phantasy Star II - Genesis

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Main - ROM Hacking - phantasy Star II - Genesis

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midwife

Posted on 07-18-07 07:31 PM

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Hi ! I'm searching for documents about PS2 ROM format. Any clues ?
( btw Google have not give me the answer :p )

Stifu

Posted on 07-18-07 07:44 PM

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This hacking community mostly mostly revolves around Nintendo, so you may have better chances of getting your question answered on a pro-Sega board...
Sonic CulT, for example... but it looks like they're having problems now.

You may still get your answer here, anyway...

Bit-Blade

Posted on 07-18-07 10:36 PM

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The jerks that hosted Cult Net and a bunch of other sega/sonic stuff pulled their servers without warning. Now it seems said servers are available for coin, and they are asking for help from the users who go there.

As for Phantasy Star II? A good path for you would be to begin to learn Motorolla 68000 assembly language. There's a great guide on Devega, but... crap, they got taken down too... No matter. If you want this guide, PM me. I saved it to my hard drive a while back. I'll send you a link by PM. This guide, while a bit on the dry side, is EXTREMELY useful as an introduction to genesis ASM, or for anyone who has little to no experience.

Luck is also on your side that 68k asm is fairly easy to use. By comparison, the NES is much less forgiving in its ASM. I can't speak for the Snes, though.

So why am I shoving ASM down your throat? It's one of the most needed skills a rom hacker can acquire, since we are reverse engineers. It will allow you to institute certain changes. As for PSII itself, you'll need to get your hands dirty and use a little corruption. Go to zophars or romhacking.net for that. There is also a development emulator (similiar to FCEUXP) for the genesis, but I don't know how good it is.

If you don't feel up to it, that's fine, you take your own pace.

Nicole

Posted on 07-18-07 11:54 PM (rev. 2 of 07-18-07 11:57 PM)

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I did find some data on Phantasy Star II once, unfortunately it wasn't very much and I lost it- I found what I think was the TSA definitions (not the format), and what might have been part of the level data (but I never got around to further examination), and all the data was via corruption.

On a better note, all of the area graphics are compressed in the "Nemesis" graphics format that is also used in Sonic games. To make it even easier, Nemesis programmed a searcher program for the format, all you need to do is load the ROM into the searcher, and it decompresses the graphics neatly and labels them by offset... I vaguely recall that the current Nemesis compressors are of better quality than those used by Sega, so 99% of the time you can just shove the re-compressed data back into the same offset without repointing.

Also, I recall a theory that PSII was actually the base of Sonic 1, programming-wise... Unfortunately it was on the s2beta page that is now down.

____________________

smkdan

Posted on 07-19-07 07:43 AM

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Posted by Bit-Blade
Luck is also on your side that 68k asm is fairly easy to use. By comparison, the NES is much less forgiving in its ASM. I can't speak for the Snes, though.

Is that because of the mappers or something that makes 68k code easier to read? I haven't read much about it, just that it's a pretty beefy processor.

Skreeny

Posted on 07-19-07 07:49 AM

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Posted by Imajin
Also, I recall a theory that PSII was actually the base of Sonic 1, programming-wise... Unfortunately it was on the s2beta page that is now down.

I'm pretty sure that was referring almost exclusively to the object-handling code, which Yuji Naka carried over to many of his programming projects, albeit in more or less refined versions.

Bit-Blade

Posted on 07-19-07 01:20 PM

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Posted by smkdan
Posted by Bit-Blade
Luck is also on your side that 68k asm is fairly easy to use. By comparison, the NES is much less forgiving in its ASM. I can't speak for the Snes, though.

Is that because of the mappers or something that makes 68k code easier to read? I haven't read much about it, just that it's a pretty beefy processor.

I'm not sure about mappers, but I can say it appears to be pretty direct to control graphics with the VDP (Video Display Processor). About as much as I know is a bit of the concepts about how the VDP is used (though it's been a while). I'm hardly an expert, other members might be able to answer that more clearly than I.

Also, if I am mistaken in any of those particular details I'd like to know.

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