NBA Jam 2K20 PSone Mod

[ponlork]

Loving all the hard work you guys put out man, I've done a ton of playthroughs of the SNES hacks:

NBA Jam 2K21 - Tournament Edition SNES Playthrough with Shaq/Kobe Bryant (1080p/60fps)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqwEPtMN6ho

NBA Jam 2K21 - Tournament Edition SNES Playthrough with The Flash/Johnny Cage (1080p/60fps)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ--qk-xbfw

(This one has gotten a ton of views, thanks for that man!!!)

NBA Jam TE - Double Z Mod SNES Playthrough with ProStars (1080p/60fps):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2QncTk_Hw


I tried playing both PSX versions of the game but the difficulty gets to me ROFL, I'm not sure if there is a way to turn that down yet, however they both run fine!!  You guys should probably make separate patches for those that don't want the custom soundtrack, as you don't won't people to get copyright problems on Youtube when making videos!!

Speaking of console versions, have you guys tried hacking the Genesis/32x version??  Since in those versions have the music in-game while playing, while the SNES version of TE doesn't have music, or, if there is a way to change that and I don't know!!!

Anyways, thanks for everything guys!!  You guys sure do some awesome work, looking forward to the next versions of the game!!

hey fam, Appreciate the support. i've seen your NBA jam videos before. i think some people may have even used your footage for their NBA Jam themed videos.

i made a NBA Jam TE snes longplay video a while back: https://youtu.be/valcEdyVeD0

NBA Jam TE was the first game i purchased. i played the hell out of it when i was younger.

over the years i would play NBA jam roms very casually, more so to test on emulators. i didnt play the Genesis ver until around 2020, and i must say... when it comes to the 16bit ports i think the Genesis version is the closest to the arcade experience.

that's when i started noticing the subtle little differences between the ports that i never noticed before. the genesis version had background music, falling effects during dunks, although the snes was graphically better i would say the Genesis felt more closer to the arcade.

Then there were the 32x port which was really good too and seems to be a hybrid of the Genesis and Atari Jaguar port. The main issue i had with the 32x and Atari jaguar version is some of the players dont resemble their real life counterpart such as Scottie Pippen. other than that, it plays really good

and yeah the AI for the PSX port is brutal. it seems some teams just overpowered, like Minnesota, Washington bullets, and the Dallas Mavericks. And these are typically the teams that you play first. So whoever was in charge of that screwed up.

then some teams like the Utah Jazz and Cleveland Cavaliers are very easy. Have you ever played the Japanese or European release? the difficulty is fixed in those versions. and i'm sure the US version is fixable too.

as for music in the Snes version, i notice NBA Hangtime is lacking music too. Not sure what the deal is with that. maybe its a hardware issue with the audio where they used up most of the memory for the voice clips and they couldn't add music due to that. and maybe the Genesis sound chip was more advanced where they could have more sounds? i have no idea.

edit nevermind the SNES port of hangtime does have music. i wonder why NBA Jam TE didnt. looking at both games now, it appears that the genesis ver has more voice samples to emphasize various plays whereas the Snes version is very basic and only has voices for standard plays. The snes ver does look better though. maybe less voice samples mean they can have music, and Jam TE had too many voice samples so that's the tradeoff im assuming.

Why didnt they use the Super FX chip for NBA hangtime, they could have had sprite scaling with that. As for a custom soundtrack, i made a tutorial for people to add their own music in but i'm the type of person who's kinda embarrassed just to tell people what im listening too lol so i made it a optional thing. Like i still get extremely bashful when i see a video of someone playing my mod. I hear some directors are like that where they cant attend a screening of their film.

i can watch other peoples work easily though. i might make a optional soundpacks available in the future where i'll host it on mediafire or something. i might have like a 80s or 90s inspired theme pack. There appears to be a unused track in the US ver, it was meant for th ending. But the ending uses a str movie which contain a XA audio track so the CDDA audio track was a leftover and wasn't used. Im thinking it might be possible to utilize that track for one of the quarters

[resurrecta]

speaking of hangtime, i tried to extract the sprites for the PS1 ver but was unable to. I got the on court sprites to show but not the player graphics. I'm thinking it uses some sort of unknown compression for the player's body and heads.

