Dream Library Hacking

[fraggle200]

have you tried running any of the bin files through Ghidra? They've put a SH4 disassembler in there with the most recent version. I've had mixed results when poking about files with it but it could make life a little easier in being able to track down whats happening as the assembly code should be there to see instead of trying to work out what's happening through a hex editor.

I'll be honest, I've absolutely peaked my technical knowledge getting to this point. I don't know of Ghidra, how to run an SH4 disassembler, and I'm largely blind looking in the hex editor. My knowledge base is in film and cinematography, not coding.

If you are willing, I can send you the files. Would you be open to looking?

Fire me a link with the files and I'll take a look but I know nothing of SH4 assembly but I can at least run it through Ghidra to see if it can disassemble it and dish out something meaningful to someone.

[SMiTH]

bumping this one too.

[ateam]

I've done some assembly hacking on a few Dreamcast games to remove the "valid ISP settings" checks, as well as some assembly hacking of Dream Passport 3 to remove the screensaver. I might be interested in looking at this one day in the future, but would like to understand something. Is the end goal here to modify Dream Library to pull its online game list from a custom URL (i.e., a community-hosted server containing a complete ROMset)?

If so, it's important to note that you'd need to understand exactly how the old servers sent game list data back to Dream Library. This means format of the list payload, and also the structure with which individual game ROMs are stored. In theory the disassembled executable can be used to figure that out, but would be very painful. Essentially you'd be first locating and then sifting through the assembly that assesses the response from the old server so that you can build your new server software to behave the same.

This, of course, would be far easier if the old server were still online and traffic between it and Dream Library could be sniffed and analyzed. Not a luxury you have, though!

[SMiTH]

I've done some assembly hacking on a few Dreamcast games to remove the "valid ISP settings" checks, as well as some assembly hacking of Dream Passport 3 to remove the screensaver. I might be interested in looking at this one day in the future, but would like to understand something. Is the end goal here to modify Dream Library to pull its online game list from a custom URL (i.e., a community-hosted server containing a complete ROMset)?

If so, it's important to note that you'd need to understand exactly how the old servers sent game list data back to Dream Library. This means format of the list payload, and also the structure with which individual game ROMs are stored. In theory the disassembled executable can be used to figure that out, but would be very painful. Essentially you'd be first locating and then sifting through the assembly that assesses the response from the old server so that you can build your new server software to behave the same.

This, of course, would be far easier if the old server were still online and traffic between it and Dream Library could be sniffed and analyzed. Not a luxury you have, though!

The pc engine emulator running offline with roms on the same disk would be awesome.
https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/vi ... =2&t=16210

[colgate]

Looking through the mega drive emulator's binary, I see some reference to a config or save file of some sorts: MD_EMU00.CFG, MD_EMU00.%03d. The emulator doesn't seem to save anything to the vmu though, have we found anything about this before?

[SMiTH]

Looking through the mega drive emulator's binary, I see some reference to a config or save file of some sorts: MD_EMU00.CFG, MD_EMU00.%03d. The emulator doesn't seem to save anything to the vmu though, have we found anything about this before?

https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 3#p1052213

[colgate]

Looking through the mega drive emulator's binary, I see some reference to a config or save file of some sorts: MD_EMU00.CFG, MD_EMU00.%03d. The emulator doesn't seem to save anything to the vmu though, have we found anything about this before?

https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 3#p1052213

Well back to the drawing board, thanks for posting it.