quitting on 68000?

[Hungry Horace]

right, my first "chucking of new slave into old folder" told me "corrupt data / unsupported version" or something, but i still need to try a fresh install though... i'll try it with the many copies i have! - i hope it will still work with my editted Bloodwych exe-files! (i do like to hack this game up a lot, so i'll get you a fresh copy/edit of that Girv, so you can add a "trainer" it if you like! )

the extended levels use the bloodwych save files to "import" your saved game stats, after that it has its own bextsave files. i guess the two games will share the one data folder? since there's only the "BEXT" (game exe) to add.

btw; out is interest... is the "import/export to disk" function not just a matter of switching off the HD load/save routine, and using the original one?

anyway, i'll do some reporting back later!



edit: ok, i'm still running winuae on the closest setting to my real amiga - Kick 3.0 - WB3.1 - 2 meg chip 24 meg fast, AGA, 68020+FPU

i discovered it began to work adding "PRELOAD", when i tried the gamefile from one of the IPFs - shoulda tried that before... however, the screen looked like this;



and pressing anything to start quit back to WB with the error "Exception "iIlegal instruction" ($10) at $600 occured."

this means nothing to me! (no KG, that's not your cue to start singing)

[girv]

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

right, my first "chucking of new slave into old folder" told me "corrupt data / unsupported version" or something, but i still need to try a fresh install though... i'll try it with the many copies i have! - i hope it will still work with my editted Bloodwych exe-files! (i do like to hack this game up a lot, so i'll get you a fresh copy/edit of that Girv, so you can add a "trainer" it if you like! )

The slave calculates a CRC checksum on the game executable and uses that to determine the code version it is dealing with. Any changes you make to the file will alter the checksum and make the slave think it is dealing with an unknown version.

What do you change in the file? It should be possible to calculate the checksum just on the parts of the file you haven't modified. Send me one of your modified game files if you like.

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

the extended levels use the bloodwych save files to "import" your saved game stats, after that it has its own bextsave files. i guess the two games will share the one data folder? since there's only the "BEXT" (game exe) to add.

OK I'll need to check out how that works.

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

btw; out is interest... is the "import/export to disk" function not just a matter of switching off the HD load/save routine, and using the original one?

Yeah, but it's better not to use the built in floppy access code in case of compatibility problems. So we remove it and use a compatible, system friendly RawDIC imager slave to get the data instead.

I've uploaded slave v2.00b2 to the Zone that should fix the address errors and text corruption.

[Hungry Horace]

for editing, there's quite a lot of stuff i tend to play around with, mostly because i am still working out what some of it is!

for example, there are the contents of pockets and player stats (the bits i understand the most) , and the main map data (including monster positioning, type etc) - although i havent done *much* editing of this, and i am still trying to work out how the object data works! (although i think i found where this is located, it uses numeric codes to represent positions on the map, rather than an X/Y postion )

http://www.djcresswell.com/bloodwych/ - this page has the very basics of data-layout for pockets and stats...

the maps (which must include almost everything else i would want to edit) seem to be the same on the PC version, so i've uploaded the map files from that too. if all this data could stay editable, that would be great!

www.djcresswell.com/bloodwych/MOD0.MAP
www.djcresswell.com/bloodwych/SERP.MAP
www.djcresswell.com/bloodwych/MOON.MAP
www.djcresswell.com/bloodwych/DRAGON.MAP
www.djcresswell.com/bloodwych/CHAOS.MAP
www.djcresswell.com/bloodwych/ZENDIK.MAP

i guess there's all the text that could be edited too, especially if the maps could be changed (wall scrolls might want updating), but i dont really have details on that atm.


this probably all sounds a bit mad, (and excessive) but the thing is, i have managed cobble together a front-end for the two games you see, and would like to add at some stage a basic stats-editor, and map-viewer (possibly also map editor later) - the map-viewing bit is done and works, but wont compile! (that'll teach me to use AMOS!)


here's a game-exe with extra stats and weapons, although if you base any trainer on this, i advise taking the characters levels down from 49 (i think?) to 14! (49 is way too high, and causes loads of problems with casting spells!)

www.djcresswell.com/bloodwych/bloodwych

i also cant guarentee i havent messed around with other (unimportant) stuff too.

i will probably edit my save to give me stats and keys, to test all the towers work too, as i've been really frustrated once before when the game crashed at the 4th Tower!!


funnily enough, i got the screen corruption to go-away when using the 439 IPF rather than the 102 i used before - there's a third one too, but i dont have this - sadly though, it still quit on game-start.


i'll go give the second beta a whirl now!


thanks Girv for catering for obsessives like myself.

[Hungry Horace]

Good news on beta 2. all seems in order on both disks (maybe my old one was from a cracked copy - quite why i dont know), and the quit key working lovingly, (even on 68000) along with the game itself

i see you kept in the annoying "crunchy sound" on game-start! i never quite understood why that happened on the whdload version?

anyway, you've made this man here very happy indeed thanks.

