Saturday, April 4, 2020

Game Patching, now actually user friendly-er

Recently i was working on automating most of the mundane stuff that i have to do to patch the game files and the ISO.
When we are working on the files we have to do the following:

1. Unpack the Growlanser 6 ISO using "Xpert" with the plugin "PS2 CdDvd5 |PSP UMD ISO Shrinker v1.05 *.ISO"
2. Use "quickbms" with the Growlanser script to unpack the .DAT files and its contents
3. Use "Cartographer" to dump the text and the text pointers
4. Use "Atlas" to re-insert the text and text pointers
5. Use "quickbms" to re-insert the modified files into the .DAT files
6. use "Xpert" to remake the ISO

These days i mostly have to use 3, 4, 5 and 6, since i dumped all of the files ISO files already.
The Problem with Xpert is that it takes quiet a while for the files to dump, and then to remake the ISO.
(And also the UI is pretty shitty)

Searching for an easier way to patch the game, and needing a better way for fans to patch their own game, i came across the program called "xdelta":

https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/704/

This program can check 2 Roms/ISOs for differences and create a really cool patch that you can use to patch your own game without needing to use the modified files and Xpert!
Sadly i came across a problem in which Xpert seems to modify some kind of files after remaking the ISO, which completely broke xdelta...
So, i was in search of a better way to modify the game ISO.
And after some searching i came across the program called "Apache 2":

https://www.psx-place.com/resources/apache.697/

(There also seems to be an Apache3, but i didn't try that out yet since 2 works like a charm:
https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/584/)



With this program its even easier to patch the ISO.
You can browse the ISO with Apache and then you can hot-swap the modified files in a matter of seconds.
This makes it a lot easier for me to patch an ISO to check the changes, and the xdelta patcher works now too!

If anybody is interested in trying out our current progress, which you can find on the repository, i created a patch with xdelta which patches your game:



https://bitbucket.org/Risae/growlanser-6-english-translation/downloads/GL6_0.3.rar

Beware that its super work in progress.

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