I tried the same thing because in the end, PSX also has Kobe in it and for example Drexler, both missing in the arcade.
I noticed that PSX, N64 and pc all three have differences in line ups, while being "close" to Maximum Hangtime.
Anyhow, there seems to be some unknown compression going on indeed. I ended up dumping textures for the N64, which is far less convenient.
But anyhow, I did it to have a real Clyde Drexler head... Notice how Jam TE recycle Xavier McDaniel's heads for some chars. Drexler is one of the example where arcade didn't have the heads either. However, Kevin Johnson's heads are exclusively missing in the PSX/Saturn ports for whatever unknown reason...

Yeah I wondered why no one was able to insert just some bg music for the snes, a simple midi or something. Because, it's the main thing where reviews for the SNES always get bad scores in comparison to Genesis. The game is cleaner on SNES but misses some of the sound ambiance. Perhaps it requires too much custom code?

Speaking of the Jaguar port... There's some special stuff to it too. Notice how Harper once again gets a unique mugshot, same as Kukoc does. It's like they got a set of material to choose from. Other mugshots are scaled down in total height, but show more in height of the same mugshots the PSX and Saturn used.

[eskayelle]

I'll hijack this thread for a quick minute...   

Loving all the hard work you guys put out man, I've done a ton of playthroughs of the SNES hacks:

NBA Jam 2K21 - Tournament Edition SNES Playthrough with The Flash/Johnny Cage (1080p/60fps)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ--qk-xbfw

(This one has gotten a ton of views, thanks for that man!!!)

I was just about floored when I saw Kotaku had picked up 2K21.  Your vid was a great showcase for it!

You guys should probably make separate patches for those that don't want the custom soundtrack, as you don't won't people to get copyright problems on Youtube when making videos!!

Incoming!

...while the SNES version of TE doesn't have music, or, if there is a way to change that and I don't know!!!

ponlork's pretty much on the money; it's a sacrifice of sound for music, or music for sound.

So when I was working through new voice clips for 2K22, I kept crashing the game because I was sending too many bytes to the APU.  Mattrizzle gave me some math surrounding how much data the APU can accept so that I could swap my sound clips accordingly.  Basically, the APU always takes up X amount of bytes for the global sounds ("He's on Fire!", "Heating up!", "Yes!", etc.).  Then, there are a number of sets of dynamic sounds.  Each quarter, the game randomly picks one set of dynamic sounds to play so there's diversity during the game.  Much of that remaining APU bandwidth is taken up by those Y bytes, leaving little to no room for a music track.  You'd basically have to lose the dynamic sounds (and likely some of the global ones) to pop in a decent song.  Not worth it, in my opinion.



Meanwhile, ponlork continues to kill it with the NBA Jam 21 updates!  Looking forward to v1.3!

[ponlork]

Meanwhile, ponlork continues to kill it with the NBA Jam 21 updates!  Looking forward to v1.3!

thanks. earlier today i was trying to re-activate some of the unused commentary for the 3pt shots, and at the same time attempt to pull off a alley oop.

and i think i almost saw it. i wasn't recording though. dammit i was recording for hours prior but the moment i stop recording, it happened.

well here's what i remember, you know how sometimes you go in for a dunk but the opponent swipe the ball away but you'll still be in the Dunk animation state without the ball? well i had swiped the ball while the CPU was in a high flying dunk animation, then the CPU teammate picked it up and shot the ball and while doing so, it went back to the CPU's hand. or i think it did, cuz my dumb CPU teammate jumped up for a block and swipe the ball back out of the CPU's hand.

and that's where i am not entirely certain if maybe a alley oop was about to occur or maybe the ball just looked like it went back in the CPU's hand during mid flight and my CPU partner just blocked it.

sigh wish i recorded it. But that's another method to experiment with. anyway, here's some footage of the unused sound clips. i think i edited some values and it just shifted the sound clips around that's why we can hear it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QVb9FD9dwA


