Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX hack.

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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby Peter » Mon Mar 27, 2017 4:07 pm

FINALLY, after a very bizarre problem that i couldnt solve involving overlapping on Demul with the widescreen hack activated, Ziming sent me gdi images with the widescreen hack preloaded.


And it looks absolutely immense!! I didnt think it was that big of a deal, and it wouldnt enhance my gaming experience of Shenmue on an emulator, but boy was i wrong! Mr357 was saying to me about how circles appeared more "oval" shaped and things like that, and i could sort of see it, but i wasnt that fussed since i wasnt able to activate it either way. But now, i just love it and i have to say a massive thank you to Esppiral for this. I will thank you again during all of the weekly playthroughs on Twitch, as well as Ziming setting up a link to here. Here are some comparison shots with some thoughts:

Image
WITHOUT hack activated

Image WITH hack activated

When playing this in a 16:9 aspect on a 50" LCD TV you can see how much more sleek and slim the entire picture looks, as well as how Ryo hasnt been eating pies all the live long day. It looks so much more closer to its original than it ever has done.


Image
WITHOUT hack activated

Image
WITH hack activated

I dont think the pictures do this one justice, but the notebook also looks far more thin, and less as intrusive on the screen. It looks as if its standing more upright and less stretched, distorting the image. This in return make the text look a lot more neat and well presented.


Image
WITHOUT hack activated

Image
WITH hack activated

The final image is the one where people had been saying for weeks during the streams where you can see the purpose and difference this at its best. Circular objects go from looking oval shaped and stretched, to perfectly circular, and again, just make the game feel and look much more neat and sleek.

I know the pictures may not look much different, or even that much of a big deal, but trust me, when playing the games it feels miles different, and if anyone is running Shenmue through an emulator in widescreen mode then you need this hack.
Thank you again Esppiral!

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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby mmxii » Thu May 18, 2017 11:42 am

What's the best way to go about opening, editing and recompiling a .cdi?

Really interested in trying this but want to know the best method to do it.

I know WinRAR can open disc images but would that break anything if I were to open it using WinRAR?
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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby Esppiral » Thu May 18, 2017 1:41 pm

You can directly patch the CDI, there is no need to extract and recompile it.

Just drop the .cdi into an hex editor find and replace the values and you are good to go.

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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby Ziming » Fri May 26, 2017 7:50 pm

mmxii wrote: What's the best way to go about opening, editing and recompiling a .cdi?

Really interested in trying this but want to know the best method to do it.

I know WinRAR can open disc images but would that break anything if I were to open it using WinRAR?


You forgot to give credit where it's due.
https://twitter.com/Shenmue_Dojo/status ... 0228928512

*Slight correction: S4pph4rad from assembler games originally found the 16:9 exploit. Esppiral developed it further for both Shenmue games providing us instructions how to patch it in this topic.
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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby espouai » Sat May 27, 2017 4:44 am

Wow, this is amazing.
Seeing how wide your screenshots are, isn't it possible to get a ultrawide hack? (21:9)
edit : I saw the "new widescreen hack" on 21:9, but I don't really get how to achieve that :-k
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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby Sappharad » Sat May 27, 2017 5:50 pm

Ziming wrote:You forgot to give credit where it's due.
https://twitter.com/Shenmue_Dojo/status ... 0228928512

*Slight correction: S4pph4rad from assembler games originally found the 16:9 exploit. Esppiral developed it further for both Shenmue games providing us instructions how to patch it in this topic.

They're different methods of doing the same thing, Esppiral's work isn't really based on mine.

My initial approach for Widescreen hacks was to crush the horizontal camera field of view without changing vertical so that you see more on each side of the screen. This caused minor pop-in on the sides in Shenmue 1 & 2 because the game knows when an object would normally not be visible anymore and doesn't draw it.

Esppiral's first approach was to zoom the in-game camera further out then stretch the vertical field of view so the top & bottom of the screen still end up in the same place they were originally. The game engine knows about the zooming, his approach eliminated pop-in. Since the zoom is a game engine feature though, it didn't affect cutscenes and since the vertical stretching was still there the black bars had to be disabled so you could see the same amount of detail as before.

I'm not sure what approach he took for the Hex patch, I never got around to figuring out why the codebreaker wasn't able to perform the same patch in memory yet. I suspect it's permanently modifying the game logic that calculates the camera parameters. The patches are in the executable range and I've done other codes that patch the executable like the one to let you start a new Shenmue 2 EU game from a US Shenmue 1 save file, so it's still a mystery why his latest patch isn't working. I'm getting closer to finishing up on other projects that I promised to do, so hopefully I can go back to figuring out how to get these working with an unmodified copy of the game.


Random note: the 4's are A's, the previous Assemblergames forum software was disallowing my username when I signed up even though it wasn't taken. I tried to get the owner to change it when I made a rather reasonable donation over a year ago, but he ignored my request.

