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| Nicholas Steel |
Posted on 19-05-01, 06:09 (revision 3)
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Post: #186 of 426
Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 281 days Last view: 8 days |
It turns out the improvements to load times are a result of a system firmware update for the Switch console. It allows games to temporarily overclock the hardware, and that the 2 games I mentioned (Mario Odyssey, Zelda: BotW) are utilizing the mechanic during loading screens. Games need to be patched to take advantage of the overclocking function. AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64 |
| Broseph |
Posted on 19-05-03, 00:34 (revision 4)
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 Post: #79 of 166 Since: 10-29-18 Last post: 1344 days Last view: 1020 days |
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia - NDS. Played on the libretro DeSmuME - 3069551. Btw big thanks to bearoso for all his work on it.  Bad Ending run    Good Ending     Didn't had to look up any guides to get the good ending. I mean, honestly it's pretty easy to figure out, they even show you the missing villagers you didn't rescue and based on that you can guess where they're hidden. Whereas something like SOTN was more cryptic if you didn't already know. Game is pretty great. Last Iga-vania unfortunately, but it's a pretty good note to end with. Also the portraits artwork style is much better than the anime ripoff we got with the first two NDs 'vania imo. More reminiscent of SOTN's style. Speaking of iga Bloodstained is getting a June 18 release. edit: Also WarioWare: Touched!   If you're emulating the game with DeSmuME, make sure you select the interpreter core not the JIT one, otherwise it will crash when you attempt to begin the game. |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-05-04, 22:29 (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
 Post: #291 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 16 days Last view: 1 day |
Solitaire. Yes, I'm not joking. Due to the endless daily blackouts over here, the only videogame I can reliably play is Solitaire on my cellphone. Concretely, the BREW port of Solitaire Deluxe on my good ol' RAZR VE20, which was released almost a decade ago. Animations can be kinda laggy at times (don't know if to blame the BUGGYBUGGYBUGGY Motorola firmware, or GOSUB60's BREW/C++ code, as other games on this cellphone rarely lag, but other features of said firmware do, very noticeably. But I digress...), but you get a bunch of varieties that will get you entertained for as long as your battery holds up. Or pissed off, if you decide to play modes like Golf in non-Turbo mode (where kings end card runs, which means you can't play aces or queens on top of those... which leads to basically unwinnable-by-design games!). [software preservation rant] Too bad noone ever bothered cracking Qualcomm's BREW mild layers of DRM (compared with whatever Apple is now using on their iDevices, for example), which means: 1) On most firmwares, filesystem access is blocked to some or all places (my VE20 is the former case), which means you can't dump your own games/apps! 2) An option is using some VERY EXPENSIVE service apps to perform a full memory dump of your phone storage area. Except when your OEM decided to block that too! (Motorola didn't used to do that except for Verizon firmwares. Verizon never sold the VE20, but Motorola locked out that backdoor on the VE20 firmware) Hello undumpable ROMs~ 3) Even if you manage to dump your game/app (no matter how you achieve your goal), good luck getting any use of your backup. BREW app binaries (.mod files) target your phone architecture (which is ALWAYS some flavor of ARM, depending on your specific Qualcomm chipset). There are phone SIMULATORS (provided either by Qualcomm or your phone OEM as part of BREW SDKs), but they're not EMULATORS of any kind (the simulators are x86 binaries and they only run x86 .mod binaries -a specific target on the SDK-; if you need to do native ARM debugging you're supposed to do that on the target device, using a debug-enabled BREW firmware). Even uploading those to an actual phone involves actual usage of more restricted Qualcomm tools, and the generation of a device-specific signature (a .sig file which includes your phone ESN/MEID/IMEI) signed by either Qualcomm or your carrier: back when BREW was a thing, each time you bought an app from your carrier mobile app store, their backends would automatically generate said signature for you... and this is why if you swapped phones, the only way to move your apps from a phone to another (assuming the app/game was available for your new phone as each binary was device-specific: a Motorola V3m .mod would not run on a LG MX500, despite both phones being based off the same QC MSM6500 chipset!) involved calling your carrier to transfer your app licenses (something which most non-USAian carriers never ever did, including Movilnet: your only option was to purchase again your apps, and hope your phone never breaks/gets stolen/have its firmware updated). For software developers, you could get your signatures directly from Qualcomm... at $4 a pop (minimum purchase: $400 for 100 signatures, good for one year!). OUCH! tl;dr: Thought the iDevices were horrible for software preservation? No, Qualcomm had something TEN TIMES WORSE well before the first iPhone was in the drawing board! Consider each and every BREW game/application ever made lost FOREVER thanks to Qualcomm's (and carriers) greed, including my beloved copy of Solitaire Deluxe :/ Dunno if Mobile Deluxe ever published a J2ME port (which thankfully are MUCH easier to dump and preserve, at the cost of lower performance because Java), but the game still survives on modern smartdevices... albeit