June 09, 2021, 09:38:59 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)

I tried the same thing because in the end, PSX also has Kobe in it and for example Drexler, both missing in the arcade.
I noticed that PSX, N64 and pc all three have differences in line ups, while being "close" to Maximum Hangtime.
Anyhow, there seems to be some unknown compression going on indeed. I ended up dumping textures for the N64, which is far less convenient.
But anyhow, I did it to have a real Clyde Drexler head... Notice how Jam TE recycle Xavier McDaniel's heads for some chars. Drexler is one of the example where arcade didn't have the heads either. However, Kevin Johnson's heads are exclusively missing in the PSX/Saturn ports for whatever unknown reason...

Yeah I wondered why no one was able to insert just some bg music for the snes, a simple midi or something. Because, it's the main thing where reviews for the SNES always get bad scores in comparison to Genesis. The game is cleaner on SNES but misses some of the sound ambiance. Perhaps it requires too much custom code?

Speaking of the Jaguar port... There's some special stuff to it too. Notice how Harper once again gets a unique mugshot, same as Kukoc does. It's like they got a set of material to choose from. Other mugshots are scaled down in total height, but show more in height of the same mugshots the PSX and Saturn used.

have you seen this GDC talk with mark turmell and sal divita?
https://youtu.be/Dp3Os2kk6V4?t=1369

they talked about the head process and mentioned that towards the end they got lazy and kinda cheated by using a lot of the same head sprite angles for various players.

I notice they have like a base sprite sheet, even for Shaq they use some angles from that generic base sprite.

Development for the first NBA Jam was very difficult because they had to find images from magazines and stuff. i have a hard time with that myself and i got the internet lol then later for NBA Jam TE they had a easier time because they had access to a lot of the players and they were able to film their heads.

i was tempted to cheat at times too, like i thought about just re-using the same image for another angle and just slightly rotate it a bit but the perfectionist in me refuse to do it lol so every player that i worked on has a unique image for every angle.

this is just my observation and i may be wrong but in the first NBA jam, it seems like the players heads didnt re-scale on the fly when they were moving up and down the court. Some players like Shaq will look like that dinosaur from the Super Mario Bros movie where he has a small head and big body.

one minor thing i dislike about the Jaguar port is the position of the player heads, it seems to be placed too low. Got them looking like goblins or something. though i admit i havent played the Jaguar port too much, but i highly enjoyed it. Ive played the Snes and PSX version the most and although the PS1 ver is the one i prefer, it can be frustrating at times
June 16, 2021, 07:17:02 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
i've been working on restoring some of the sounds, mainly the 3pt shot attempts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7R6KqHbK6I

some of y'all may have noticed that there are sounds missing in the PS1 version, mainly during 3pt shot attempts and lay ups. Sounds such as "From downtown! Wide open, from long range, he's got a hot hand! Ugly shot! With the Rainbow!

the sounds are actually still in there but it's not activated for some reason. Pretty much most of the shot attempt calls are disabled except for when the announcer yells "At the buzzer!", "takes a hook shot", or "They need a shot here" and "running out of time". on some rare occasions you may hear "Terrible shot" during a bad hook shot attempt.

I'm currently trying to restore them. The problem is that it starts sounding like the Saturn version where the Announcer constantly calls the players name. But i think i can minimize it so it wont be called as often.

[resurrecta]

Sorry for the slow reply. That's a nice talk there in that YT video.
Anyhow, those sounds are indeed a needed fix. I guess you sort of notice how much the Saturn and PSX versions are based upon each other.

One thing that I find super annoying when modding the PSX version, is the head size limit. For example, a head like Kongo's, can't be done unless you downscale it to an ugly proportion.
When I helped out on Bart Simpson, I did what I could within the limits. Removing the 2 pixel limit, will help a fraction, but still not for Kongo sized ones.

Other than that, this version looks interesting. But in your video, I noticed behaviour I don't get in my vanilla version while rebounding, somewhere burried in there, there must be remnants of the Alley Oop system.