[girv]

I've taken a look at your hacking pages - impressive reverse engineering there

Something to note is that the addresses you use will only be valid for your version of the executable. The game data in the different versions starts at addresses $EBD0 and $EB2A (your version) and is $C600 bytes long. You'd be better writing an actual savegame editor as the savegame data is taken from the correct address for each version and should be compatible across versions.

I've changed the slave to use a different method to determine the game version, so you should be able to use your hacked binaries with the new slave It also now supports the intro and fixes a few other problems in the game.

2.00b3 slave in the Zone...

[girv]

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

i see you kept in the annoying "crunchy sound" on game-start! i never quite understood why that happened on the whdload version?

I usually run WinUAE with sound disabled. I didn't know it made a crunchy sound

[Hungry Horace]

Originally Posted by girv

I've taken a look at your hacking pages - impressive reverse engineering there

haha, good joke. hardly up to your standards i used to like messing around with it using my Action Replay III cart... over the years i've slowly picked apart more and more parts of the game just for fun.

Something to note is that the addresses you use will only be valid for your version of the executable.

oops. i should have added that they were the results i got on the A500, using one of my genuine copies. tbh, i only ever thought i'd be using that page, and used it as a way of keeping a few (out of date) notes. if i'd known it'd end up being used, i'd have cleaned it up!

You'd be better writing an actual savegame editor as the savegame data is taken from the correct address for each version and should be compatible across versions.

very true, though being such a purist, i'd probably end up wanting to allow both exe and save editing!

I've changed the slave to use a different method to determine the game version, so you should be able to use your hacked binaries with the new slave It also now supports the intro and fixes a few other problems in the game.

ooh neat, i'd tested the 5 towers (by editing the save) on the last slave, and they all worked fine. i meant to ask if i'd need to find my locations for editing the extended levels maps, but i guess this wont be needed now (if you are mostly adjusting what you've done for this slave)

2.00b3 slave in the Zone...

yummy. i've had a burn, and it's looking spot-on on my phantom-a1200 setup, (even the sound thing gone) but gave an error on my pspuae-style (68000) config, quitting after the TEST screen... "Exception "Address Error" ($F00) PC=$3FF3EA (Slave $122) Read from $6ED "

so close....

[Hungry Horace]

wait, there's more! (jesus Horace, do you never stop?! give the man a break!)

there's a bug/feature/whatever which i know is "left over goods" from the Morbidus slave... in that, if you already have a savefile, and you save over it in the game, you need to quit the game for the file to actually be written to disk (if you reset the amiga, your game is lost) - it doesnt happen when it creates the file on first-save though, only when overwritting.

dunno if this could be fixed?

[girv]

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

yummy. i've had a burn, and it's looking spot-on on my phantom-a1200 setup, (even the sound thing gone) but gave an error on my pspuae-style (68000) config, quitting after the TEST screen...

That's an odd one. I'll PM you my email address (or get it from the WHDLoad site) ... can you mail me your BLOODWYCH and TEST exes?

Regarding the file save "feature" - this behaviour is a feature of WHDLoad. You can disable it by using the NOWRITECACHE option.

[Hungry Horace]

oddly, i'm on a different install of winuae here, and i -think- all my files should be the same, but i'm having trouble reproducing it now, with everything working ok.

i can send you the files i used here, and when i get back to my usual setup, i will have a look for any differences and send you the lot.

thanks for he heads-up about nowritecache, i really shoulda looked for that - just never noticed it with anything else! i admit, the whdload readme, which i have tried to fathom, i dont find to be particularly.... erm.. human

[andreas]

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

i discovered it began to work adding "PRELOAD"

This seems to be a very severe bug not introduced until v16.6!
Everyone MUST upgrade to 16.7 to get this straight!! I had the same problem this morning with another game (GearWorks) run straightly from CLI! Appending preload in 16.6 worked as well as double-clicking from icon. Upgraded to 16.7 -> preload nonsense no longer needed: whdload randomgame.slave did the trick. Get rid of 16.6 ASAP everyone!

[Hungry Horace]

in hindsight i did know of that bug win 16.6 , but went on blissfully unaware that i wasnt on 16.7, so thanks for the that!

@ girv, same problem on 16.7 - e-mail sent.

[girv]

2.00b5 in the Zone now.

The previous error was an unaligned read, which breaks on 68000.

The 2.00b5 archive includes a new slave for the extended levels as well.

Have fun

[Hungry Horace]

taken me a while to cock-up these betas!

