DOA2 XiaoPang / redundant files and more ?
Moderator: pcwzrd13
-
nuggetreggae
- shadow
- Posts: 9
Re: DOA2 XiaoPang / redundant files and more ?
I will say that ENGINE.BIN started life before going on this compilation as a small text file. It is the protection for the game, as that file and the game files will not fit on an 80min selfboot together. Tennis 2K2 did the same thing. The game does not check the contents of the file, only the length. So it starts as a small text file and after the ISO is made the length in the file table is edited to be nice and long, so when you dump it you're actually dumping other game files as well. The reason it errors while trying to dump it is that the small text file was obviously left with the name engine.bin when creating the ISO and it therefore put it half way through the disk and when it was "lengthened" it ran off the end! As the game only checks the size, who cares? does it work? absolutely! But definitely dirty tricks. Thats why the duplicate size only went down to 1.2GB, because it was factoring in a 400+mb file that would have been 100 bytes long when the compiler made the disk. I'll give this a go, today i found corresponding addresses in the JAP version to Echelon's JAP-LE version crack and made a successful JAP version which only needs a 20byte ENGINE.BIN appropriately (?) containing the text "- The Dawn is near -" and will post how i get on. It will be a 45000 LBA so i can make a GDI of it as well.
-
nuggetreggae
- shadow
- Posts: 9
Re: DOA2 XiaoPang / redundant files and more ?
I made the new version at 45000 LBA and everything works. The original japanese promo SFD was 72MB which would NOT fit in the smaller session, and finding enough UNIQUE files to put in cd session 1 would have probably been possible but VERY time consuming and require a ton of SFV checks so I took the video from the PAL demo disk which was a similar sort of 3 minute promo vid but only 58MB. Then to cap off the lower session I put the Japanese Promo GDI (which contained the same sfd video) and some files from the SE DOA2 which were unique to that version (the ones prefixed DV_ in the DOA2 folder. I learned that the -duplicate-once option does not work well with data across the two sessions, although filenames are carried and re-linked. thats why i needed to find files that were unique to 1 version of the game for Session 1. Aside from these small hiccups it went quite smoothly. The PAL was a nightmare with the picture off the TV screen and no sound, also unable to hit the opponent it seems, but I confirmed the verified original PAL GD did EXACTLY the same...... As there are two menu options to play videos I will put the japanese video in the second one for the GDI image I will make today. If anyone knows somewhere with not much trouble to host these it would be fantastic!
-
nuggetreggae
- shadow
- Posts: 9
Re: DOA2 XiaoPang / redundant files and more ?
just wrote a huge update and this site had logged me out, by the time i logged in again my text was lost. GDI is working completely on GDEmu, but resets back to DC bios with no disc inserted instead of returning to the menu. Working on it. Original desc had details on how i constructed the gdi.
-
nuggetreggae
- shadow
- Posts: 9
Re: DOA2 XiaoPang / redundant files and more ?
ok its all done. CDI virtually the same as Xiaopang's except the different vid, gdi has all that in addition to the original japanese vid and the pal white label and a ntsc playable demo. Here's my release notes. If someone can host these or knows somewhere that can it'd be fantastic. Message me and i'll give a mega link, but dont wanna post as my bandwidth is limited. The 7z archive is 474MB and it contains a full GDI, truncated GDI, my CDI and xiaopang's original CDI. the GDI problem was the image was not properly region free. IPBIN 4 WIN only patches the JUE letters at the beginning of the IP.BIN but the bios checks the text as will later in the file "for europe" etc its explained in my nfo..... which is here
*** Nugget's Notes ***
I read some reports of one of the games maybe not working correctly either due to bad files or to the game objecting to having the LBA changed to 11702 or maybe even incorrectly patched to that LBA. Certainly the protection file for both japanese versions of the game were extending beyond the end of the CD causing ISObuster to throw an error while analyzing the disc. Also the image file 0GDTEX.PVR was not showing up in my ODE's GDMENU, maybe due to the aforementioned error (the pic and ENGINE.BIN protection files overlapped).