Meanwhile, here's a copy paste from what Mark literally told me:

"Hi. Yeah, we eventually did the alley oop in hangtime. We ran out of time in original Jam series. Acclaim cobbled together what we were up to."

So, my interpretation is that Acclaim noticed the beginnings of the system in the JAM source code and decided to make a working version for Slam.

[ponlork]

i might try my Waifu Jam idea with the NBA Jam TE engine instead since i couldn't figure out how to decompress the sprites in Hangtime and since i'm already familiar with modding Jam.

the main concern i had was the limited head size of 32x32 (30x30 in game). i thought this wouldn't be sufficient enough for female characters as i wanted to have long hair and big hair.

i'm going to try and see if i can restore the extra 2 pixels, and i was thinking recently on how i can get larger sprites. This is just a idea, but i believe its possible to modify the head size to something like 32x36. It'll just show the next head angle from the sprite sheet partially.

well there is a unused head sprite in the game, so my idea is to utilize that for the extra pixels. We could get 32x34 with this method, since 32 / 14 = 2.29. Or what if we omit one of the head angles and swap it with a different but similar looking head angle to get around 32x36 px for the head.

it's even possible to change the default head size. you know like for Big Head mode? so maybe we can draw the heads smaller to fit more detail, then blow up their heads so that it'll be proportionate to the body. I kinda did that with the cyberpunk character where i put more detail into the head where i place a lot of emphasis on her hair, the problem is her head size smaller compared to other players but i could squeeze in more detail.

i actually tried this with the Sonya Blade referee sprites. If you notice while she's running, some frames are clipped because there wasn't enough horizontal width to fit it. Well i could resize the sprites so that it's smaller, then blow up the sprite size in the game's engine.

only problem with that is it doesn't look as detailed. however i think for more simple art such as Bart Simpson, or even Anime style heads it would look okay. That's why The Hulk's head looks so good because it was originally sprite art.

Wow you got a response from Mark Turmell? Well maybe for NBA Jam TE upgrade they tried to implement it again.

As for the Alley Oops that i described, the second one i witnessed last week may have been more of a glitch where the ball was knocked out of the players hand while in the high flying dunk animation state, then when the ball was thrown back up towards him it landed back in his hands lol i may have seen that a long time ago with lay ups attempts where my player goes in for a layup and the ball i swiped but it goes back into his hands to finish the layup.

Now the other Alley Oop that i described i think was an intended feature. its very hard to do but i remembered i did a move like this:
https://youtu.be/g7R6KqHbK6I?t=107

see how i got my own rebound and at the last moment i put it back up? i remember doing that and then my CPU partner came in and went into a dunk motion and jammed it in. it was a simple dunk and was totally unexpected.

though i remember the put back lay up animation being mirrored, where i did it with my left hand while running up from the corner.

but again i may have been hallucinating because the game plays so fast and im thinking maybe my CPU teammate didnt catch it mid air and he just grabbed it while running and did a dunk. however at the moment my reaction was like Holy Shit WTF was that lol i was so sad that i didnt record it.

anyways im gonna try to test both method thoroughly later and record it this time.

[resurrecta]

Well, don't mean to ease off, but I'll leave the technicalities up to you.
Omitting certain angles could indeed also be possible for hidden chars as in the end, Arcade was cheap that way too.
Restoring the 2 pixel limit should give an overall better look and matching to the arcade. But it will help a bit with some custom heads.
But like you said, some out of the box thinking is required if you really want to have specific big heads in.

The tip in dunk was indeed all over, but I get your point. Your cpu pal was probably set up for that specific collision to do it. It's one in a million, cause I mean I rarely see the CPU character following up after a put back lay up.

Yes, Mark replied. He's in fact a nice guy but super busy. So I have to limit my interaction to avoid abusing asking questions.
But he replied after I sent him the soundbyte.

