[Jimmy]

You could have mistaken the fact that the Spiderman 2: Enter Electro game had a battle with Super-Electro on the WTC and the game was changed after Sep. 11th.

[ReaperMan]

Jinroh, on Sep 6 2010, 12:13 PM, said:

I thought it was pretty awesome that it was originally going to have Asynchronous Multiplayer. It's a shame that it got cut. T_T I never did get a chance to Dukematch with anybody in DNA though.

Maybe there will be a GBA port that supports multiplayer someday.

[Jinroh]

ReaperMan, on Sep 7 2010, 01:33 AM, said:

Maybe there will be a GBA port that supports multiplayer someday.

Well it did have 4-player multiplayer, it just wasn't asynchronous. If you pulled out the GBA link cable from one of the 4 players it would halt the game. If it was Asynchronous it would let you pull out the cable and plug it in without interrupting the current game because all the players wouldn't rely on the same timer.

Captain Awesome said:

You could have mistaken the fact that the Spiderman 2: Enter Electro game had a battle with Super-Electro on the WTC and the game was changed after Sep. 11th.

Yeah that could have been it. I remember somewhere there was a battle cut for something 9/11 hehe.

EDIT:
After reading this article they had a full year extension to DNA after 9/11. One of the things that was added is multiplayer.

the article said:

Fortunately, last September saw a reevaluation of the project and the game was granted an extension on its development time. While we have had to wait almost a full extra year for the game, it looks to be worth the wait. Multiplayer has been one of the features implemented with the extra time and as we all know, there is nothing quite like blowing your roommate's head off.

EDIT EDIT:
I went into DNA with Visual Boy Advance and it's easy enough to rip the weapons. You can rip the OAM Tile Data for the weapons and the HUD easily. It'll take some more doing and reverse engineering to get other stuff like textures and level data. Time to break out the Hex Editor!

Here's the pistol though, reconstituted from the OAM tile data, I also made a Gold D-Eagle by adjusting the colours in the image editor.

EDIT EDIT EDIT:

Ok I went in with the hex editor and the interesting stuff was where I thought it would be, appended to the end of the game ROM. The first thing I found was a bunch of references to Duke and then follwed by other things in HexEdit and HexEdit1.png. This seems like texture data considering all the stuff that it lists. It lists 64 bytes (unless I counted wrong) after the texture string reference name. This may be colors for the texture or something. The texture data itself should be 64^2 unless they used some kind of compression. So that may be somewhere else.

Next in HexEdit2.png you can see references to CEIL and FLAT which are probably data for the level I would imagine that designate the behaviors of ceilings and flats maybe? Dunno. It may be ceiling and flat textures but it looks like it's a different set of info from the textures.

HexEdit3.png looks like it has some kind of regular pattern or something. So it may be texture data or level data not sure yet.

Next thing that we'll have to do is just start playing with values and seeing if things are affected by them. The fun of reverse engineering. That's probably all I'll do for tonight. ^^

HexEdit and HexEdit 1 are the top two. And 2 and 3 are the bottom two respectively.

[ReaperMan]

Jinroh, on Sep 6 2010, 03:27 PM, said:

EDIT EDIT:
I went into DNA with Visual Boy Advance and it's easy enough to rip the weapons. You can rip the OAM Tile Data for the weapons and the HUD easily. It'll take some more doing and reverse engineering to get other stuff like textures and level data. Time to break out the Hex Editor!

Here's the pistol though, reconstituted from the OAM tile data, I also made a Gold D-Eagle by adjusting the colours in the image editor.

Unfortunately you can't get the whole image of the weapon they used by doing that.

[Jinroh]

ReaperMan, on Sep 7 2010, 07:59 AM, said:

Unfortunately you can't get the whole image of the weapon they used by doing that.

Looks about right to me, I may have missed a piece, but all the pieces are in the OAM. You just have to freeze it when you fire to get the 2nd frame.

EDIT: Yeah it looks like I missed that little tiny 3 pixel tall curved piece at the bottom.

EDIT EDIT: I searched for "SCUM" in the Hex Editor and Found all the Dialog Strings.

