Curiosity check: Cosmic Fantasy 2 hack?

[spenoza]

I think a project like this is a great way for a talented newcomer to hacking to get acclimated to the system. It's definitely not a good project for the established devs around here. In that sense, it's not a waste at all, but rather practice and training that others can benefit from.

[Keranu]

Some interesting info in this thread already, but can anyone talk more about the graphic hacking process and how much work that would require? Even if it was as simple as straight up swapping tiles that already fit in place or repixelling existing ones.

Just so everyone knows, this is not something I'm (or anyone else AFAIK) is planning, but merely a curiosity. I really don't like the ideas of remakes in general because it tends to take away aspects that made certain games classics to begin with. However I always thought CF2 would be a good candidate for a remake because it had a lot of great ideas but had some setbacks restricting it from being a real masterpiece.

If it's not a overly ambitious project, I'd love to see it come to fruition. Otherwise, best focusing efforts on new original ideas.

You could do ACD as well. I don't think SCD will be enough to eliminate load times. ACD would be though.

From what I remember Nodtveidt telling me years ago, the reason why simple tasks like checking character status or looking at items took so long to load had something to do with the game running data/images off the CD itself or something instead of RAM.... yeah I'm probably way off on the tech stuff there, but regardless it was due to RAM limits that could've been resolved in SCD format. Wanna chime more in on this, Nod? lol

EDIT: OH and props to whoever mentioned adding more music to this hack. CF2 had some pretty decent music but definitely lacked a variety of tracks to play through! Probably due to all the voice acting.... maybe shortening some songs could squeeze enough room for a short song or two.

[nodtveidt]

Yeah, it loads the portrait images from the CD when they're needed. I guess there wasn't enough room in system RAM to hold them. It does that for all of them, including the description items in the shops. I would think that using the SCD could eliminate that problem, since they could all be loaded into system RAM ahead of time. Might even be able to preload enemy sprites like that as well. The game sure did pull off a lot for 64KB (I bet it used the ADPCM RAM for some things too though).

The interesting thing about the music is that it's all on a single track, and played via the A-B repeat technique. Cutscenes are put on subsequent tracks, and paired with their accompanying redbook audio. Quite a clever way to reduce reseek time.

[nodtveidt]

play main CD tune, encounter battle -> fade out, save position, play new track.
End of battle, fade track -> play small ADPCM or psg jingle
while jingle is playing, ~don't~ cancel CDDA fade (should be mute), load main CD tune with normal parameters and play CD track (still in mute status), call CD_SEARCH to offset to the previous track, cancel fade out, fade out jingle.

 As long as the 'jingle' tune is long enough, the CD_search function should do it's job. No need to monitor and re-call CD_play function.

Experimenting with this concept right now in MS2. Basically... the current music position is saved, the new program is run with the new track... when the track is no longer needed, I set the 2.5 second PCM fade and play the ADPCM buffer on infinite loop and load the next program... the ADPCM playback continues through loading (since it's unaffected by CD access when playing the buffer as opposed to streaming), load the original track, use CD_SEARCH using the CD-ATIME search objective (with both arguments set to 0, since I want it to complete the search and then pause the track before proceeding), then unpause the track and set the CD fade to the 2.5 second ADPCM fade, which seems to cancel the PCM fade, which allows the CD audio to cut back in while it fades the ADPCM channel out. Since all the sound effects in MS2 are PSG-based using Squirrel 3.0, this method does not interfere with anything. However, in a case like CF2 where I am positive that it uses the ADPCM buffer for storage, some rewriting would probably be necessary so as to not interfere with things.

[Keranu]

Some interesting info in this thread already, but can anyone talk more about the graphic hacking process and how much work that would require? Even if it was as simple as straight up swapping tiles that already fit in place or repixelling existing ones.

Bump?

[Bonknuts]

Some interesting info in this thread already, but can anyone talk more about the graphic hacking process and how much work that would require? Even if it was as simple as straight up swapping tiles that already fit in place or repixelling existing ones.

Bump?

Grab tmod2 (make sure it has the PCE plugins) and dosbox. Open the ISO in tmod2 and have a go at pixel editing the graphics. Editing the palettes is a little trickier, though there's a way to visually identify them (using tmod2).

[Keranu]

Thanks tom! Got tmod2 and dosbox set up and playing around with it. If only I could make out all the garble! Do any PCE emulators have built in tile/sprite viewers?

Would programming be required for things like adding more tiles and dealing with tile overlap issues?

[megatron-uk]

Thanks tom! Got tmod2 and dosbox set up and playing around with it. If only I could make out all the garble! Do any PCE emulators have built in tile/sprite viewers?

Yep. Mednafen.

Run the game, do Alt+D to enable debugger, then Alt+2 to show the sprites and tiles as loaded into vram.

[Keranu]

Grab tmod2 (make sure it has the PCE plugins) and dosbox. Open the ISO in tmod2 and have a go at pixel editing the graphics. Editing the palettes is a little trickier, though there's a way to visually identify them (using tmod2).

OK took a look at CF2's ISO last night in TMOD. Thankfully the graphics are uncompressed and I'm able to make everything out. How do you go about with the palettes? I can't seem to select from more than the first two colors of the default palette either. Have a feeling this part of the process is going to require some coding, especially if I import CF4 tilesets that use different palettes...