Well, I dunno, the alley oop system in my opinion is broken in both Slam and Hangtime. In Hangtime, it feels like the game is way too centered on the alley oops. At some point, I just got furious from hearing the 200th "raises up" soundbyte during play and seeing the cpu perform the alley oop when I don't need him to.
Slam on the other hand... It has great mechanics where when you're about to miss the 3-point shot, your cpu char (perhaps it works player sided too?) can alley oop dunk it. On the other hand, the only dislike here, is that the alley oop is a bit of a "show" feature cause you can't "summon" the cpu char to do it. He just jumps up and you have a very limited window to do it.
In between both games lies the perfect balance IMO.

Anyhow, keep it going. I think everyone is excited Jam is still relevant.

[niuus]

i was tempted to cheat at times too, like i thought about just re-using the same image for another angle and just slightly rotate it a bit but the perfectionist in me refuse to do it lol so every player that i worked on has a unique image for every angle.

You've been doing a superb job with this hack. Certainly, we end-users appreciate it.

This hack and the eskayelle ones are my main source for videogame basketball fun 90% of the time.

[ponlork]

Thank you for the support niuus. I'm typing on my phone so this post my come out sloppy.

I think my next release will have significant improvement. I was able to restore many sounds for jump shot attempts like from long range, from the 3pt line, from downtown, wide open, for 2, launches a three, ugly shot.

Though there are several more clips that I haven't restored yet. Those are "no good!", puts up a brick, lays it up, with the rainbow, he's got a hot hand, one minute to go.

Hopefully there's a way to get those in. It appears undefined. I'm really just a amateur lol it's mostly luck that I was able to get this much going.

Hey resurrecta. Good news, I was able to restore the 2px problem. I think I made a mistake before where I thought it clip 1px out from all 4 corners but upon closer inspection, I think it only clip the bottom and left side.

I'm not entirely sure. Later today I'll take screenshots, and I'm going to do a test where I use a empty head with a 1px border around it and see exactly what's being clipped.

And after today I'm gonna start working on new players. My idea is to have 3 players for each team in the NBA finals, while the conference finals runner up will have 2 for each. So pheonix suns, clippers, bucks, and whichever team win tonight between the sixers and hawks will be the new roster updates.

Anybody got any request for which players to add?

[resurrecta]

I'd base on a mix of stats and how well certain players are recognized.

My take:
Suns
Paul
Booker
Crowder

Clippers
Leonard
George
Either Batum or Rondo. It's a hard pick. Since Rondo is probably due HOF and Batum has length which Clippers would be missing.

Bucks
Giannis
Middleton
Tucker

76'ers
Embiid
Simmons
Harris

Hawks
Young
Capela
Bogdanovic

[ponlork]

thanks for the suggestions.

so here's what i found so far, i used this test sprite for the players head:


i put a blue 1px border around the image. and here's how it look in game:


looks like it does clip a pixel off the right and bottom corner. but when i move the player left it clips a pixel from the left corner:


which is the back of a players head when mirrored. not sure what's going on there. but its like that on player 3's side too:



i was able to expand the default head sprite size from 32 to 33 and this is the result:



it now shows the full test image. however it still clip the right corner when i move the player left


i tried expanding the size to 34 and it shows extra artifacts and it still crop 1px when i move left



that's something i'm going to have to investigate later.

so here's the before and after:

before:


after:



man now im gonna have to redo a lot of players because i had cropped pixels from the corners. darn. well at least i know what the issue is from now on. i also uploaded a test footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHlB4OGttc4

[resurrecta]

man now im gonna have to redo a lot of players because i had cropped pixels from the corners. darn. well at least i know what the issue is from now on. i also uploaded a test footage:

This here makes me super excited. That's just awesome work. I see what you're explaining but I can't tell what's under the hood.
However; maybe I can give you an idea.
In my mk-game collabo, we also ran into some edge issues because the engine used 3D as a base with the Z axis disabled (sounds familiar?).
So anyhow, most issues we encoutered were due to floating point calculation rounding issues.
Perhaps Acclaim had this going on too and they disabled the outer pixels due to time constraints.

Anyhow, don't worry about what you need to redo... Yes, it's super duper stressing... But I mean, everyone is super supportive here and I guess the next characters will directly use that built.

