So I recently acquired a review copy of Fable II. It appears to be identical to the retail version, however the xex is not exactly the same. It has the same amount of bytes, but when I compare them both in HxD there are numerous differences. That implies that there's a hidden debug menu or something similar, right? As far as I can tell, there is no way to activate it in game. The only other thing I can think of is maybe the review copy is PAL so the hex vales differ from my NTSC copy. But it acknowledges my preexisting NTSC save files, so maybe not. Anyone have any ideas?
Even still, a review copy would be debug encoded, which of course would be different. Really, you just have to play around and hope something is left in there.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by debug encoded. If any debug menus still exist, I'm not sure what else to do to activate it. The retail game had files on the disc that implied it had some sort of debugging tools leftover, so I thought the differences in the review copy's xex had something to do with enabling that. It looks like that's not the case.
Just did. There are still differences in the beginning, which I'm assuming has something to do with it being debug encoded as Borman mentioned. Just by skimming through it, it appears to be slightly off (string b3980 in the review xex appears as b4980 in the retail xex). I found what appears to be text used for debugging purposes in both the retail and review xex, but I see no obvious way of enabling any sort of menu. There is also some leftover text mentioning the E3 demo, so maybe it's possible to access the E3 data left on the disc?
finding debug interface components in retail games is common- I think the first game i ran across this in was wipeout for psx/pc where what appears to be a visual track editor's resources are embedded in the game still, yet the actual code for the debug features has been removed. I usually only deal with hacking around on wipeout series games, and another example that amuses me highly is the pre-release Data/XML/songlist.xml with songs that apparently someone liked enough to consider when they were demoing/developing the game, and the partially complete Maya file Data/Ships/Zone_01/shipwreck.mb someone at SL forgot to remove when they compiled the final retail wad files that both appear in all versions of Wipeout Pure except the Greatest Hits release where the filesystem was cleaned up a little. Hell, Gundam versus Gundam Zeta and DX for 246 arcade platform still have both direct copies of files from the Naomi versions of FvZ and what appears to be a gameshow demo. poor cleanup is rampant among game developers. Why bother if the code's not there and the media's probably of no use without it?
It's not poor cleanup so much as it is smart development. If you don't want a feature, you no-op it out. But you don't delete code if you don't have to. Something you might think is unused, just might have something else, somewhere, depending on it. Removing it would probably be OK, but has an extremely small chance of breaking something. Leaving it harms nothing. So you leave it.
Same thing happened to me as well when working on FEZ. The .xex's were different files, but the XDK is rejecting the files I resigned for it and I need to figure this out, it's one of the last few things I need to complete the tutorials. I'm probably going to make a Disc version of FEZ then send it to DVD EMU & IMGBURN.
