Some of you will remind me from my thread about Mario 64 (and basically, Nintendo first-party) sequence format.
This is just to let you guys know that I finished my Super Mario 64 hack, called "The Missing Stars". It's the first ever complete Mario 64 hack and features, besides new levels, tons of custom music, including an original composition of mine.
Download it here:
http://sites.google.com/site/messiaen64/themissingstars
edited 6:02 PM EDT May 5, 2009
This hack uses extended memory, so I guess it won't work on a real N64 :(.
It's probably a matter of misalignment somewhere. I noticed the extender tool mentioned something about a future version doing 16-byte alignment, that might be required for ROM access via DMA (though iirc it was 8 bytes).
edited 9:31 PM EDT May 5, 2009
Have you tried running a "clean" extended ROM on your N64 just to see if the same problem happens? Since there is an open-source ROM Extender tool, I could try word aligning the data just to check if that would work.
Sure enough, if I have it round the "new offsets" up to the next 16 bytes it works, here's my diff. I don't know if this is a particularly safe way to handle it, though, as I don't take into account the actual file sizes, so they might overlap. I'm just guessing here.
edited 9:05 AM EDT May 6, 2009
Edit: Ops, you edited your post after mine :). I don't know exactly what you modified, but what I was about to do is edit the tables.c file and change offsets like 0x00b1f8b5 to 0x00b1f8b4. There's a 32k space (if I remember correctly) space between the uncompressed files moved to the upper part of the ROM, so it's safe to displace them a few bytes.
edited 9:22 AM EDT May 6, 2009
0x00b1f8b4 won't work if I understand the issue correctly, you'll want 0x00b1f8b0 likely. And I'd personally round up instead of down, to 0xb1f8c0 (0xb1f8b8 might work, too, but I didn't test 8-byte alignment). That way you're consuming your own padding, rather than that of the previous file.
[edit]
Oh, man, I've known about Toad's Tool for a while, but I just got the pun. Awesome.
edited 10:37 AM EDT May 6, 2009
edited 2:21 PM EDT May 6, 2009
anyway, nothing inherently wrong with mess-around hacks, fun for about 5 - 10 minutes, but your first post made it sound more promising than that. :(
well, it's good to see these things are possible. hope someone really capitalises on it.
Hope I didn't miss much of it.
As for custom music, I have done the possible with the limited tools I wrote by cracking myself the music format. There's one original song (the night "town" music) which I think turned out quite well, but I didn't want to write more because it would be hard to make them sound good without hours and hours of work and I was too busy trying to solve dozens of small problems everywhere.
Mastery: You are using an inadequate video plug-in (there's a reason a readme.txt file is included!). I'm not sure what is going on in the end, I couldn't reproduce whatever bug you had there.
Edit: About the camera: the main problem of the camera is that the original Mario 64 camera is broken. It only works because there are tons of hardcoded camera positions for each level, and I (or anyone else) couldn't yet get rid of this.
edited 9:24 PM EDT May 12, 2009
Here is the save state:
M64-TheMissingStars.pj.zip
About the camera, the hard coded camera positions isn't really the nuisance, but rather that you're restricted from angling the camera into logical positions, and that it tends to go in the opposite direction of what'd seem logical to be at.
edited 10:48 PM EDT May 12, 2009
Mastery: that's strange, the grass texture coordinates look messed up, and the only plug-in with this problem (from the ones I've tested) is Jabo's 1.5.2. The camera angle limitations are also part of hardcoded (on a level basis) stuff. There are dozens of different functions affecting the camera coordinates at once, so it's really hard to understand it and thus overcome these problems.
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?zhqojiu3tgy
Nemu is the only emulator that seems to care about the alignment, since it wouldn't run the extended ROM before and now it works perfectly. That's great, because I had to resort to PJ 1.4 debugger (ugh) to correct some bugs and now I can use Nemu 64.
Now let's see if it works on real hardware. If so, I want PICS :). Patch it to the normal (non-aligned) output of the extender.
Also, for those interested or merely curious about it, here is pretty much all source code for the assembly/C hacks used:
http://sites.google.com/site/messiaen64/themissingstars/download/missing_stars_src.zip?attredirects=0
(Warning: I'm an amateur programmer!)
I guess if I can correct some of the messed up display lists maybe it can work reasonably. I will try doing some tweaks in the RSP commands of the 'basic objects' and producing a new patch.
Now would be a good time to try some low level video plugins :P.
Edit: Yep, the Z64 plugin seem accurate enough to reproduce most of the graphical glitches, I'll see what I can do.
edited 5:53 PM EDT May 17, 2009
http://desktop64.homeip.net:8086/newextender-0.03.tar.gz
Mario 64 "Pong":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBjUml6xPQo
It's basically a pong game which exploits the Print
functions from the game. Features a primitive computer AI with progressive levels of difficulty and even some sounds :P.
Crappy source at http://sites.google.com/site/messiaen64/pong_of_death
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-QleEpFqDo&feature=channel_video_title