Landstalker

Hi everyone,

Just to introduce myself, I am a longtime lurker on these boards and having read BigNailCow's thread with great interest (massive SFII fan) I decided to have a go at hacking my all-time favourite game, Landstalker, in IDA.

For those of you that don't know, Landstalker is a relatively unknown action RPG released for the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis by Climax all the way back in 1993.

This is the first time I have ever attemped any ROM hacking other than simple text/graphic substitutions, and I had never programmed in assembler or knew much about Megadrive hardware, so this has been a huge learning experience for me.

The game itself is HUGE - there are over 800 room maps - and as a consequence pretty much everything is compressed in one way or another. The text is compressed using Huffman (in exactly the same way as Shining Force) so with the help of BigNailCow's posts I figured out how the compression routines worked and managed to dump the raw text.

Next came the graphics. These are compressed with a type of RLE, and it wasn't too bad to figure out having worked out the Huffman compression previously. The graphics compressed in this manner include the level tilesets (excluding animated tiles - these are stored raw), some sprite graphics, the Island map and Lithograph, Sega and Climax logos, Intro Sequence, Inventory window tilemap (strangely enough...), magic sword effects, falling coins (for the end), end credit font and logos and the little animations that appear above Nigel's head when he is cursed, etc. (IDA XRefs are great!). The room tileset palettes are also stored in this area as well.

The tilemaps (2d and 3d) are a bit trickier and there is all sorts of things going on with stackframes etc. I haven't figured it all out yet, but it hopefully will just be a matter of sitting down with a cup of coffee and going through the trace logs until I figure it all out. However,I do know how the uncompressed data is stored in RAM (more on this later).

I do know how the graphical sprite data is stored, and I have made a viewing utility for this data - Landstalker Sprite Viewer 1.0 - landstalker.hostsnake.com/download.php. It wouldn't be too difficult to save edited data to ROM, but the ROM itself would need to be modified and expanded so that the new uncompressed data would fit. Details of the sprite data and sprite palette format - which at one time gave me massive headaches - are included with the download.

I am also working on a map editor (screenshot below), which uses the data in RAM as input, the idea being that it can be linked up to my own decompression routines when I have figured them out, thus removing the headaches involved in trying to work out if it is the editor or the decompressor that is generating bugs. It will also mean that when I have solved the codecs I will already have the required frontend for editing.

http://landstalker.hostsnake.com/imgs/leveleditor.gif

I have also unlocked the inbuilt test mode - see landstalker.hostsnake.com for details.

My ideal ambition for this hack is to enable anything to be edited: maps, dialogue, enemy stats, tilesets, sprites, palettes, character interactions, cutscenes, and more. However,it may be a long time before these can be edited.

EDIT: Fixed image (apparently not)
DOUBLE EDIT: crappy free host doesn't support remote image linking

I like the sprite editor.

Hi everyone,
...
edited.

We need more [new] people like you around here. Nice job.

Wow! Quick replies!

Thanks everyone.

Epic win!!!

Stop by my IRC channel #sf2hack on irc.darkmyst.org.  I'm sure SF2 and landstalker share some other compression schemes.

Hey, lordash !

From what I've heard from BigNailCow, you've lost your data, and you've come in the sf2hack irc channel several times to get it back, but you missed each other.

BigNailCow does have a copy of your IDA file ! So don't hesitate stop by #sf2hack again !

Your project really deserves more than this tiny 5-answer thread, a lot of people appreciate it. I hope you are still in the surroundings to read this !

I would be really interested in that level editor or any graphics or room data of Landstalker.
Unfortunately all the links are dead now. Is there any possibility that someone could load it up again anywhere or send me a mail with some information or files?

I would like to extract the room data out of the ROM (if that's possible) and create a big map with it.

I'm also very interested in the tiles. I thought about creating a new fan game with them.
While I guess that I could reverse-engineer it as well, if someone already figured that out it would spare me some time 

Hey all!

It has been a long time since I've been around here, or done any work on Landstalker at all - I have been caught up in a rather nasty personal and financial problem, which has meant I have not had the time to do anything (and the two hard-drive failiures didnt really help - I really need to start backing up my files). Things are beginning to look a bit better for me now, whereas nowhere near perfect they are on the way, and hopefully doing more work on this will help me keep my mind off things.

To summarise my progress so far: (not that anything has changed much since last summer) - I have located in the game ROM the locations of the in-game dialogue script, graphics/pallettes of all the sprites in the game, graphics/palletes of the background tilesets, and the routines responsible for decompressing the room tilemap data, and a load of other stuff as well. Hopefully when I get a bit of time, I'll work out how the compresed room tilemaps are stored and I'll be able to make a start on my level editor, which shouldn't hopefully be that far away.

Unfortunately I have lost all the work I have done since my hdd crashed, so I am unable to reupload anything. Sorry 

Hopefully I'll be able to post an update soon,

Cheers for all the support  ,

LordAsh

Nice to see some more Genesis games being hacked.  A while back I went through the Sword of Vermillion Rom and found a ton of great stuff for it.  Let me tell you that you don't want to know how treasure chests work in THAT game.

Like I said, I probably still have some of your stuff kicking around somewhere.  Let me know if you want it!