BW one seems perfect afaik


extended levels.... try to load an empty save-slot, and rather than fail (as it does with the load-game routine) it imports a "0" team full of character number 0 (blodwyn) with 0 stats all round.


second... how come there's two import functions? since you can only load/save "a game" - rather than seperate 1/2 player games, i figured only one would be needed?

i noticed that importing a two player game as a 1 player game, simply ditches the other player....

previously, i saw that 2 player saves with one dead player, imported as 1 player games.... this doesnt happen now (dead player is resurrected) - i was wondering if this was the reason for keeping both import-functions in?



cant make whdload exit-early on either slave or any setting now, which is great! sadly, it's a lot harder for me to test the extended levels fully, as it's a lot more linear in the long-run, so i'd need to play through it to properly test. (i cant cheat to test all the towers!)

top notch work mate.

[Hungry Horace]

HH squirms at asking about more stuff

rather than me asking for a trainer mode.... howabout a tooltype for the name of the main binaries?

ie. CUSTOM1=Bloodwych for normal, or CUSTOM1=Bloodwych_trainer , to make it load my edited bin' ? of course, i might like to create some edited BEXT files at some stage too....

i dunno, maybe you could use it combine the two slaves? (or is this bad working practice?? )


anyway, just wondering.

[killergorilla]

It'd have to be CUSTOM=Bloodwych or CUSTOM1=1 (for trained versions), as CUSTOM1 through CUSTOM5 can only take numeric values IIRC

[Hungry Horace]

Originally Posted by killergorilla

It'd have to be CUSTOM=Bloodwych

ok, that'd do.... i'm sure i could handle *not* typing a number

[girv]

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

extended levels.... try to load an empty save-slot, and rather than fail (as it does with the load-game routine) it imports a "0" team full of character number 0 (blodwyn) with 0 stats all round.

I found that the original disk would do this too, so it appears to be a bug in the game itself. I've changed the slave to just reload the game from the start if you try to transfer a non-existant Bloodwych save. Non-existant Extended Levels saves are handled correctly as before.

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

second... how come there's two import functions?

The game transfer code needs to know if it has to initialse the second player but the savegame doesn't indicate if it's a one or two player save, so you need to explicitly tell the game what sort of save you're loading. If you tell it the wrong thing weirdness ensues, as you found

I wanted to have different filenames for one and two player saves to avoid this (and also allow for ten one player and ten two player save slots instead of ten altogether) but this would break compatibility with the 1.x series patches. I guess this could be worked around by using only the new filenames for saving but using both for loading, taking a new format filename file in preference if it exists.

What do you think? Or can you tell from the data if its a one or two player save?

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

rather than me asking for a trainer mode.... howabout a tooltype for the name of the main binaries?

Done. Use the CUSTOM tooltype as KG indicated, or leave it out to use the default names.

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

i dunno, maybe you could use it combine the two slaves? (or is this bad working practice?)

It could be done, but I'm not sure I like it. I think it might be confusing for the users and it would definitely make a mess of the code!

2.00b7 slaves in the Zone, plus a few icons I knocked up. Enjoy!

[Hungry Horace]

yeah, my apologies for causing "the wierdness".... it's just that if i go to test something, i like to absolutely thrash it any way i can think of!


this latest beta is looking great, it was kinda neat just dropping it into my gui and immediatily having my "start bloodwych triainered" option back and unlike before, i dont need a whole new folder & seperate saves for it.... brilliant!


regarding the 1 / 2 player saves, i dont see that it would be an issue if you did as you said, and just had it load the old type, but always save the v2 type save..... however, i'm for some reason convinced that you can tell from the stats data how many champions are selected (one or two) and thus determine the number of players, so i will have a look into that for you. thankfully the stats data is right at the beggining of the save anyway!


forget my idea about combining the slaves, i was only thinking of it being like the Populous one or something, but if it's a mess to do, it's not worth it! (you know best)

btw, havent been able to check, (since i dont have any edited binaries) but does the CUSTOM= also work with the extended levels?

edit 2 - never mind, i see it does and since it worked when i messed with the spellbook runes, i guess it must let you edit anything you can!


any cheers again.... off to stuff myself into some savedata code.


edit...


well that didnt take very long.

referring back to www.djcresswell.com/bloodwych
and looking at the "champion stats" - it's pretty easy to see what it does when one of the champions is a selected player.

the "Start X / Start Y" numbers become FF FF on the party leader (so there are two instances of this on a 2 player game) - whilst additional party members become "FF something" - i think where the `something` represents their positioning in the team.

this is dead easy to find on the save data, as the first block of data is the stats for Blodwyn (continuing down through the 16 champions) so i guess, you are looking at whether the 23 And 24th bytes (?) are equal to FF, and repeating this for the rest of the champions.

hope that helps!

(out of interest, even if a player is dead, the numbers are still FF FF, there is just another number nearby denoting "deadness" )

[girv]

2.00b8 slaves in the Zone.
+ changed: Extended Levels can load a 1 or 2 player Bloodwych game

FWIW the 1 player / 2 player flag is two bytes at offset $306 in the Bloodwych save games ($eed6 or $ee30 in memory) and $406 in the Extended Levels save games. $ffff means one player; $0000 means two player. The Extended Levels code didn't set this up when transferring a Bloodwych game, but it does now

Once again, have fun