The Great Rare Fundraiser : Conker's BFD and Perfect Dark Betas

I bet there are, at least, some multiplayer modes not included in the final release.

 

Just search in RAM for 200, it should find year 2000 (well unless it's 1999).

In PD 1.1 it's about 003D7C87 which is Apr 6 2000 15:05:01. Oddly 1.0 says same date. I'll double check but I think that's date.

 

Last couple of weeks so many Rare videos of unreleased games and now leaked prototypes. Wonder whats going on?

 

Rare's just been a hot subject this year (which is great). More and more Rare employees are leaving starting new companies and doing interviews, plus with Rare barely resembling the company we fondly remember maybe the risks involved in info/video/data spilling out have lessened. Rare always liked to keep to itself in terms of unreleased work, so it seems like former employees and the like are becoming less and less tight lipped.

 

What tool do you recommend?

 

I just use nemu to open it, and then can text search in there. You could also use PJ64 and dump the save state, use byteswap.exe to remove header. I've also use EmuCheat before ok. Easiest is nemu.

 

Unfortunately the build seems to just be a couple of days before the final PAL build. That said, it still does have that debug menu. Build date is Apr 26 2000, vs Apr 28 2000 for the final.

 

Oh damn it's after the NTSC build? That's still cool it has MCM enabled, for sure, but it doesn't sound very promising for beta levels and things alas. It's probably the final Debug build they did, and the release one is probably the one that went to cart. I guess they built debug in case things go wrong, perhaps it has some sort of slightly better "things crashed, show some info".

 

Yeah, the most interesting will be whatever the developers left in the game. Even with options disabled in the MCM, it is still possible that they exist somehow. Still, you won't see many other Perfect Dark things come up for release, so it'll still happen in the future. People who are interested should send me a PM with what they are willing to send, so I can figure out how I want to do it.

 

If you would like it supported in the editor you could search for the following with a hex editor:

• First compressed bank: search for the hex value "1173". It should be right after some ASM, so you'll have a few zeroes and a 03E00008 within 0x10 before it. That address is one of two compressed files we'd use to edit data.
  (Actually, the file itself would be more useful since offsets will be different.)
• Second compressed bank: This one is a bit trcky to find outside of ASM. I'd say look for the hex "117303" from the beginning of the ROM, and it will be the first hit that's aligned to an address ending in '0'. That's the second bank, containing mostly system variables if I'm not mistaken.
• Compressed TLB segment: It's a table with many compressed files that are loaded and set via TLB. Any actual code differences would lie in this table. Search for the hex values "00030007 000F001F 003F007F 00FF01FF 03FF07FF 0FFF1FFF 3FFF7FFF FFFF0000", which is part of the decompressor just before it. The value 1-2 lines below it, probably something like 0x6EC, is the start of the table.
• Filelist: Search for the string "bgdata/". It should be in the last quarter of ROM. From there, scroll backward through that table of numbers until you hit an entry that's 00000000. It should be about 0x2000 before it, probably less. That address is for the filetable, assigning all the filenames to all the objects and allowing you to look them up again.

Oh, I should warn you there's the possibility that the thing still suffers the save bug that can render it unplayable unless you reformat or delete the save file.

You know, even in the final cut there's a remarkable amount of beta stuff. Besides older versions of the text files and a debug stage, there's also all the registers and most of the code for the debug features and all the GB IO support and error messages for the camera. I think we had the camera moving to fixed positions by playing with registers, but without the controller support it wasn't really feasible to do anything interesting.

 

Sent a few PMs regarding releasing this thing. In the meantime, Im having a trusted friend check it out on a full n64 dev setup

 

Nice find, curious though if there is a way to get the game to run in 60hz, cause rare was one of few companies to actually optimize their pal release.

 

PAL Perfect Dark runs in 50hz but is optimized to full speed and has a slightly higher frame rate than the NTSC version.

 

You could probably throw the VI table index into the NTSC range, since the buffers would be larger, not smaller. Oh, and you'd have to unhook the permanent loop when it checks the TV mode since Rare's games didn't exactly handle that condition. There's an audio change too, right, or is that based on clock rate? Clock rate can be tampered with by setting the second word in the ROM header.

 

IF anyone is interested in this :http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=35&threadid=87157

 

No updates, but I havent been pushing hard with the storm and work being what it is.

 

any news??

 

This is still ongoing. Ive had a few people promise me some cash, then they stop responding, which is never fun.

 

Never knew this is maybe seeing a release (if the goal is met) ill send u a pm borman (why is there so many goodies on ag?)

 

I havent been pushing hard since there was too much going on. Still waiting on the stuff for Made Man, been a bit since Ive heard from the guy again :\ Holidays though so I gave the benefit of the doubt.