with ads (and most likely spyware and some form of microtransactions, just like any good cellphone game nowadays) [/software preservation rant] Speaking about solitaire videogames, the original Windows version has just been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame, where it joins other revolutionary videogames that represent significant landmarks of history, like Doom, WoW, and of course, Tetris (which every cellphone owner -dumb or smart- should have installed on their devices). Laugh all if you want, but any serious PC Master Race gamer has played good ol SOL.EXE at least a few dozen times in his/her lifetimes (in fact it was one of my first videogames ever, at least on PCs). To celebrate this, I decided to play, for the first time ever in my life, the Windows 7 version of Solitaire. First things first: the executable is no longer called SOL.exe, but Solitaire.exe. And it now requires a video card with some sort of 3D acceleration, because Microsoft deciced it was a GREAT idea to rebuild it as a D3D9 game! (it now has sounds over DirectSound, and it even links to an XInput DLL, maybe this thing can be played with a Xbox pad?). All of this for those shiny new card designs (face cards designs are really weird, I can't get used to them), silly animations and sound effects (which thankfully can be disabled), not very useful hints, and the ability to detect unwinnable game situations (which often fails). Oh, and they ruined the iconic game win animation show: the cards just "fall down" from their decks, to "shatter" at the bottom of the display. This is... quite stupid. But hey, under the heavy glossy paint coatings, it's still good ol' Klondike under the hood, and you will get hooked in no time anyway - that's Solitaire for you :) Before you ask: fuck FreeCell (I suck big time at that game), and to hell with Spider (hated it when it was first introduced at Windows Me, and still hate it) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| Vladiskov is missing |
Posted on 19-05-10, 20:15
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 Post: #7 of 13 Since: 04-30-19 Last post: 1730 days Last view: 1730 days |
Posted by tomman on the Gaming preservation, hows the scene of java powered applets on old phones that soported it? i remember playing an promotional port of age of empires 3 on an old sony-ericsson, some sort of gta I clone, and some small metroidvanias <3 ------------------------------------------------- Porn makes everything better, even art. |
| Duck Penis |
Posted on 19-05-10, 20:30
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #266 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1546 days Last view: 1544 days |
Posted by Vladiskovwashere You can download such games from torrent websites, so I imagine our #1 modern preservation enthusiasts have got that problem solved. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-05-11, 00:07
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Dinosaur
Post: #313 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 16 days Last view: 1 day |
AFAIK there is no preservation project aimed at cellphone games of ANY era, much less from the pre-iPhone/Android age. Then there is the issue that, just like BREW, J2ME games were mostly phone-specific. If you stick to the very basic stuff, you can achieve a universal MIDlet... but as soon as you want to use the action buttons of your phone, display sizes (and extended canvas modes: do you want to hide EVERYTHING, even the status bar? That's very OEM-dependant!), among other things, you need model/manufacturer-specific targets. For example, years ago I downloaded a pirate version of Sega Puzzle Pack (the MIDlet said "BiNPDA", which it seems it was a warez group for the cellphone "scene"). Apparently it was for some Nokia or Sony-Ericcson model, as the both the input and canvas size were completely screwed up on my Motorola V9x. There were tools you could use to work around these incompatibilities (a well-known one was Java Adapter for Mobile, which hacked the MIDlets to modify keycodes and inject some extra Java classes to deal with the canvas modes), but even then the results were very YMMV (in my case the softbutton labels were partially off-bounds, rendering those unreadable) Noone really cared about cellphone games in the early dumbphone era. Just imagine all those sophisticated Japanese i-mode games that are now lost forever because there simply was no cellphone app piracy scene in Japan (or even a homebrew scene, for that matter). Western J2ME was a low-hanging fruit, but even then noone gave a damn :/ At least I managed to archive the two games I bought for my V9x (Gameloft's Block Breaker Deluxe 2, Glu/Sony LocoRoco Hi) way back when Movistar ran their own local appstore for dumbphones: the download links were completely unprotected; all you needed was to know the exact URL for your game, and your favorite download tool would do the rest (WTF Telefonica?!). In the case of Motorola phones, filesystem access was trivial, allowing me to dump the Opera Mobile cache... where the links were waiting for you on a cached HTML file :) But then, those wouldn't work properly on any other phone than a V9(x), mainly due to the different keycodes (the games will run, but you will be unable to properly interact with the menus, much less to play a game!). If you were curious: No, you couldn't simply copy the .JAR from your filesystem: those Moto phones DID protected OTA-downloaded MIDlets with some unknown DRM that turned those into encrypted .DMJ files that would be tied to your IMEI (and the volume ID of your SD card, if you choose to store your apps there... which meant that if you upgraded the storage on your phone, you HAD to download your apps again!). MIDlets installed over Bluetooth or USB weren't protected by this anticonsumer bullshittery. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| Duck Penis |