Congrats on discovering!!

Also....
If you need names to be called out, perhaps TTS is an option too. Like https://www.readspeaker.com

[eskayelle]

man now im gonna have to redo a lot of players because i had cropped pixels from the corners. darn. well at least i know what the issue is from now on. i also uploaded a test footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHlB4OGttc4

Nice.  Did your solution require debugging and modding the code, or did you make adjustments just to PIN.BIN?

[sevin0seven]

I'd base on a mix of stats and how well certain players are recognized.

My take:
Suns
Paul
Booker
Crowder

Clippers
Leonard
George
Either Batum or Rondo. It's a hard pick. Since Rondo is probably due HOF and Batum has length which Clippers would be missing.

Bucks
Giannis
Middleton
Tucker

76'ers
Embiid
Simmons
Harris

Hawks
Young
Capela
Bogdanovic

I don't agree with some of these lineups listed. It should be:

Suns:
Paul
Booker
Ayton

Clippers:
Leonard
George
Jackson or Morris Sr

Bucks:
Giannis
Middleton
Holiday

Hawks:
Young
Collins
Capela

[ponlork]

hey y'all, i submitted ver 1.3 to the database. a lot to unpack today.

key features of this update will be faster inbound passes, restored various play by play commentary, the graphical fix for clipping edges, and new players added, Paul George, Clint Capela, Devin Booker, Deandre Ayton, Khris Middleton, and Jrue Holiday.

i also added a option to disable the music from looping. basically whenever a track finishes playing it'll goto the next track. this also utilizes the unused track where if the arena music finishes it can goto the last track. It plays from top to bottom so if you leave the opening track running it'll goto the next track which is the half time music.

i included a option in the Extras folder to have it loop too.

here are some screenshots:
devin booker

paul george

Khris Middleton

Deandre Ayton

Clint Capela

jrue holiday

updated portraits for Lebron, Durant, The Hulk, and Snoop Dogg



i still need to make a trailer and write up a news article. oh man i dread having to do those things lol

hey resurrecta, that sounds interesting because i've read comments from Saturn fans on why the Saturn is superior for 2D sprites because the PSX uses polygons to create a flat 2D image on one side of a polygon or whatever but i dont really see how that really matters because you're still seeing a 2D image no matter how it's being created. but yeah that might have something to do with it.

turns out there's still artifacts that show for player 3 and 4 on certain emulators like Duckstation and BeetlePSX. it doesnt show in epsxe, nopsx or pcsx though. and it only shows up when the players are "mirrored".



if i expand the head box further you can see the back of the next player's head and that's what's causing the artifact.


if we look inside the PSX ram, you can see where the artifact is coming from:



basically this fat camera guy in the corner here:


and the letter "D" in the initials screen for the Months and Date.


So what i did above was I deleted the px from the edge of those sprites so it wont show up in the game. Problem is you can see the letter D is missing pixels.

So what I did to fix this was replace the letter D with the unused letter Z. So instead of DEC i changed it to ZEC. Instead of Players Needed, it's not Players Neezez.


Then I just edit the letter Z to replace it with the letter D. So it'll display properly in the game. This is just a workaround until i figure out the mirror problem that's causing it.

At the same time I also deleted 1px out from the left side of all players heads because it'll also show artifacts there too. The good news is that we dont often use all 32px from the head width. but for the height we do because of the hair and player's beard. And later i can nudge all the player's head slightly to the right to fit their back head or have more hair, and i can realign the players head position to the left by modding the game engine.

i also found out how to resize all the players heads so this might be useful later when i attempt the waifu jam project where i want bigger anime heads.

hey eskayelle, it requires modding the exe. at 8002181c is where it's at. i changed the 20 to 21 which is 33 in decimal.

hi sevin0seven, thanks for the suggestions. i decided to go with Ayton and Holiday for the substitution players

[eskayelle]

Incredible stuff!

If I'm understanding correctly...
1) an increase to the value at address 0x80041510 speeds up the inbounding?
2) Setting the value at 0x800460C0 to zero restores the missing sounds?  Without losing any others?

