Bangai-Oh VGA Patch

[TapamN]

Wow, allot of VGA patches are coming from here! very thanks you so much!
I know is allot to ask, but a patch for Dance Dance Revolution: 2nd Mix or a tutorial to do it myself exist? i play it allot and its the only game without vga I use.

The DDR games are ones I plan to patch. They run at 320x240, so patching would have been more involved than stuff like the ECW games.

I've been making progress on my new patching method, to replace the ad-hoc way I've been doing it up until now, that should avoid side-effects (like Airforce Delta or Seven Mansion's incorrect scaling) and maintain NTSC support. I currently have a basic version (no NTSC or low res upscale support yet) working with a repatched KoF 98, so the idea seems to work. The earlier way of patching KoF 98 took around 25 changes, but the new way only took 4 changes (one change is big, but can be easily reused between games).

[fraggle200]

The earlier way of patching KoF 98 took around 25 changes, but the new way only took 4 changes (one change is big, but can be easily reused between games).

This is amazing news! Hopefully this newer method opens it up so all non-vga games can be patched by whoever wants to tackle it with a lot less work.

[VirtuaShenmue]

With this method, can we also patch Skies of Arcadia Pal to have the correct game speed?

If there's an easy way to convert it to PAL60, then maybe? I haven't paid much attention to the PAL mode setting code, so I don't really know what would need to be done. Getting PAL50 to run the same speed as NTSC would definitely be too much work.

The problem with the old VGA patch of Skies of Arcadia PAL, is that it messed up the speed of the game:
the gameplay acts like if it's NTSC 60HZ speed, while the audio remain at Pal 50Hz speed, so they are not synchronized anymore (you can notice it already in the game intro).

If there was a way to fix and tell the game to just play at 50Hz for both gameplay and audio, maybe it could be a easier fix?

[MoeFoh]

With this method, can we also patch Skies of Arcadia Pal to have the correct game speed?

If there's an easy way to convert it to PAL60, then maybe? I haven't paid much attention to the PAL mode setting code, so I don't really know what would need to be done. Getting PAL50 to run the same speed as NTSC would definitely be too much work.

The problem with the old VGA patch of Skies of Arcadia PAL, is that it messed up the speed of the game:
the gameplay acts like if it's NTSC 60HZ speed, while the audio remain at Pal 50Hz speed, so they are not synchronized anymore (you can notice it already in the game intro).

If there was a way to fix and tell the game to just play at 50Hz for both gameplay and audio, maybe it could be a easier fix?

Would it be easier to modify the US version to support RGB mode? The US version already supports VGA.

[VirtuaShenmue]

If there's an easy way to convert it to PAL60, then maybe? I haven't paid much attention to the PAL mode setting code, so I don't really know what would need to be done. Getting PAL50 to run the same speed as NTSC would definitely be too much work.

The problem with the old VGA patch of Skies of Arcadia PAL, is that it messed up the speed of the game:
the gameplay acts like if it's NTSC 60HZ speed, while the audio remain at Pal 50Hz speed, so they are not synchronized anymore (you can notice it already in the game intro).

If there was a way to fix and tell the game to just play at 50Hz for both gameplay and audio, maybe it could be a easier fix?

Would it be easier to modify the US version to support RGB mode? The US version already supports VGA.

I don't know, the old japanese_cake patch was created for the Pal version, and someone even adapted it to codebreaker.
So 98% of the work was already done, it only needs the speed fix...

[MoeFoh]

Bob at RetroRGB interviews TapamN about his VGA Patches.

https://www.retrorgb.com/interview-with ... olved.html

[TapamN]

One issue I had making the Bangai-Oh patch, that I somehow forgot to mention, is that I didn't extract the 1ST_READ.BIN from the US GDI I was patching, but using a 1ST_READ happened to have lying around from earlier. I was too lazy to rebuild the GDI from scratch, and just did a search to find the code I wanted to patch. When I was trying to fix the vertical resolution, I couldn't find what I was trying to patch in the GDI. Eventually, I realized that the 1ST_READ I was looking at was from the PAL version of Bangai-Oh (from an earlier CDI version I had downloaded), and it had very slightly different video code for that part.

I have a fixed Airforce Delta patch, with the correct aspect ratio this time, using my new patching method. I also have a patches for the Seven Mansions translation, and Psychic Force 2012. I haven't implemented NTSC compatibility yet, so they're all still VGA only at the moment. I'll update them later. They're UDCP patches this time.

[megggan]

Thanks again, good interview with RetroRGB too!

[Impacto]

One issue I had making the Bangai-Oh patch, that I somehow forgot to mention, is that I didn't extract the 1ST_READ.BIN from the US GDI I was patching, but using a 1ST_READ happened to have lying around from earlier. I was too lazy to rebuild the GDI from scratch, and just did a search to find the code I wanted to patch. When I was trying to fix the vertical resolution, I couldn't find what I was trying to patch in the GDI. Eventually, I realized that the 1ST_READ I was looking at was from the PAL version of Bangai-Oh (from an earlier CDI version I had downloaded), and it had very slightly different video code for that part.

I have a fixed Airforce Delta patch, with the correct aspect ratio this time, using my new patching method. I also have a patches for the Seven Mansions translation, and Psychic Force 2012. I haven't implemented NTSC compatibility yet, so they're all still VGA only at the moment. I'll update them later. They're UDCP patches this time.

The Seven Mansions Patch is corrupted or incompatible. That`s the message I`m getting when trying to apply it via Dreamcast Universal Patch. The other ones are fine.

[ateam]

Great work on "Airforce Delta" and "Psychic Force 2012"!

However, what version of "Nanatsu no Hikan - Senritsu no Bishou" (aka "Seven Mansions - Ghastly Smile") did you use as your source when creating the patch? I tried applying your xdelta to the TOSEC GDI's 1ST_READ.BIN, as well as the 1ST_READ.BIN from the Redump version and the v1.3 (latest) of the English translation patch. Unfortunately, there's a checksum mismatch.

Once I have a patched 1ST_READ.BIN from the vanilla Japanese version, I can pass along the diff to the translation team so they can apply it to their patch too.

TOSEC
Nanatsu no Hikan - Senritsu no Bishou v1.002 (1999)(KOEI)(JP)[!]
MD5 of 1ST_READ.BIN - 3D47FD5D172D12D5629D833689AD540F

REDUMP
Nanatsu no Hikan - Senritsu no Bishou (Japan)
MD5 of 1ST_READ.BIN - 3D47FD5D172D12D5629D833689AD540F

Lastly, here's MD5 of 1ST_READ.BIN from v1.3 of the English translation patch:
F4D7309557A4A99DAAA935EAE9DF8976

EDIT: For some reason the 1ST_READ.BIN from v1.3 of the patch I have here is F4D7309557A4A99DAAA935EAE9DF8976, but when I download v1.3 from romhacking.net, I see a checksum of DFBBD494CBFC98ABB46BCB18C3FFB89E. That checksum difference might be because one is pre-binhack (i.e., CDI build), and the other is post. Either way, I can't apply the xdelta inside the DCP.

EDIT 2: TapamN, if you want to share which addresses in 1ST_READ.BIN need changing, the patch can be made very portable from there.