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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby Ziming » Sat Jun 10, 2017 11:00 am

phpBB [video]

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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby Esppiral » Sun Jun 11, 2017 5:39 am

Great Video Ziming!!!

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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby nekusasu » Sun Jun 11, 2017 8:17 am

Thank you Esppiral!

I've seen some videos on youtube where you modified the game to run at 21:9 Ultrawide.

Can you tell me how you achieved that? I'm assuming it's also with hex editing?
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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby Esppiral » Sun Jun 11, 2017 10:20 am

nekusasu wrote: Thank you Esppiral!

I've seen some videos on youtube where you modified the game to run at 21:9 Ultrawide.

Can you tell me how you achieved that? I'm assuming it's also with hex editing?



Do you have a 21:9 monitor?

If you are interested, I can post the orresponding code to make the game 21:9.

It should run fine on emulators, but I guess It may be too much for the Dreamcast to handle.
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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby nekusasu » Sun Jun 11, 2017 11:01 am

Esppiral wrote:
nekusasu wrote: Thank you Esppiral!

I've seen some videos on youtube where you modified the game to run at 21:9 Ultrawide.

Can you tell me how you achieved that? I'm assuming it's also with hex editing?



Do you have a 21:9 monitor?

If you are interested, I can post the orresponding code to make the game 21:9.

It should run fine on emulators, but I guess It may be too much for the Dreamcast to handle.


Yes, sir. 2560 x 1080.

Would be nice to, at least, try that on Demul to see how much of a difference it makes.

From your videos, it looks amazing!
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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby SanzenSama » Sun Jun 11, 2017 10:50 pm

Ive Been loving the stream Peter. Looks so good with the hack, I was wondering could you or Ziming post the GDI with the hack already preloaded? Ive messed around with the cheatengine codes on the Shenmue 1 Undub and Shenmue II PAL and it looks amazing, but I'm still not sure i have it completely correct.

So yeah, any chance the preloaded Shenmue II Pal could be posted here?

And I was also hoping Masterchan or someone could make a patcher for the Kogami Undub 99min DGI's too.

Links in this thread:
viewtopic.php?t=46869

I'm going to mess around with it some more, as the patcher for US or EU might work for the undub. But I've seen it requested in a few other threads so preloaded versions of both of there would be awesome.
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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby SanzenSama » Sun Jun 11, 2017 11:03 pm

It took me like 5 minutes so I probably should have done it first lol, but the patcher nero posted works on the Kogami Undub. It detected it was based off the EU version which makes sense.

Link and Directions for patcher:
https://mega.nz/#F!L4xAUTCB!dz3QkSV7WnkF8w8XGelfoA
To make it easier to patch your images, whether you're using a lite version (for 700MB CD-R) or the bulkier (untouched) GDRom rips, you can use the script that I uploaded here: https://mega.nz/#F!L4xAUTCB!dz3QkSV7WnkF8w8XGelfoA

Just unzip the file anywhere on your disk, then simply drag & drop each of your track06.bin files, from each of the 3 game discs, over the script named DRAG track06.bin HERE.bat. This will patch the EUR, USA or JAP images and also create a backup just in case.

Taken from page 2 of this thread. All credit to nero.

So now I guess the only thing is the Shenmue II preloaded GDI's. If those could be posted it would be really helpful.

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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby Ziming » Mon Jun 12, 2017 1:32 am

phpBB [video]


SanzenSama wrote:
So now I guess the only thing is the Shenmue II preloaded GDI's. If those could be posted it would be really helpful.


http://theisozone.com/downloads/dreamca ... -esppiral/

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Re: Shenmue I, Shenmue II & What's Shenmue Widescreen HEX ha

Postby ner0 » Fri Jun 23, 2017 7:04 pm

Sappharad wrote:I'm not sure what approach he took for the Hex patch, I never got around to figuring out why the codebreaker wasn't able to perform the same patch in memory yet. I suspect it's permanently modifying the game logic that calculates the camera parameters.

I may not be remembering correctly some of the stuff but you can patch the game memory to use this hack. Although nullDC was a pain in the ass because of how it emulates the game in a protected memory region, I needed to use kernel-level access to the protected memory in order to change the values, otherwise it would either crash or reallocate the value to another address. DEMUL is straight-forward in that regard because it emulates the DC so amazingly. Anyway, I think that one of the conditions is that you do patch the memory before you start playing, at least one of those addresses must be because it is the one responsible for the mechanism that dynamically adjusts the clipping range - depending on several factors, game level/map being a major one.

Esspiral is obviously the best person to talk about this, but my understanding is that there are 2 very important addresses: one that makes the clipping and draw distance become static, and another that changes the aspect ratio. The rest of those addresses are responsible for the draw distance and clipping area values. Since all these values have been made static, they need to be tweaked to optimal values that will work well visually, without stressing the hardware (DC) too much, independently of the level you are in.

Some of this is guesswork, but it's the rationale I've used to include the memory patch in my Save Anywhere trainer a few months back, and at the time it worked fine on both emus, but the patched images are always the best approach.
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