Ninja Gaiden II (working version please)

[NfernalNfluence]

bump for progress report!

[mai]

Unfortunately two conditions are required:
Interest(motivation) and knowledge.
There are a few members only, who have both.
So i am expecting nothing.
Althought it would be worth to have a working version.

[prowler]

Mai, you forgot that there is a third requirement.

I intend to have a look at this when I have time.

[mai]

Originally Posted by prowler

I intend to have a look at this when I have time.

I would be rather surprised then.

[Arnie]

I have copied the contents of disks 1&2 to a HD in Winuae and it loads ok with A1200 config.

I'm useless at these games, so can someone try it out to act seven and see if it works up to that point?

[mai]

Originally Posted by Arnie

I have copied the contents of disks 1&2 to a HD in Winuae and it loads ok with A1200 config.

I'm useless at these games, so can someone try it out to act seven and see if it works up to that point?

use the cheat (post 6).

[Arnie]

Originally Posted by mai

use the cheat (post 6).

Ah, missed that, thanks Mai.

Unfortunately the bugs are still there but, at least I now know it works from HD

[mai]

Originally Posted by prowler

Mai, you forgot that there is a third requirement.

I intend to have a look at this when I have time.

of course forgotten thread/post.

[prowler]

I haven't forgotten this, mate!

There is a good chance I'll get around to looking at this before Christmas. I have a few disks here which still need salvaging, but the weather here has prevented that for most of the time recently by raining so much. Except on the odd occasion (yesterday, for example) it's just too humid.

Of course, that won't prevent me looking at disk images.

Anyway, thanks for the reminder.

[prowler]

Well, it looks as if the weather here, yet again, is about to turn very wet, so, as promised, I'll be having a look at this problem in the coming days.

[prowler]

Okay. Well, after looking at the various disk images for a couple of days, I can confirm that the important files on all disks are identical (albeit, in most cases, with different timestamps) and, in common with most disks you will find in TOSEC, all loose blocks have been zeroed-out, so there's absolutely no help to be found from that quarter.

I do have a few ideas about how the graphics corruption might be fixed, but first I thought I would reproduce the opening screen for each level.

















I have included two Level 7 screenshots, because there is flickering and colour-changing going on in the area which is shown differently.

You'll notice that I've made no attempt to play the game. That's not my area of expertise; I'm only here trying first to find and then fix the corrupted code.

[prowler]

I've had to split this between two posts, because I reached the maximum number of atachments above.

In this final screenshot, it appears that the corrupted level is the final one, because I was unable to enter Act 8.



Next, I will try some of Boo Boo's suggestions to locate the errant file.

In the meantime, as always, any observations, suggestions and/or criticism will be welcome.

[clenched]

This is what act 7 looks like on the PC. The green ooze on the walls is animated to mimic flowing lava. That would account for the ugly flashing on Amiga. Also the basic level structure (platform, door, chasm placement) looks intact on Amiga. The graphics are just wrong.

[prowler]

Thanks for that, clenched!

I've just snagged two DOS version downloads.

[dlfrsilver]

Cool, this smell a repair !!!

[prowler]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Cool, this smell a repair !!!

I wish! Whether it will turn out to be a trivial fix or not I don't know yet, but I can't see anything immediately obvious and, unfortunately, there's little resemblance between the Amiga and DOS files either! But it's a good omen that clenched is on the case!

[clenched]

TIP: Press TAB key to advance through the stages and cut scenes in each act. The blinking graphics abate after a while making act 7 somewhat playable.

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

I cant get the dimensions for the Tiles GFXRip even though they seem to be 16*16
but it seems the Tiles are stored in file PageX.RAW you can view them in game simply by renaming them Page1.RAW and file Page6.RAW does seem to be corrupt.

I haven't tried renaming these files yet in order to view them in game. I've been looking at them with GfxRip, but can find nothing. They look compressed to me when viewed in a hex editor, so I'll try decrunching them tomorrow if I get time and, if that works, I'll give them another look.

[Retro1234]

Hope everyone had a good Xmas - Id also like to try and help -
GFXRip- Maybe File size / Number of tiles 16*16? might work?
I probably would have tried an uncompressed winuae savestate - but maybe not

[Belgarath]

Might be a silly question this..but do we actually have any proof the Amiga version was released?