***DISCLAIMER I'M NOT REALLY THE MANAGING DIRECTOR!! JUST FOR FUN!

It's a little messed up since I didn't map out how it maps the bytes but still getting there.

[ReaperMan]

Are you going to try ripping some of the wall textures?

[Jinroh]

A fun little vid I made of text hacking.
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=OjJGP6Q6UY4

I'm consolidating all my info into an editing document. Stay tuned. I'm going to attempt to find the image data today, I've got a good bit of downtime to work on it so we'll see. ^^

[Nacho]

If you happen to somehow find a way to gain access to things like wall textures or enemy sprites give me a shout! I've been ribbing the weapons and hud but I don't know much about hacking into things so I don't know how I'd get a hold of the enemies and such.

[Jinroh]

Yeah I'll let you know.

It's really tough because we don't know any of the file formats or anything. We can only assume things based on the GBA and how it works. I traced the General Graves image on the message boxes from it's position in VRAM and traced that with the hex editor back to where it's stored in the ROM. So now I know the general location of where the Sprites/Textures/Etc are held. We can also assume, most of the sprites/textures are going to be 64x64 and be 0-255 values that refer to the global palette. Next I'm just gonna write a progrum to rip a bunch of data and dump it to a file so we can see the raw image data and take note of it's location in the file so we know where and when they start. Then I'll just have to find all the appropriate palettes in memory and then apply them. ^^

[ReaperMan]

Jinroh, your so awesome for doing this.

[Jinroh]

No problem. ^^ I'll start and probably finish writing the program tomorrow. ^^ I have some work stuff to finish up tonight, so I'll get started tomorrow.

So many people do a lot for the Duke Community and I enjoy their works and it's about time I gave something back. It's fun too so I enjoy the challenge. ^o^ If I'm not too busy with work and once I figure out where everything is I'll write a utility to make it easier to edit too.

[ReaperMan]

So Jinroh, how much progress have you made on finding the textures?

[Jinroh]

Hey guys!

I got the program written in it's first attempt. Basically it's still a shot in the dark. So the results are not very good, but still there were some interesting things pulled out from the .GBA file.

Here are the highlights. You can see some of the textures and mip-maps in there, along with the font information.


I'll keep researching and sooner or later my tool will be able to rip out the data. ^^ I know even more where to look and I'm going to start with the textures first since they've given the best results.

Stay tuned!

[ReaperMan]

It looks like your making good progress

[Jinroh]

Yeah it's coming along. ^^ Hopefully sooner rather than later we'll have a working ripper.

The most striking graphic there, is the circular grate. That's the destroyable texture they have over the air vents in the alien ship levels.

Hacking Duke Advance is a lot tougher than say hacking Doom for the GBA. Doom for the GBA is a port of the Atari Jaguar version and uses an IWAD file. Or at least most of one if I recall. Anyway, in hacking that, it's easy to find what you're looking for because you can just look for the IWAD header and start parsing the WAD file from there.

Easy.

Here it's a lot harder, because it's all unknown, so I have to play detective. :3 It's fun though I'm enjoying it and when I'm done we'll all be ripping and editing Duke Nukem Advance. ^^ It'll be nice when we can mod that along with Duke 3D. ^o^

[ReaperMan]

Jinroh, on Sep 8 2010, 07:01 PM, said:

The most striking graphic there, is the circular grate. That's the destroyable texture they have over the air vents in the alien ship levels.

Yeah that one turned out nicely, other then the fact its not in color and its not complete.

[Jinroh]

ReaperMan, on Sep 9 2010, 06:08 AM, said:

Yeah that one turned out nicely, other then the fact its not in color and its not complete.

There. :3


Once I tweak it a little bit the results should be better. If you look below the circular grate and use your imagination a bit you'll see that, that is the broken grate texture. The texture with the horizontal lines is the Duke3D style grate and right below that is the broken texture for that one too.

I've added a lot to the memory map layout in my hacking document. My next attempt will be much more precise and more successfull in terms of ripping good data. I know where at lot more things are now.