Posted on 19-05-11, 01:27 (revision 1)
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #267 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1546 days Last view: 1544 days |
Posted by tomman They still seem to be preserved. Then there is the issue that, just like BREW, J2ME games were mostly phone-specific. Does that hurt preservation? It seems like complaining that you have all the SNES ROMs but no emulator. You're in no hurry to perfect that adapter, as long as you have what else it takes. Gameloft's Block Breaker Deluxe 2, Glu/Sony LocoRoco Hi Those were easy to find. I'm not sure I can post links, but a quick google search for "locoroco hi" download gives you appropriate results. There's also (poorly seeded) torrents with lots of games and no organization. Try btdig, torrentz2, and rutracker/tparse. I suppose it's free to chuck a few dozen info hashes into the client and wait to see if anyone starts to download. Also, for archaic stuff, you can try archaic file sharing networks. I was able to find an user sharing just shy of 4000 .jar files, of which most (all?) seemed to be mobile games. As for the Japanese games, have you tried their file-sharing networks? They work like the old ones ("share entire downloads dir") and not like torrents ("pls seed"), right? If you wished to create such a project, you have a golden opportunity with your unique regulatory situation and all. But it seems like it's all there, if not very well organized. On the other hand, file-sharing networks fade fast, so it might be a good idea to obsessively download everything and dump it somewhere, like the Internet Archive. EDIT: As for i-mode, I found this: https://assemblergames.com/threads/project-i-mode-ezweb-to-preserve-the-dying-unpreservable.56933/ There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| Vladiskov is missing |
Posted on 19-05-11, 23:34
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Post: #8 of 13 Since: 04-30-19 Last post: 1730 days Last view: 1730 days |
Posted by sureanem yeah, while regulations are LAX here in memezuela, our internet structure is basically an stone connected to an paper satellite, with cords instead of wires... and an monkey controlling it all, it couldnt support the speeds needed to make these archives aviable on internet. im still supporting the pirate party though (only on secundary elections, they were never meant to take the main positions) ------------------------------------------------- Porn makes everything better, even art. |
| Duck Penis |
Posted on 19-05-12, 01:03
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #270 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1546 days Last view: 1544 days |
Oh, you live in Venezuela too? My condolences. But it's definitely interesting that 3.3% of the members here are Venezuelan. Yeah, probably it would be best to administer it from VE and use a Venezuelan domain, but host at least the bulk of the content elsewhere (torrent, Internet Archive). Then you could use international fiat currency (not going to suggest crypto) without having to do black market exchange, which apparently is very difficult. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-05-12, 03:52 (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
Post: #314 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 16 days Last view: 1 day |
Posted by sureanem Fair warning: EZweb = BREW (KDDI au is CDMA, thus their cellphones are Qualcomm-based by force), hence undumpable. Also, didn't knew i-mode games could stop working if your phone didn't had an active service (I already expected DRM/crypto, but this is completely nuts). I DO know that Softbank locks out pretty much every cool feature on their phones (except for making calls) if they don't have an active Softbank SIM card - this is better known as "multimedia lock", ensuring that your phone only works as a PHONE (and nothing else) if you're not chained to an active phone service. Gross. Holy shit, the fixation of Japanese carriers with DRM is unreal. It's like Verizon/Qualcomm, but one hundred times worst. If anything, it's a blessing that they're finally embracing Android, where ripping .APKs is mostly trivial. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| Nicholas Steel |
Posted on 19-05-12, 05:33 (revision 1)
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Post: #192 of 426
Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 281 days Last view: 8 days |
I now own Hob on PC! AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64 |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-12, 08:25
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Full mod
 Post: #241 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 884 days Last view: 80 days |
Cool! Hope you like it! The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Nicholas Steel |
Posted on 19-05-12, 11:43 (revision 5)
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Post: #193 of 426
Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 281 days Last view: 8 days |
So far it's pretty good, certainly a lot better than that Oceanhorn game. You're right that it's pretty much Zelda and so far its focus has been a lot more on the exploration/puzzle aspects and less so the combat. I'm now up to the 3rd zone on what should be Hard difficulty, I certainly intended it to be on Hard. I got stumped for a little bit on the final puzzle for the 2nd zone, I wasn't thinking of bringing the crawler over... Edit: Just got a level 2 sword. AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64 |
| Duck Penis |
Posted on 19-05-12, 13:09
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #273 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1546 days Last view: 1544 days |