Thus I decided to rebuild this, using LBA 45000 (the same as the original GD-Roms) keeping xiaopang's good menu work in place and taking a few liberties. This new disc still contains the 4 main versions of the game and a demo promo video, in full form with nothing ripped or downsampled. I also created a GDI version and with the extra available space added back the video from Xiaopang's original compilation, a white label beta version of the PAL game, and a US playable demo for completeness. The contents are thus now:-
[CDI]
Dead or Alive 2 Limited Edition (NTSC-J)
Dead or Alive 2 Regular Edition (NTSC-J)
Dead or Alive 2 (PAL)
Dead or Alive 2 (NTSC-U)
Dead or Alive 2 Promo Movie (PAL)
[GDI]
Dead or Alive 2 Limited Edition (NTSC-J)
Dead or Alive 2 Regular Edition (NTSC-J)
Dead or Alive 2 (PAL)
Dead or Alive 2 (NTSC-U)
Dead or Alive 2 White Label Beta (PAL)
Dead or Alive 2 Playable Demo (NTSC-U)
Dead or Alive 2 Promo Movie (PAL)
Dead or Alive 2 Promo Movie (NTSC-J)
Making of the discs
-------------------
I started out by getting hacked versions of the two japanese versions of the game. This was way out of my league, knowing no Hitachi CPU code, but fortunately Echelon had already tackled the limited edition. So I compared the hacked and original BINs using my favourite hex editor, Hex Workshop. Its a bit long in the tooth now and dies if you open a >500MB file but serves me well for my purpose. I hoped I would be able to use this hack to also hack the regular japanese version. I found the following differences in the Limited Editions 1ST_READ.BIN :-
$0014BB 3222 was changed to
-->> 3332
$12FFBE 4C84
-->> 30E0
$12EDD0 02E0
-->> 00E0
$12EDE8 224F06B00900264F03E4194009240B004360
-->> 07D33160194003C90288008B03E00B000900
and these small hex changes allowed the ~430MB ENGINE.BIN protection file to be replaced with a 20 byte one!! Now onto the japanese regular version. Using my trusty hex editor in its compare mode I found the same code at the following address offsets:
$0014BB had equivalent code at $0014BB (unchanged)
$12FFBE had equivalent code at $12F9FE
$12EDD0 had equivalent code at $12E810 and finally
$12EDE8 had equivalent code at $12E828 in the Japanese regular edition
So..... I patched the changed code to that edition, tested, and voila! It worked and japan version was also cracked and able to use the 20byte ENGINE.BIN file
Nice work Echelon!
The rest of the rebuild was fairly straight forward, nice 0GDTEX.PVR icon (Tina), -duplicates-once function in mkisofs being essential to getting 1.4GB or whatever onto an 80 min CD-R. (As there are LOTS of nice duplicate files between 4 versions of the same game)
The reason I changed the video was because a LBA 45000 selfboot cd can fit 65MB into the 1st session. The Japanese video was 72MB, and the european one was around 60MB, hence the latter fitted.
[The GDI]
For the GDI creation, it was pretty much the same method except I zero-lengthed the menu BIN (0DREAMON.BIN), the two videos and the 7Z file with the bonus pics. I then edited the menu stuff for the extra versions (US DEMO and WHITE LABEL PAL) and the extra video, and the games themselves, and added them in the SELFBOOT data folder. I then added a pause command just before the merging section in FG's selfboot script (where it merges the two iso's into a Nero NRG dual session file) and deleted the files for session 1 in data1 folder, before running it and making an ISO without videos, boot file or 7Z extras file. The files are there, but all 0 bytes in length.