Anything I missed?

[resurrecta]

Since the thread has been quiet, probably because 2k22 is nearing...
I guess we're expecting some early roster swaps next?

[ponlork]

Since the thread has been quiet, probably because 2k22 is nearing...
I guess we're expecting some early roster swaps next?

i do plan on getting back to it i've just been working on some other things i've been meaning to mess with. it's still 2021 so i might ride out the 2k21 name until the end of the year lol i dont know. hopefully i dont take too long of a break because i lose that muscle memory and it take me some time to get back into the groove. There's still a lot of graphical fixes and improvements i'll like to make.

what i'll like to do next is having player sprites appear bigger when they move to the foreground. not sure if i can achieve it but i'll try.

[MadZiontist]

I think I had maybe posted this originally in the wrong spot  . But anyways, I was wondering about the multiple .bins in the Redump build, and why they wouldn't be merged first, rather than patching only one of the .bin files? I gather that it's because you only modified that one .bin file. But, isn't there relevant data in the other .bin files? Sorry, I'm just confused by this and am hoping you could shed some light on it. I haven't checked the game out yet, as I've been wrapped up with other things, but I will. Thanks again.

[ponlork]

I think I had maybe posted this originally in the wrong spot  . But anyways, I was wondering about the multiple .bins in the Redump build, and why they wouldn't be merged first, rather than patching only one of the .bin files? I gather that it's because you only modified that one .bin file. But, isn't there relevant data in the other .bin files? Sorry, I'm just confused by this and am hoping you could shed some light on it. I haven't checked the game out yet, as I've been wrapped up with other things, but I will. Thanks again.

you know i was confused about that as well when i first submitted my hack. this is my first PSX project and I had ripped the game myself using imgburn and it dumped it into one .bin and cue file and that's what i was working with. then when i finished version 1.0 and submitted it to romhacking.net, i had it scan my ROM / ISO Information and it showed unknown and it was a genesis game or something. then DonPatchi edited my game entry noting that "This is PSX patch nothing to do with genesis no-intro rom info."

at first i didnt know who or what Redump was but i understand now. The way PS1 games are structured is they have the data track for the first track, and the rest are CDDA redbook audio tracks. Most PS1 games only have 1 data track, but some PS1 games use Redbook CD audio which adds multiple tracks. these games you can put in your CD player and it'll play those tracks. The games that dont have CDDA audio uses Sony's proprietary XA format and that's including in the data track.

that's why with some backup games when you try to play it on a real playstation using swap methods, it won't have any music because it uses the donor disc which doesn't have multiple tracks, or it has a different TOC (table of contents).

And many people load up PS1 games incorrectly inside a emulator where they load up the first bin track in a emulator and it doesn't play any background music. that's because they're supposed to load the .cue file. Preferably i would like PS1 games to come in 1 bin file to avoid confusion. But it's Redump's decision to seperate the tracks individually for PS1 and Saturn games.

But yeah the first track is the data track, and the rest are CDDA audio tracks. So you can patch it on a .bin that merges all the tracks together, or patch it on the first track.

up until March of 2021, there's never been a way to fully play PS1 games with CDDA audio other than with a modchip, using a PSIO type device, or swapping with the original retail game. but earlier this year a user named Socram discovered a exploit that unlocks the drive by using Tony hawk or another compatible game. the exploit is callecd tonyhax. This basically unlocks the CD Drive where you can lift the lid open and when you insert a backup it'll play whereas with swapping methods u would need to have something pressed down on the sensor to have it think that the lid is closed. Lifting the lid open will refresh the toc that's why the music plays properly.

what a coincidence that right when i was working on my NBA Jam 21 project, i had encountered this issue with CDDA audio not playing, then shortly after the tonyhax and freepsxboot exploit dropped. Oh and let me just say that freepsxboot only requires a ps1 memory card and i think that is more suitable. For some reason I notice a graphical glitch when using tonyhax during the Coaching tips screen, and it appears that the player profile portraits have some sort of double exposure when the portrait is mirrored but it displays properly with freepsxboot