doctorclu

There are a few hacks I'd love to do for Raiden. That, and see how slow it would go without the right scoreboard panel covering 40% of the screen.

We present to you this necro-bump to share my first thread that Atariage remembers me replying to. According to this thread January 28th of next year will be my 20th anniversary on Atariage. Fun! The above quoted was not my first reply, that is later in the thread, but I had fun with this part of the thread as you'll see in a second. I really have found memories of Jaguar Interactive II and AtariHQ as my earliest Atari Jaguar website when I first got a Jag. It was funny to click the link above which ACTUALLY STILL WORKS!... 😮 Ah that brought back memories from 2000. And then you click the link on THAT page and get a error 404. I am curious if the archive of the messages was ever made available as mentioned in the part I quoted above. Would be fun to read that.

Thanks! Looking back, was some fun folk I worked with on a lot of that.

That is interesting on how they are the same player, but inserted in different ways. Was cool to hear about. Just curious overall. Sounds like the mod player was not always a seperate file in the directory. What was it Spock used to say "Requires further investigation". Something like that.

I've often felt any time up is assigned to jump, it generally does work. And like you said, especially when another button is assigned to jump.

So part of me is wondering: 1) Did Imagitec use the same modplayer in their game. As I understand it they were ProTracker 1.0? 2) if the same, I believe I know where the Bubsy modplayer is and I could compare to find the modplayer in Zool. 3) If I could find it, possibly swap in another more modern modplayer. Maybe the other Zool mods would work better? Just my thought of the day. Found this being said about the Imagitec mod players by you (Seedy) in 2013 (you've been here a while!)

That is some cool info and currently working with Crossover (replacement for Wine in recent days) to see if I get dasm68k and the above rnc_lib working. So rnc_lib is basically a scaled down version of MRIP focusing on RNC files? And while I'm exploring these, what's the data number for Bubsy?

Try it out, and let us know what you think. Finding UP on the D-Pad is not really missed BTW. Also think in Zool 2 the jump up and climb are not seperate actions. Up on D-Pad and jump button did both. If you need to climb a wall just hold down the jump button, climbs at regular speed as if you were holding down up on the D-Pad.

I won't say the Zool 2 as a tune once it gets going isn't cool in it's own way, but it is a lot of noise. As I was playing RedimeNsioned I got to liking the original quick tune and "Get Ready". Glad that mod worked well when swapped in.

Been enjoying this hacked version of Zool 2, and the more I play, the more I really don't miss UP on the D-Pad. To climb up, rather than pulsing the jump button, just hold it down. Climbs just as fast as it did under D-pad up. * Option menu used up and down on D-pad, but luckily if you hit down on D-pad it will cycle back to the top if you need. -------------------- * Being how the jump button also helps Zool climb, I am really starting to wonder if climbing and jumping could be separated so that D-Pad UP could only be for climbing. They might be one in the same.

I kinda figured as much. I noticed the long string of text was overwriting text, so.. neat, got something new we can do. So on that was it an uncompressed area? (looks back at the picture and hex code) Yes it was! So cool. So the patch happening the bigging of the game gave an instruction superceeding anything said afterward? Awesome that something so simple can be modified like that. I use Hex Fiend on the Mac.

Sounds good, might run a test through those and see what does what of the list of tests you mentinoed previously. Maybe eventually we can have UP for climbing but not jumping. So how did you add the rom routine like you did? Looks like that was all placed in the start of the rom image near the universal header (that I had to paste in to replace the original encrypted header). And how much can be added there?

Been playing it with UP turned off. The game is still quite hard, but at least the controls are not as frustrating and the game is more fun to play. The big part that is less frustrating in the Swan Lake levels are the hanging corn cobs or whatever they are. Those use to be TERRIBLE with up direction because you are trying to climb up, which you do, and then you would fly up. Well ok, that still happens because the jump button is being used for climbing and jumping but at least now you don't have two things that can set it off. Ideally if there was a way UP could solely be for climbing, and the jump button for jumping, would be the best world scenario here. But not hopping around at other times till jump button is pressed... much nicer!

Glad to say thanks to collaboration, you can now play Zool 2 with no crazy jumps from up on the D-Pad. Can find that here: Up on D-Pad is entirely off on this version, however for climbing you can hit the jump button to shimmy up a wall. Overall, less chaotic.