I then unpacked the DOA2-LE GDI in "Extract Re-Build GDI's" deleted all the data and replaced it with my 4 files I zero-lengthed before, and re-built the GDI. I did this because on a DC GDI disc the boot binary MUST be the last thing on the disc, and that tool takes care of that task. That then gave me a track03.iso (toc) and a track04.iso (the data at the top of the disc). I used a hex editor to find the four file entries in the new toc (not hard, they're the only 4 there) and placed them in my iso from the SELFBOOT by copy/paste. So then track03.iso is about 767MB and track05.iso is about 170MB. The LBA start of track05.iso is already in the gdi file spat out by the "Extract Re-build GDI's" tool. Track03.iso is always at 45000 and we have re-linked the 4 files at the top without messing around or calculating LBAs converting to hex etc etc!!!
The new GDemu firmware does not like GDI's with 4 files, but is happy when a 4 second raw audio file is added, therefore track04.iso became track05.iso and a 300x2352 byte sector blank file is added as track04.raw and added to the gdi text file 450 sectors below track05.iso and testing begins.
All the games and videos worked well, but on exiting games the DC would revert to the BIOS screen, and It would refuse to accept the disc "please insert a valid disc" forcing me to power down or click the GDemu button until something booted. I messed with this for about a day, even moved to a different dreamon menu version, rebuilt 10 times, changed IP.BIN a few times and ran it through "IP BIN 4 Win" and eventually didn't "win" and gave up. Some late night reading last night revealed a guy called Derek had written an IP.BIN patcher which didn't just patch the "JUE" text at the start of the IP.BIN, but the longer "for Europe" etc later in the bootsector. It didn't even click then. In fact it didn't click until the next day 24 hours later, while testing the Dreamon, Generator etc. demo discs. I was looking for a new menu to try. A few dumped to the bios then the disc booted fine. Now I was sure it was all to do with the IP.BIN. I extracted the first 32768 bytes of my track03.bin, ran it through derek's patcher and replaced it. Bang! It worked. I immediately added his patcher to my selfboot script, and had a working DOA 2 Ultimate Ultimate disc! Bloody Eureka! that was an effort......
[Trivia]
Echelon obviously also burned the midnight oil. The text in his modified 20 byte ENGINE.BIN file reads
"- The Dawn is near -"
[Thanks]
Family Guy, for the excellent 45000 Data/Data builder "-=Self-BootDATA=-"
The author of "Extract Re-Build GDI's" - in it he gives a nod to Family Guy and S4pph4rad in the file "Credits.txt" but no indication as to who he is.... Thanks anyway. Very handy.
Breakpoint Software for Hex Workshop, which found me those offsets between the two japanese editions effortlessly.
Xiaopang, for making the first version and creating all the icons and backgrounds for the menu, I'm no artist and have no patience for that Shiznitt.
Echelon, for the skillz. I downloaded all your available cracktro's last night from pouet and plan to incorporate them back into some CDI's, after searching for releases was fruitless! Amiga days every disk had one. Chiptunes. Ascii. It's all getting lost to time! And with the whole scene moving to GDI's these cracks are lost.
*** Nugget's Notes ***
I read some reports of one of the games maybe not working correctly either due to bad files or to the game objecting to having the LBA changed to 11702 or maybe even incorrectly patched to that LBA. Certainly the protection file for both japanese versions of the game were extending beyond the end of the CD causing ISObuster to throw an error while analyzing the disc. Also the image file 0GDTEX.PVR was not showing up in my ODE's GDMENU, maybe due to the aforementioned error (the pic and ENGINE.BIN protection files overlapped).
