Game mods

[ßüboni¢ $oñic]

how do u take a DC game and made modifications to it? What do you have to know? How far can you go with alterations?

[ßüboni¢ $oñic]

i kno sum1 knows..

[DCDayDreamer]

how do u take a DC game and made modifications to it?

I'm assuming you mean commercial games, this is common knowledge so - get a DC and use a BBA or coders cable to get the data to your PC.


What do you have to know?

It's a time consuming fruitless task.


How far can you go with alterations?

Not very far, sounds and music can be replaced easily, some graphics can be replaced in certain games but it's really not worth the time and effort.

You'd be better off with a homebrew game and applying modifications to that, ten minutes with Beats of Rage would yield better results than ten hours with a commercial game.

[quzar]

No beats of rage mod will look as good as a commercial game, although BoR is a good analogy of what can be done to a commercial game: sprites and music changed out, maybe models and some gameplay. (yes yes, i know more can be done with BoR, I don't need flames from a million BoR modders, but a good 90% of all mods add nothing but new arts).

[ßüboni¢ $oñic]

i think everyone has grown weary of BOR MODS. do u remember how in those old street fighter games on the gen. and snes u played say m.bison? then if u played urself you'd see m.bison in say purple instead of red regalia. a BOR MOD would be as lame as calling the purple m.bison a new character.. so tell me the main issues with modding comercial games. and yes i have the .CDIs for them. I want to take out back grounds and modify the engine a tad bit. whats the prob?

[quzar]

i think everyone has grown weary of BOR MODS. do u remember how in those old street fighter games on the gen. and snes u played say m.bison? then if u played urself you'd see m.bison in say purple instead of red regalia. a BOR MOD would be as lame as calling the purple m.bison a new character.. so tell me the main issues with modding comercial games. and yes i have the .CDIs for them. I want to take out back grounds and modify the engine a tad bit. whats the prob?

The main issue is that it's illegal. Especially since you went and crossed the line from hypothetical to "i have warez"

[DCDayDreamer]

The main issue is that it's illegal. Especially since you went and crossed the line from hypothetical to "i have warez"

Exactly!.

My main point was that if ßüboni¢ $oñic wants to apply modifications to a game, there are easier ways than messing with a commercial game, BoR was just an example, it doesn't imply that BoR modifications would be as good as commercial games. There's loads of info and even a toolkit to make mods for BoR, there's also loads of stuff available for Doom, Quake etc., ßüboni¢ $oñic could contribute to the homebrew scene with mods like those. Choosing the commercial hacking path doesn't do anything for the homebrew scene, we can't even discuss the topic in any great detail here, all we can do is make brief statements on the subject, and of course, the final one being the fact that it's illegal.

[ßüboni¢ $oñic]

i own all those games. ive heard BOR is a cheap engine, i wanted to edit Q3 and make it different and add to the moves and characters while still being online. thats what i really wanted

[quzar]

Too bad? We have an open Quake 1 engine. Or you can do it on your PC, but that's about it.

[Runefox]

If you don't have the source code and you don't know what language they programmed it in (and thus have no compiler or programming experience for it), you can only go so far.

Levels are probably in an undocumented proprietary format. 3D models *usually* are proprietary as well, and 2D textures and sprites are *usually* in an editable .PVR format (for which you have to either get a poor-quality converter or use an illegal (Katana) Photoshop plugin), though sometimes they, among other files, can be included into one big package file that cannot be decompressed by mere mortal beings (eg. no utility exists to decompress) and therefore makes most of its contents inaccessible (though I believe there *is* a "standardized" archive format called AFS that there are explorers for, but to my knowledge, this is primarily a sound container format).

Audio (music) is usually stored in an MP3-style format called ADX (sometimes multiple tracks are stored in AFS files), though can sometimes be stored as CD audio tracks. Individual sound effects may well be in a completely random format for which there exists no decompressor, and will probably be inside one of the aforementioned archive files.

All in all, it's excrutiatingly difficult to meaningfully modify a commercial game, especially for the Dreamcast platform. Even if you own the game, and have dumped it yourself, you're still going to have to go through hell to modify anything, especially if you plan to re-burn it, and even more especially if the game expects a matching CRC signature.

[ßüboni¢ $oñic]

can u not get the s.code off the disk with some tool? what is a crc sig? how will i get my new mod on say a chankast?

[Runefox]

Source code cannot easily be gotten from compiled binaries in ANY situation unless you actually have a decompiler to do it (I'm absolutely certain none exist for the Dreamcast binaries), and not all coding languages have decompilers (not to mention most are very flaky and don't output proper code). The best you could hope for is using a hex editor to change bits and pieces of the binary. That would have to be performed through trial and error, since there's not much chance of there being any sort of tutorial to edit that specific game.

A CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) signature is a check on the contents of a file; It's like a file's fingerprint. Every file that's not a copy of another file has a unique CRC signature, and when a file is never expected to change, a program can check that signature against a copy of the signature hard-coded into the program. It's theoretically possible to change that CRC check to look for a different signature, but you would definitely need the source code first.

To get your program running in Chankast, you need to set up your CD directories and compile the source. From there, you go through the procedure of making a standard bootable DC CD, using BootDreams or similar. Once done, load up the CD image (or put the burned CD in the drive) and use Chankast to boot it.

Remember, Dreamcast GD-ROM's can hold in excess of 1GB of data. If the game you're trying to modify uses more than a standard CD's worth of space, you will have to delete or compress some files (using special tools, NOT zip, divx or mp3).

[ßüboni¢ $oñic]

u can use CD ROM games in the drive to play w/chanka? no .cdi but the game CD disk?!

[Runefox]

As long as it's not the original GD-ROM and just a burned CD-R (warez or self-ripped), then yes, it should work just fine. However, I haven't used Chankast because I haven't access to a Dreamcast BIOS file (nor a way to rip it from my own Dreamcast).

[ßüboni¢ $oñic]

do u want the bios? And is quake II online?? what was it coming from b4 it went DC?

[Runefox]

Quake II was originally a PC game, ported over to the Dreamcast by homebrew dev 'Bero'. It currently runs without sound (runs out of memory if enabled), but has CD music support (if data is running from a PC; CD drive isn't fast enough otherwise), full commercial or demo support, VMU save support, and user maps support.

The renderer is in software mode, probably due to the fact that Quake II used OpenGL, which isn't readily available for Dreamcast..