Very nice, you showed how the rom was different after the game was unpacked, changed and repacked. Zool2B-NoUp.rom The game itself on testing, UP is completely turned off. However this does not leave the character without means. Now there is no pesky jumping by hitting anything that is close to up (diagonally up and what not too) which always happened at the wrong time. And if you need to CLIMB up, you can now shimmy up using the jump button. Very cool! Thank you! And I'm sure these people will be thankful too (from another thread about rom hacks...) Now for that item collection part. --------------------------------- Took a moment to check out how this was done. As it was said, the actual program file was not adjusted, much... RNC file 127 is the "PAUSED" graphic, and there was nothing there. And RNC files 128 to 131 I can't get ProPack to unpack. So effectly loaded all game in as it was, and then patch written beyond the program code. Cool.

That is about what I suspected so there we go. LOL! Got more to play with later knowing that. Ah yes, I do understand where you're coming from. After having played Zool I can see why there was a Zool2. After having played Zool2 I can see why there was not a Zool3. The layouts are something. From my perspective, I've mastered Bubsy, and I enjoy a good 30 minute zip through that game about once a month. I enjoyed Zool RedimeNsioned on the PS4, and got to thinking without that twitchy jump on the d-pad up position, and not needing to collect junk, would make a fun speedrunning game. Layouts are still ... blah, but can they be mastered for a speedrun? What I want to find out. And wow, all these years with Amiga players and you'd think there would be recorded Zool 2 speedruns, but no! Dannng... https://www.speedrun.com/zool2?h=Any-Jaguar&x=02qpo8jd-jlz5w15l.81wdn4oq

This has been fun. Been working to put in the NOP changes. When recompresed though the file was bit for bit the same size the compressed file was about 8 bits bigger than the original compressed file I was pasting back into the rom. Really wonder why propack sometimes does that, sometimes, not always, create a larger file through the source is the same size So all that to say, will try this startup hack soon. Good to know it cancelled the UP on the D-Pad. Was that for the jump ability, or for climbing too?

Roger that. Oh that's more than fine as you have the 68k know how. And I still want to try killing the up command... been itching to do that all day. In this game the character's jumping ability is triggered by the A button OR pushing up on the controller. This causes the player to jump around at the worst possible moment at times, and quite irratically. So there have been quite a few Zool players over the years that wished the up direction was NOT another option for jumping. But being able to climb up on walls would of course be nice. Will try out the example code when I get home... geez long day. LOL Probalby more than 100 items more than likely. The player is required to collect 99% of the "tokens" or items before the player can advance to the next level. Would be nice if that were considerably less. Quite a few thought the earlier Zool games were better because they didn't have the item collecting requirement, and I agree.

Ah so deleting the move.w line to free up eight bits of space? Not bad.

Thanks for confirming 126 is the program file. I was searching through these three to change the 99% items found to something much less (say 15%) for speedrunning. Funny part was, this file only mentions 99 as in "copyright 1994". Another file had four occurances of 99 in it, and the other file had like 30 occurances of "99". Tinkered with changing those values, no noticable difference. But the changed and recompressed files in those cases were bit for bit of the original at least when re-added to the rom image, so far say that experience. Appreciate the code patch idea because it's true what you say... Just have to see how pro-pack handles a recompressed file with one bit change. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes not. As for this... Very cool, and not visible in the compacted rom but in the uncompacted file RNC126 file we get this... So it's right there, the real question is, will this kill up on the D-Pad for just jumping, or would it also kill the up motion for climbing too? Either way, could be fun to try in a few hours after work.

So I got about as far as I could tonight. Wine (on my Mac) is not loading dasm68.exe, and won't run in dosbox which I use for dos utilities like ProPack. I have a older PC I will probably plug up for this very soon and run the disassembler. In the meantime, using the hex 33fc to find the "move.w" command since move was said to be a common command, I did a search for that on unpacked (from propack) files that I established were not graphics, music, map, or whatever files. Found three so far. RNC00024.RNC RNC00097.RNC RNC00126.RNC

Ok this is going to be fun to check out after work. You mentioned the team tap, does that require special coding, or do you code ports 1 and 2 standard and then had special coding from Atari for 3 and 4? As I've dove into Bubsy, Raiden a little bit, and now Zool been fun to see how Imagitec put these together. May have to peek at Dinodudes sometime just for fun. More hex values... mohahaha!! Really cool. Again, can't wait to check this out more in a few hours.

Oh this is good. I was still enjoying the information shown about the table of start addresses hadn't had a chance to try this. Will play with this more tonight. And see if I can rustle up an example of Jaguar controller code to get an idea of what that looks like.

Throwing my hat into the ring... Skyhammer = 160 Joust = 133,300