Sylverant PSO Patcher 2.0 Released!

[BlueCrab]

Tonight, I have released version 2.0 of the Sylverant PSO Patcher. Sylverant PSO Patcher is a boot disc that will automatically detect and patch (in memory, of course) GD-ROM versions of PSO to connect to the Sylverant PSO Server. This new version is basically a complete rewrite and has a few bugfixes and new features, detailed below:

• Added support for patching the hostname in and booting the PSO Network Trial Edition.
• Added support for patching in the music for the Palace and Spaceship stages into the main bgm table. This way, quests that use these stages in non-battle mode (Prospective Horizons on Altimira) can use the correct background music. This patch is optional. When you see the note about pressing Start for all patches or A for not patching the music, this is what is being referred to.
• Fixed booting of many import games that would not boot with the older version. This version still won’t boot Windows CE-based games, but it hopefully will work with just about any other game you throw at it, if you choose to use it as an import boot disc.
• Finally, and most importantly, this release fixes the issues with battle mode timing out immediately on all Dreamcast versions when using the patcher. No, there was never any bugs in the server with regard to this, which is why it worked for people that used PALv2 and didn’t use the patcher at all.

Due to that last fixed issue, it is recommended that all users update to the new patcher if they ever intend to play in Battle mode.

You can find the downloads on the Downloads page on the Google Code project. As with previous versions, there are downloads for the source code, plain files, and a self-booting CDI image.

[PH3NOM]

Cool stuff BlueCrab! Thanks

When I get some time, I will take a look at the code. It will be interesting to see how to boot commercial binaries ( even if only from the GD-Rom )
It would be cool to be able to boot GD-Roms from DCMC

[BlueCrab]

Cool stuff BlueCrab! Thanks

When I get some time, I will take a look at the code. It will be interesting to see how to boot commercial binaries ( even if only from the GD-Rom )
It would be cool to be able to boot GD-Roms from DCMC

It isn't particularly hard to boot a GD-Rom, but be forewarned that some really do not like the state of the machine being anything other than what it would be after the BIOS passes off control. PSO is extremely picky and exhibits some very strange bugs if you're not extremely careful with things, for instance (some of which are pretty hard to notice).

The general way to get things to boot is actually extremely easy. Basically, make sure the system is in a sane state, load IP.BIN and 1ST_READ.BIN from the disc to the correct locations in RAM (0xac008000 and 0xac010000 respectively) and jump to 0xac00b800. The problem mainly revolves around the part of making sure the system is in a sane state. Hint: there's a reason that this particular program doesn't use KOS -- it is much easier to maintain the sane state from the start than to get back to it.

Also, this doesn't seem to work for Windows CE-based games, so I'm sure I still have something a bit off in the process.

[PH3NOM]

Interesting stuff, thanks for the info! What would be the best approach to implement in kos?

[BlueCrab]

Interesting stuff, thanks for the info! What would be the best approach to implement in kos?

Well, versions 1.0-1.2 of the patcher actually do use KOS. You can look to v1.2 for clues about getting a good number of games to work with something that still uses KOS.

As to how to get things back to a state that the rest of the games require, I couldn't even begin to speculate, unfortunately. I got tired of even trying... Tired enough to just rewrite the code not to use KOS in the first place.

[PH3NOM]

That's what I figured

So where did you host version 1.0-1.2? The download page you linked to, I only see the version 2.0?

[BlueCrab]

They're on the same page. You just have to pick All Downloads in the search box and hit the search button.

It is a stupid UI, but there's not anything I can do about that.

[Neoblast]

What's odd about pso is that those "bugs", I think some of those might be intentional on sonic team's end are even stored in the saved game.

As in not being able to lock on targets using techniques or a certain type of weapons, for example.

Planet Ring is not picky at all lol...

[BlueCrab]

Oh, I certainly wouldn't doubt that some of the bugs were intentional and due to the game trying to detect if you were tampering with it. v1.0 of the patcher had lots of fun bugs (like how you could run through the pillar in the hunter's guild, for instance) because I wasn't booting it correctly.

[Neoblast]

Oh, I certainly wouldn't doubt that some of the bugs were intentional and due to the game trying to detect if you were tampering with it. v1.0 of the patcher had lots of fun bugs (like how you could run through the pillar in the hunter's guild, for instance) because I wasn't booting it correctly.

I remember reading somwhere that the game made checks in memory from time to time to check if it was being altered and things like that, like the anti-game shark protection thingie. Also, the very special security in the pal v2 version, that made it unrippable until not so long ago.

Sonic Team sure knew how to protecto what they wanted, shame they underestimated codebreaker and the hackers in that time...