Posted by tomman What does this mean? According to the Wikipedia page, they just include some digital signature, so an emulator could ignore this without having to crack any actual DRM. Also, didn't knew i-mode games could stop working if your phone didn't had an active service (I already expected DRM/crypto, but this is completely nuts). I DO know that Softbank locks out pretty much every cool feature on their phones (except for making calls) if they don't have an active Softbank SIM card - this is better known as "multimedia lock", ensuring that your phone only works as a PHONE (and nothing else) if you're not chained to an active phone service. Gross. I don't think this is a big issue. Data was expensive back in the day, right? So there's no need to waste it getting a key each time you want to play. So probably, what they did was just to check if the phone reported a connection, and then it would be up to the provider to lock up the phone if they wanted to. Likewise, there shouldn't be too much encryption. These were real puny CPUs, US crypto had export restrictions, and AES was only standardized in late 2001. I strongly doubt cellphone manufacturers were using what was then bleeding-edge military-grade crypto without hardware acceleration. If anything, maybe DES (56-bit), RC4 (40-bit), or something weaker (40-bit, presumably). Perhaps even home-rolled. So the only issue ought to be preserving the .jars, the rest can come later. Also, far from all of them did this: Some games needed a Web connection but most were stored on the phone or SD card and could work just fine without any network. The problem with Japanese phones of that time is while they were years ahead of the West they became nothing more than a paper weight once the phone contract had ended. They just lock up. You can't even use the camera, TV or radio on them. The only thing that works is the clock and alarm. (emphasis added) According to the thread, there's commercial emulation of some of the games ("Appli Archives") for PSM and PS Vita. So you can just get those through the, uh, conventional channels. And you can back up encrypted versions of the phone storage ".sb1" files. You have Perfect Dark, right? Try searching for .sb1 and see if you find anything but porn. Otherwise you could ask on 5ch for someone to share a backup if you speak Japanese. See https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/binary/pdf/support/trouble/manual/download/sh06a/SH-06A_E_16.pdf for more information about folder structure. (pg. 27/345) http://midorigame-ferret.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2018/03/docomo-f0b7.html - some notes http://fj800511.la.coocan.jp/docomo/index.htm - this guy tried to reverse engineer it, I think maybe contact him at  , if you're luckyThere was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| Duck Penis |
Posted on 19-05-12, 13:35
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #274 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1546 days Last view: 1544 days |
http://www.4centity.com/document.aspx?doc=a6d3ab2d-fe8b-41e3-bb30-02101ca53276 - this might be what they use for DRM - filenames ("SD_BIND") match, but some other details of their filesystem don't. They seem to use some magic SD card stuff though, which matches up with the details in the threadThe encryption algorithm is C2_ECBC (the C2 cipher algorithm in C-CBC mode) The decryption algorithm is C2_DCBC (the C2 cipher algorithm in C-CBC mode) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomeria_cipher It uses 56-bit keys, but mystery meat S-boxes. Can be cracked, anyway. So the important thing would be to secure the backups. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| Duck Penis |
Posted on 19-05-12, 14:03
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #275 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1546 days Last view: 1544 days |
https://www11.atwiki.jp/gundamwar/pages/749.html Here you can find some .sb1 files. There's a short header, then zeroes, then the encrypted content starts at offset 0x1000 (4096). Ent says it's random, so I'm pretty sure it's encrypted and not, say, compressed. Not sure about what's going on at the end. Because the header always starts at the same offset, but the size of the encrypted chunk isn't an integer number of blocks. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| tomman |
Posted on 19-05-12, 14:10
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Dinosaur
Post: #316 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 16 days Last view: 1 day |
I've opened this thread for discussing the cellphone perservation stuff, so let's continue there~ Note to myself: attack my endless VN backlog! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| Kakashi |
Posted on 19-05-17, 11:16
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 Post: #117 of 210 Since: 10-29-18 Last post: 1659 days Last view: 1631 days |
The Borderlands 1 GOTY Enhanced can bite me with it's shitty, shitty lag that can't be fixed even after disabling voice. |
| Nicholas Steel |
Posted on 19-05-17, 12:02
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Post: #198 of 426
Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 281 days Last view: 8 days |
Yeah it's got weird as heck performance issues. In my case being in specific locations (ie: most of the main game content and pretty niche specific spots in the DLC) caused FPS to tank for no discernible reason. AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64 |
| Kakashi |
Posted on 19-05-17, 13:40
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Post: #118 of 210 Since: 10-29-18 Last post: 1659 days Last view: 1631 days |
I've had no FPS issues, just shitty, shitty co-op lag issues. But perhaps I haven't played it enough because I only wanted to play co-op. |
