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HiToText (Version 2010.11.4).
Fyrecrypts:
So I've been thinking about how I'm sure more people would like to help if they thought they could, and while recruiting my non-technical brother, I realized I should make a post about what he does to help me get some of these games decoded just a little bit faster.
Basically, I'm getting pretty good and actually decoding the .hi files. Games like Road Runner (Atari) would be difficult if I hadn't already put the time in on Marble Madness which use the same space saving score and name coding.
Because of this, more of my time getting a game into HiToText and HiScanner is usually ensuring that all the possible characters allowed in the name of the hiscore are taken into consideration. So I'm regularly beating hi scores and putting my name as: ",.-" to see what these characters map out to.
What I've got my brother doing, is beating hi scores, and using every possible character that the game allows, taking a screenshot of all the high scores, and e-mailing those screenshots and the .hi file to me, so I can spend more of my time programming and decoding the .hi file.
One important note about this, I never need all the alpha-numeric scores, usually just "ABZ", "abz", and "019", as every game so far has a pattern for these characters, that make needing "CDE" and so on pretty pointless.
For something like Captain America and the Avengers, the game only stores 5 scores at a time, but has a lot of characters that could not be on the same hiscore table at the same time, so my brother took multiple screenshots, and made copies of the captaven.hi file for those screenshots and sent me an e-mail with this information, deleted the old captaven.hi file and started again with the characters that wouldn't fit in the first hiscore table, I ended up with 4 different captaven.hi files, but was able to capture every possible character allowed with the screenshots.
I'm hoping that some of you that have games you'd like to see decoded (especially those of you using the new version of GameEx, thanks Tom!) would be willing to upload their hiscore screenshots, and .hi OR .nv files to this post. Please zip them up as this board does not actually accept .nv or .hi extensions, and converting these to .txt corrupt them.
I'll go ahead and put this information in the first post as well.
Fyrecrypts:
On another note, I've decided to make all clones and hacks listed in the hiscore.dat for games already deciphered included in the next version of HiToText and HiScanner. I thought about it, and if for whatever reason the scores are determined differently in clones/hacks that I can fix them as they show up. For now, it's just too much work to ensure that every Mr. Lo type game has the same encoding as Mr. Do.
Although it is technically possible that the games could have something like 4-byte scores that were reversed resulting in the same entry in the hiscore.dat file being valid, and then would be incorrectly decoded. I highly doubt this is the case, as most bootlegs or clones just wouldn't have any reason to do this, and if they did they'd more than likely do something to reduce the size of the hiscores, and therefore a new entry would need to be done in the hiscore.dat.
Again, if this causes a problem with untested games like Mr. Lo, I'm hoping someone comes to this board and posts it, and I can fix the problem.
headkaze:
Here's a screenshot of HiToText running from inside GameEx :)
Say a big thanks to your brother Fyrecrypts his help is much appreciated. It's good to see that other people are seeing the usefulness of this project. I always had faith people would realize it eventually.
I was going to say that if your going to give thanks or credit for work on this project to include NOP in the list as his hard work has been invaluable. Fyrecrypts perhaps you should put some credits in the first post and list the people who have been involved in the project in some way? Maybe include a readme.txt in the software packages with info about the project, who's involved, contact addresses etc.
Fyrecrypts:
I totally agree, having some credits is a great idea.
Edit: New version up, does not have the readme.txt as headkaze suggested above, but the next version probably will, I just wanted to get this newer version out real quick that adds Bubble Bobble and Captain America, plus works with all the hacks and clones as I mentioned above.
tspeirs:
Good call on including the clones. I was going to suggest that. I could see that it was needed once it was running in GameEx.
What would be nice too, would be the option to output a list of supported roms from the command line. I made a file myself for GameEx to use, as I didnt wouldnt to have the overhead of calling the process for every game. This would make it a lot easier for me and other front end devs.
Thanks to all involved in the project.
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