Thus I decided to rebuild this, using LBA 45000 (the same as the original GD-Roms) keeping xiaopang's good menu work in place and taking a few liberties. This new disc still contains the 4 main versions of the game and a demo promo video, in full form with nothing ripped or downsampled. I also created a GDI version and with the extra available space added back the video from Xiaopang's original compilation, a white label beta version of the PAL game, and a US playable demo for completeness. The contents are thus now:-
[CDI]
Dead or Alive 2 Limited Edition (NTSC-J)
Dead or Alive 2 Regular Edition (NTSC-J)
Dead or Alive 2 (PAL)
Dead or Alive 2 (NTSC-U)
Dead or Alive 2 Promo Movie (PAL)
[GDI]
Dead or Alive 2 Limited Edition (NTSC-J)
Dead or Alive 2 Regular Edition (NTSC-J)
Dead or Alive 2 (PAL)
Dead or Alive 2 (NTSC-U)
Dead or Alive 2 White Label Beta (PAL)
Dead or Alive 2 Playable Demo (NTSC-U)
Dead or Alive 2 Promo Movie (PAL)
Dead or Alive 2 Promo Movie (NTSC-J)
Making of the discs
-------------------
I started out by getting hacked versions of the two japanese versions of the game. This was way out of my league, knowing no Hitachi CPU code, but fortunately Echelon had already tackled the limited edition. So I compared the hacked and original BINs using my favourite hex editor, Hex Workshop. Its a bit long in the tooth now and dies if you open a >500MB file but serves me well for my purpose. I hoped I would be able to use this hack to also hack the regular japanese version. I found the following differences in the Limited Editions 1ST_READ.BIN :-
$0014BB 3222 was changed to
-->> 3332
$12FFBE 4C84
-->> 30E0
$12EDD0 02E0
-->> 00E0
$12EDE8 224F06B00900264F03E4194009240B004360
-->> 07D33160194003C90288008B03E00B000900
and these small hex changes allowed the ~430MB ENGINE.BIN protection file to be replaced with a 20 byte one!! Now onto the japanese regular version. Using my trusty hex editor in its compare mode I found the same code at the following address offsets:
$0014BB had equivalent code at $0014BB (unchanged)
$12FFBE had equivalent code at $12F9FE
$12EDD0 had equivalent code at $12E810 and finally
$12EDE8 had equivalent code at $12E828 in the Japanese regular edition
So..... I patched the changed code to that edition, tested, and voila! It worked and japan version was also cracked and able to use the 20byte ENGINE.BIN file
Nice work Echelon!The rest of the rebuild was fairly straight forward, nice 0GDTEX.PVR icon (Tina), -duplicates-once function in mkisofs being essential to getting 1.4GB or whatever onto an 80 min CD-R. (As there are LOTS of nice duplicate files between 4 versions of the same game)
The reason I changed the video was because a LBA 45000 selfboot cd can fit 65MB into the 1st session. The Japanese video was 72MB, and the european one was around 60MB, hence the latter fitted.
[The GDI]
For the GDI creation, it was pretty much the same method except I zero-lengthed the menu BIN (0DREAMON.BIN), the two videos and the 7Z file with the bonus pics. I then edited the menu stuff for the extra versions (US DEMO and WHITE LABEL PAL) and the extra video, and the games themselves, and added them in the SELFBOOT data folder. I then added a pause command just before the merging section in FG's selfboot script (where it merges the two iso's into a Nero NRG dual session file) and deleted the files for session 1 in data1 folder, before running it and making an ISO without videos, boot file or 7Z extras file. The files are there, but all 0 bytes in length.
I then unpacked the DOA2-LE GDI in "Extract Re-Build GDI's" deleted all the data and replaced it with my 4 files I zero-lengthed before, and re-built the GDI. I did this because on a DC GDI disc the boot binary MUST be the last thing on the disc, and that tool takes care of that task. That then gave me a track03.iso (toc) and a track04.iso (the data at the top of the disc). I used a hex editor to find the four file entries in the new toc (not hard, they're the only 4 there) and placed them in my iso from the SELFBOOT by copy/paste. So then track03.iso is about 767MB and track05.iso is about 170MB. The LBA start of track05.iso is already in the gdi file spat out by the "Extract Re-build GDI's" tool. Track03.iso is always at 45000 and we have re-linked the 4 files at the top without messing around or calculating LBAs converting to hex etc etc!!!
