Status Update - July 2022

Hello! This month, I didn't publish any new releases, but I did invest plenty of time into research - so I'm going to shuffle the formula a little.

I also played Stray 🐈

Info for Box of cookies supporters

I have migrated my to-do list to a new version of GitHub Projects, which means the link has changed. You should have received invitations for a new project board that has all the entries migrated to it, but if you didn't, here's a new link: https://github.com/users/CookiePLMonster/projects/3 

Research:

I usually don't list research done throughout the month here, but since this month I have no new releases to showcase and I ended up doing much more research than normal, here it is. All findings listed here have also been published on PCGamingWiki.

TOCA Race Driver (1&2) 

When cross-checking different TOCA Race Driver 2 releases on Redump, I noticed that the Italian release of the game has no DRM listed. Turns out, both the first and the second game have been re-released by FX Interactive without any DRM other than "physical" protection on the disc making copying time-consuming! TOCA Race Driver 2 installs fully so the player doesn't even need to keep the disc in the drive, while TOCA Race Driver still uses it to read some files. However, they can be copied over to the disc and the path to the CD can be changed in the registry, making the game fully "digital"! With these two releases + a GOG release of TOCA Race Driver 3, all 3 games from this sub-series are playable without a disc, DRM, or cracks.

Screamer 4x4 

Something I've only taken a cursory look at, but it seems like Screamer 4x4 suffers from a similar issue to Deus Ex: Invisible War, where the game's startup is blocked by other seemingly unrelated processes. I think in this case it's related to the game attempting to disable input arriving to all other windows via EnableWindow, which is documented to be sending a window message to a different process - but if I want to fix this, I need to take a closer look. In the worst case, it may be similar to this issue with Kao: Mystery of Volcano which can be extremely unsafe.

True Crime: New York City 

I finally spent some time looking into TC NYC, and I may have found an issue behind the PC port being so fast. If I'm not mistaken, then it runs at around 180% speed - with frame updates tailored for 60FPS, but the game locks itself to 30FPS, or more precisely 28FPS. Changing this timestep to fit 30FPS makes the game run at almost the same speed as the PS2 version - it's around 9% slower, which matches the 28/30FPS discrepancy. If this gets fixed too, the game may finally run at the correct speed on PC!

I have a hard time believing the game was shipped running in this state, so I am currently waiting for a confirmation on how it runs on a 2006-era PC with Windows XP.

Rally Trophy 

While I've looked into Rally Trophy a while ago already, it wasn't until last week when I realized the game's DRM is removed by an official patch. Later it turned out there are regional patches and only the English/German one removes DRM, but the executable files are identical across regions and therefore transferrable! With this knowledge, all versions of Rally Trophy, except maybe the Polish release (at the time of writing this I've not checked it yet) are DRM free. I also was notified that a partial DirectInput Mapper replacement has been created for the game, which is very cool! I'm trying to get a hold of the author and find out if this tool could be expanded into a generic open source replacement that does not involve hooking DirectInput.

Rally Championship Xtreme 

The theme of this month's research is "removing DRM legally", and Rally Championship Xtreme fits the bill. On VOGONS, somebody uploaded an official, nearly extinct patch for the game with no known changelog. However, one of the things it does is... removing the disc check! Naturally, this raised questions, because it seemed like this patch could just be a crack, but I've confirmed beyond any doubt that the new executable has been recompiled with CD checks removed, and not just hex edited not to feature them.

Removal of the TrueSpeech Codec is the second thing this game suffers from, but through my stubbornness, I found out that using FFmpeg to reconvert all co-driver callouts using this codec to a regular PCM WAV sample allows the game to run without the codec! In the future, I may consider creating a SilentPatch that does this conversion on runtime, but for the time being, I'll stick to converting the audio files.

Additionally, it's the first time I see a game that scales to widescreen correctly in a demo version but stretches in the full version. I hope it'll be possible to use this to figure out what changed and release a good "semi-official" widescreen fix based off that.

Other work:

DuckStation

• FullscreenUI: Untangle Escape button behaviour - a fix for Escape re-opening the pause menu after closing, regressed after the latest UI fixes.
• NeGcon: Fix default mappings - fix for a regression after a new input system was introduced, now maps I/II to the correct triggers.
• Bus: Add RAM exports for external debugger usage - a small addition mirroring a similar functionality in PCSX2, where the base address of an emulated console can now be previewed in Cheat Engine (and other similar programs) by name, by using an export.

What's next?

Phew, that status update was supposed to be short, but ended up being longer than several previous posts 😅

For modding - I'm not sure. If I have enough time I am likely to follow up on at least one of the games I wrote my findings in. For work - a new release I worked on should almost certainly go public this month, and I'm excited to reveal it!