is mechanically different between FF7NES and FF7PSX that I will get into here.

1- Because the game is in Chinese, the characters eat memory, both PPU video memory and ROM space. This can be completely cut out.
2- The engine may look cosmetically similar, but is massively different under the hood.
3- The materia slots are gone. It works more like the FF6 method where you have one "ball" for each spell you learn.
4- The game is massively imbalanced, with no real way of correcting it
5- The growth curves are linear, with no exponential growth.
6- The batte system is a shell of itself. The only thing it has over the FF1 is is the ability to have 4 digit health. No ATB.
7- There is no 7
8- Becuause of the PPU being used for Chinese, little space is left for better graphic tiles.
9- Massive graphic/code duplication
10- The sprites are mostly ripped from other games.

I can go on, but the game deserves better than this.

Now for the big question... What about the Legality?

Well, what is done is done. The game is out and people are playing it. Either Square decided to blind-eye it, or it's under the radar. It's been around for a while now, so I'm gonna consider this "dead code" (Not out of copyright, mind you. There is a difference.) Trust me, if there are murmuring of issues, I'll be the first to know. For now, I'm going forward. Am I being a hypocrite? Well, kind of. But I like to think of this as an old car that has been abandoned. Anyways, the first stages to get this rebuilt is disassembly and reassembly. And that's not relevant because it's not Square's code.

So Yea, off to the Wiki I go. Lemme know if you want info about how things work, be it on the FF7NES side, or just the NES in general. I'll be here to help.

136
WIP / Halkun's new Project... Introducing N-gears
« on: 2011-07-26 02:00:12 »
Hi all :)

So for the last week or so I've been playing in my lab coming up with a pretty keen project, I was wondering if anyone wants to help. I figure as I kicked off the "Gears" project which became The Wiki, then creating the Q-Gears project, which was gracefully taken over by Akari, I decided to add something back to the community.

Introducing N-Gears.
N-gears is the systematic disassembly and reassembly of the FF7 ROM for the NES, recoded so that it's more like it's PSX counterpart.

Over at Romhacking.net someone decided to make a little project to take the Chinese FF7NES rom, translate into English, and give it a graphical makeover. I saw what they were doing and decided while they were doing that, why not balance the game and convert scene.bin over to the NES to make it more like it's PSX counterpart...

Sadly, the game's engine is broken on the inside. I'm not going to enumerate what's wrong with it, but after a week of trying to shim in my changes, I have declared the engine beyond repair and in need of a rewrite...

Here's how it's going to go down...

1) Set up a toolchain so that I can compile a 2MB nes game.
This is done, I'm using the same mapper as the FF7NES, Mapper 163, It needs tweaks, but does generate a 2MB rom. For those not in the know, the largest game over made by Nintendo in the NES era was Kirby's Adventure, which was 768K.

2) Disassemble FF7NES.
The game weighs in at 2MB. Lucky for us, the code is an inefficient mess. I saw almost 512K of blank space in there, and the code is all over the place. I've got the disassembly scripts started, if anyone wants to help, I can show you how to use da65. You need to have a good handle on NES architecture and 6502 code.

3) Reassemble FF7NES into workable code
The code that is disassembled will be rewritten as source code. The dissembler does about 70% of the job, minus the symbol names. This will require keeping track of variables and routines in a 2MB game. The good news is all the important global variables are in the save map.

4) Rewrite the parts that suck.
This is the big part, throw out the linear growth curves, create a small LZW routine. Import a tiny version of kernel.bin, scene.bin and savemap. Get muti-slot Matreria working. Keep things that "work" like the event system, but expand the mapping. My dream is to have this compatible with Black Chocobo :)

Feel free to tell me I'm insane. Post here if you want to help or ask questions. This might be fun, this might be a complete waste of time. Who Knows! I'm off to post the mechanics in "Reverse Engineering" now.


137
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: [FF7] Safer Sephiroths Supernova
« on: 2011-07-18 23:51:44 »
No, the U.S. release got the "custom" one. The first Japanese release had one that was a 5 second version of what we got.

138
Team Avalanche / Re: Midgar Remake
« on: 2011-07-15 01:03:45 »
This was an acceptable bump

139
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: [CC] Field script decompiler
« on: 2011-07-05 23:22:11 »
no one replied because it's a six month old topic... Don't necopost!

140
General Discussion / Re: PS-PC USB2.0 Convert V
« on: 2011-06-28 23:18:40 »
Necorposting is bad m'kay?

141
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: [ff7, field] Field map tile positions
« on: 2011-06-26 18:13:41 »
neat-o

142
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: [ff7, field] Field map tile positions
« on: 2011-06-26 03:46:24 »
What does it look like? Screenshots?

143
Archive / Re: CC Aeris successfully converted to ff7
« on: 2011-06-24 00:05:44 »
Aww man, I always miss the good ones and had my padlock and *everything* :(

144
FF7 Tools / Re: [RELEASE v1.8]: Black Chocobo - FF7 Save Game Editor
« on: 2011-06-22 04:32:37 »
You are not going to brute-force the checksum. It's based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography using the PS3's master encryption key. The only thing I can think of to break the key is to convert two copies of the same PS1 save to a PSV using an external memory card reader on two different PS3s and then derive  the master key from the two different checksums that come out.

145
FF7 Tools / Re: [RELEASE v1.8]: Black Chocobo - FF7 Save Game Editor
« on: 2011-06-18 01:13:52 »
You are trying to break the checksum in a PSV file?

The PS3 digitally signs the PSV file with it's cryptographic key. There is no way to create your own signature short of creating your own crypto key from the PS3's master key.

146
Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: Changing Associated Battle Models
« on: 2011-06-14 09:51:00 »
Nope, the only thing you can pass to the battle engine is the battle number.

147
FF7 Tools / Re: Hack7 - yet another FF7 dialog (and events) editor [v3 BETA]
« on: 2011-06-14 05:47:30 »
Save in a progress variable and the check on entry to the field.

148
FF7 Tools / Re: Hack7 - yet another FF7 dialog (and events) editor [v3 BETA]
« on: 2011-06-13 12:30:26 »
That will work

149
FF7 Tools / Re: Hack7 - yet another FF7 dialog (and events) editor [v3 BETA]
« on: 2011-06-12 21:45:09 »
lasyan
If you are change the commands names from the wiki to something else, it would be cool to make a table or something so we can convert from one command to another (Or, update the wiki)

150
Q-Gears / Re: Newbie Question: short but sweet explanation?
« on: 2011-06-06 02:38:28 »
It a project to recreate an engine much like FF7's The original intent was to make a drop-in replacement for the  FF7 executable, like SCUMM. That mission changed when Akari took over and decided to make it more generic. It should be able to play FF7, but the FF7 data must be converted first. It's been a quiet little project for a few years now. 

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