The new GDemu firmware does not like GDI's with 4 files, but is happy when a 4 second raw audio file is added, therefore track04.iso became track05.iso and a 300x2352 byte sector blank file is added as track04.raw and added to the gdi text file 450 sectors below track05.iso and testing begins.
All the games and videos worked well, but on exiting games the DC would revert to the BIOS screen, and It would refuse to accept the disc "please insert a valid disc" forcing me to power down or click the GDemu button until something booted. I messed with this for about a day, even moved to a different dreamon menu version, rebuilt 10 times, changed IP.BIN a few times and ran it through "IP BIN 4 Win" and eventually didn't "win" and gave up. Some late night reading last night revealed a guy called Derek had written an IP.BIN patcher which didn't just patch the "JUE" text at the start of the IP.BIN, but the longer "for Europe" etc later in the bootsector. It didn't even click then. In fact it didn't click until the next day 24 hours later, while testing the Dreamon, Generator etc. demo discs. I was looking for a new menu to try. A few dumped to the bios then the disc booted fine. Now I was sure it was all to do with the IP.BIN. I extracted the first 32768 bytes of my track03.bin, ran it through derek's patcher and replaced it. Bang! It worked. I immediately added his patcher to my selfboot script, and had a working DOA 2 Ultimate Ultimate disc! Bloody Eureka! that was an effort......
[Trivia]
Echelon obviously also burned the midnight oil. The text in his modified 20 byte ENGINE.BIN file reads
"- The Dawn is near -"
[Thanks]
Family Guy, for the excellent 45000 Data/Data builder "-=Self-BootDATA=-"
The author of "Extract Re-Build GDI's" - in it he gives a nod to Family Guy and S4pph4rad in the file "Credits.txt" but no indication as to who he is.... Thanks anyway. Very handy.
Breakpoint Software for Hex Workshop, which found me those offsets between the two japanese editions effortlessly.
Xiaopang, for making the first version and creating all the icons and backgrounds for the menu, I'm no artist and have no patience for that Shiznitt.
Echelon, for the skillz. I downloaded all your available cracktro's last night from pouet and plan to incorporate them back into some CDI's, after searching for releases was fruitless! Amiga days every disk had one. Chiptunes. Ascii. It's all getting lost to time! And with the whole scene moving to GDI's these cracks are lost.
-
ShindouGo
- Power Stone
- Posts: 586
- Location: LE MANS
Re: DOA2 XiaoPang / redundant files and more ?
thank you for all this information and research 
I actually have a compilation that I wanted to make in 2 CDs of DOA 2 that I will finally be able to do
I actually have a compilation that I wanted to make in 2 CDs of DOA 2 that I will finally be able to do
-
Dirge Of Ram
- Prince of Persia
- Posts: 341
- Dreamcast Games you play Online: No GGPO Fightcade For Me.
Re: DOA2 XiaoPang / redundant files and more ?
The Master Collection Plus Available Right Here Today!
Dive Into The New 56 Era.
-
SMiTH
- Black Mesa
- Posts: 1497
Re: DOA2 XiaoPang / redundant files and more ?
If you guys want to put together a doa2 collection of mods...
check out these posts i made a while ago.
https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/vi ... 00#p172564
also post #207 (describes the mod to files)
check out these posts i made a while ago.
https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/vi ... 00#p172564
also post #207 (describes the mod to files)
-
Dirge Of Ram
- Prince of Persia
- Posts: 341
- Dreamcast Games you play Online: No GGPO Fightcade For Me.
Re: DOA2 XiaoPang / redundant files and more ?
I do apologize for not figuring out how to make 3 in 1 CDI on my lonesome. Wanted the best mod Chapters put together now that have been editing up the Costumes myself & getting the Prototypes done. Even more good things getting accomplished today with this game. Players to enjoy Chapter 31 to 35 the most right now.
Be Very Thankful if someone here can make that Dream On menu a reality that be awesome please.
Be Very Thankful if someone here can make that Dream On menu a reality that be awesome please.