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Messages - rari_teh

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Game Boy / New tool to create, modify and remove GBX footers
« on: December 12, 2021, 03:10:26 PM »
As I assume most of you are aware, GBX is a footered Game Boy ROM format created by taizou to improve emulator support for unlicensed games, as many of those have purposefully incorrect metadata in their internal headers. As far as I know, until now, the only tools to edit these footers were taizou’s own GBXTool, which is a CLI Python script, and a good old hex editor. After a night of coding and debugging and three releases that should’ve been one, I’ve made GBXBuilder, which aims to be the easiest and most practical alternative without sacrificing functionality. You can get it on my GitHub. It was a really fun project to tackle, and I hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed making it =)

A word of warning: this is my first Visual Basic project and programming is merely my hobby; while I do think I’ve managed to hunt down all the bugs, please do advise if you find something or if you have any feature suggestions.

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Game Boy / Re: The School Fighter patch somebody asked for before the forum went down
« on: November 29, 2021, 08:29:09 AM »
@Ankos I checked the linked artist’s webpage with so much hope, but sadly it’s a barren wasteland of unarchived images… I’m glad that the Archive seems to have fixed this not-fetching-images problem over the years, but it’s sad it was so late =(

On an unrelated note, elfor sent me a DM on the Romhacking.net forums that was very similar to their post here but also included a link to what seems to be the lost original School Fighter AP fix by takashi/Low End. Even though both fixes should practically do the same thing, I’ve also uploaded it to Yandex.Disk because I suspect his implementation would be more useful to someone looking to reverse-engineer the copy protection chip (I just removed the loops while he changed the expected value for the variables – another less important difference is that in one instance he seems to have edited the code before calling the check subroutine while I edited the subroutine itself).

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Game Boy / Re: The School Fighter patch somebody asked for before the forum went down
« on: November 28, 2021, 07:21:06 AM »
@Ankos: That’s very interesting! I wonder if anything of substance was changed between these revisions.

I’d never seen that art page before, what a delight! I’m a sucker for oldschool animesque, it’s a pity that not all images were archived. The GBA girl looks a lot like a moe gijinka version of the console to my eyes; while I know that this trend already existed in Japan in the early 2000s, I wonder if it had gained enough traction to spill over to other places in East Asia by the time this drawing was made.

@elfor: I’ve just taken a look at both these games, but sadly, I only have a less-than-basic understanding of Assembly, to put it mildly. Without Low End’s notes, there’s no way in hell I’d have been able to figure out School Fighter’s copy protection. That being said, Binary Monster seems to have a similar implementation and I might be able to work it out in a night or two using the other game as a very rough guide – I’ll probably work on it when I have the time if nobody beats me to it. The way Binary Monster 2 works, however, looks completely alien to me and I can’t even figure what the debugger is trying to say.

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Game Boy / Re: The School Fighter patch somebody asked for before the forum went down
« on: November 27, 2021, 04:37:24 AM »
Correct me if I’m wrong, but given that Gowin claimed that GS-10 was released in January 2000, isn’t it possible that the PCB is marked 1999 because it was designed (or maybe even printed) late that year, with the carts only hitting the market in January?

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Game Boy / Re: The School Fighter patch somebody asked for before the forum went down
« on: November 25, 2021, 11:30:17 PM »
@Ankos: If I’m right, that’s exactly it – and yeah, I agree that there’s a good chance that some GS-14 assets live on under that hypothesis. Normally I’d daydream about a proto cart surfacing one day, solving the mystery and giving a bit more credence to my conjecture, but sadly bootleg protos seem to be rarer than the teeth of the hen

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Game Boy / Re: The School Fighter patch somebody asked for before the forum went down
« on: November 25, 2021, 02:29:03 PM »
@Ankos: I suspected it had been you because I remembered your avatar, but I wasn’t sure and I also didn’t know how to tag people here; I’m not very used to SMF-based forums. Hope you’re enjoying the game! =)

WRT the current discussion on production numbers: this probably doesn’t mean much since it’s not the same group at all, but this practice of assigning product codes for the projects in the order they started instead of the order of release is definitely not unheard of – I know (or at the very least assume) that Bit Corp did it that way with their Gamate games. When they were bought by UMC, they made a 4-in-1 pack-in cart for the Gamate that had an internal list of all the games they had released for the system. All the earlier gaps in that list are games that never surfaced and were probably never released (e.g. C1010 and C1020), but almost all of the later gaps are games that we know did get a release (e.g. all gaps after C1036 including the C1045–C1053 range).

Of course, this is all conjecture stemming from that internal list and what little we know about the games that got dumped, and is naturally only very tenuously connected to the matter at hand here, but hopefully it is at least a bit interesting.

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Game Boy / The School Fighter patch somebody asked for before the forum went down
« on: November 23, 2021, 07:44:53 AM »
Yesterday, I stumbled upon a post here, I forget by whom, that was asking for this anti-piracy bypass patch for Gowin’s School Fighter for the Game Boy Color. The patch was fairly well-documented, the game looked interesting and I was looking for a source of procrastination, so I took the time to recreate it. An hour and an RSI later, I managed to play the game through, patching the undocumented anti-piracy checks as they were triggered. While I’m fairly certain that no checks remain, I can’t fully guarantee that I didn’t miss a secret area or something of that effect that also triggers an AP check. As I tried to register an account here to post the patch, I mistyped the security question and the server crashed while trying to serve me a second captcha… oops??? (I know that was probably just a coincidence, but just in case, my bad *-*) Anyway, here’s the link to the patched ROM.

Also, I must say, gotta give it to Gowin when it comes down to character design. Even if the gameplay isn’t that good, every single character in the game is so captivating and has so much personality it’s a shame that this game doesn’t seem to have any sort of following.

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