Tecmo Super JRPG! Let's Play Secret of the Stars! Blind!

Originally Posted by JBear

Villains in this game continue to have the best names.

Originally Posted by JBear

Ryu sure has a look to him. Hunching like that all the time is really going to ruin his back long-term, and I am very unclear what exactly is happening with that hair.

Originally Posted by Mightyblue

It's the spell level thing I think; different levels of Cure-B cure different ailments, as I am suddenly reminded. Yes, that is exactly as annoying as you think it is.

Originally Posted by Dracula

Finally, when he's defeated, he indeed uses the phrase "覚えていろ！" which is usually translated as "I'll remember this!" and makes him sound like Team Rocket.

Originally Posted by Dracula

And how about our Disk 0 boss, Dr. Gari? Well, he's a fascinating example of subtext lost. In Japanese, his name is Dr. Garigari, which as you can see has several juicy and evocative meanings. If I were localizing this game, I might go with something like "Dr. Bonegreed" to keep the connotation, but it's not easy to translate this type of name, and I'm not surprised the meaning didn't come through on the SNES version.

Originally Posted by Dracula

Finally, we have TINA. Interestingly, her name was changed from レイナ, which is the same kana that gave us Reyna/Lenna from FFIV! I wonder if Tecmo was worried they'd get in trouble with Square? Or did they think the name was too weird? Who knows!

Originally Posted by Sensenic

The name might also be a pun on a famous horror doctor, which would make it even better!

Originally Posted by Sensenic

Seems unlikely, given that FFV never reached the states, but if it's the case it's funny to me that they would choose the Japanese name of the protagonist of the following game, then. XD

Alright, so first off, I need to pull back the curtain to explain a bit of my process for this LP before this will make any sense. My first goal for any LP is to have fun: it's never guaranteed that I'll have an audience, so I need to enjoy what I'm doing, and if other people like it too, then that's just a bonus. To that end, I want to be able to largely just chill and enjoy the game while I'm playing, so what I've settled on for this LP is playing the game in my emulator but recording a "movie" file while I do so, which in SNES9x is a series of button inputs that can then be "played" to reproduce a session. So I play for a few hours while the emulator records my inputs and I take notes about things that I want to mention or jokes that occur to me or specific screenshots or gifs that I want to make sure to capture, as well as candid reactions that I want to capture to help relate the experience of playing in the moment. Then, after I'm done, I roll it back and play the movie file while taking hundreds of screenshots and careful additional notes with timestamps. So far, this process has worked great! This time... it didn't.

During this update I had cause to reset the game and reload an earlier save (you'll see why when I finally publish the update). My reading lead me to believe that this would be fine, but that reading was a pack of lies. What I ended up with was a movie file that played for about 1.5 hours and then just died at the moment of the reset. It would still replay the remaining couple of hours of inputs, but they'd just be on a black screen. I was devastated. I knew that the data was all still there, but I had to figure out how I could leverage it, or if that was even possible.

Now, just to get out in front of this, at this point (or at some futher point during the increasingly ludicrous process that I'm about to describe) you might just ask yourself "JBear, why not just replay those couple of hours?" Well, there's a few reasons. First and foremost, I hate hate hate doing the same thing twice. Just sets my teeth on edge. It's a big part of why I refuse to grind in RPGs! Also, this update was massive, and the game was honestly getting a bit overwhelming, and I had a bunch of in-progress questlines and quest hooks and a big to-do list for next session and I was worried about getting things back to the same precise state again. Additionally, I had a bunch of notes and timestamps that would either be completely irrelevant or need to be rewritten. Each of my jokes are my precious children and I'd hate to not be able to make one that I'd made prior because a crit didn't happen this time or whatever. So, I had one canonical play-through that I wanted to save at any cost, so that's what I set out to do!

So, breaking the problem down, I quickly arrived at a high level solution: I needed to split my movie file into two files. A first half that would play back everything up to the reset, and a second half that would play everything after. Easy, right? I tried opening up the file in notepad to see if it was plain text or not. This is what I was greeted with:

Great. So, no such luck. This was going to be a challenge. My next task was figuring out what kind of file an SNES9x movie file is. What kind of data it stores, how it stores it, that sort of thing. I quickly found a speed-runner who described editing one of these files to make Mega Man shoot on a specific frame, so at the very least, I had confirmation that this was possible! Eventually, after some research (I'm yadda-yadda-ing past a lot of quality time on Google throughout this entire process), I ended up at a Google Code archive that described exactly what I needed. It had a wiki page that described the 32-bit movie file header and the data contained there. So I found and downloaded a free online hex editor, and opened my movie file to be greeted with this:



Simple! (lol)

Just to briefly describe what you're seeing here, the left 2/3 of the screen is displaying the hexadecimal data in the file, while the right 1/3 is the corresponding decimal values that those generate (i.e. the gibberish that I see when I try to open it as plain text). So at any given point I am highlighted something in both the left and right section, and those correspond to two different interpretations of the same data.

Now it was a matter of trying to interpret this data based on the header specification in the wiki. There were a few things that I needed to identify. Firstly, and most importantly, I had to find out how the inputs were stored, and what a reset input looked like, because that's my breakpoint. The wiki told me the following:

So what that tells me is that if I inspect the hex data in the four cells starting at that address, I'll be able to get a pointer to the address in the file where the controller data starts:



So, as you can see from the four cells here highlighted in red, the controller input data starts at memory address 000004B0, or 4B0. I ask the hex editor to send me to that memory address, and it takes me here:



The cell highlighted in blue is my first controller input data. There's a whole lot of weird looking junk before that, but I don't know what that is and probably don't need to care (spoiler for later: I'm going to need to care). As it so happens, it's just after a bunch of cells with CC in a row, which is encouraging, because that makes it pretty likely that I have successfully identified the start of a new section of some nature. From the specification, I know the following:

Aha! So what I'm looking for is two cells in a row with FF, which will identify the exact input frame in the file where my world came crashing down. So I do a search on the file and:



Success! There's my breakpoint. So now all I do is make two copies of the file, a "first half" and "second half". In the first half, I just delete every cell after the FF FF. I do this, and run it, and everything works fine. Encouraging! Then, for the second half, I highlight every cell between the starting memory address identified earlier and the FF FF cells inclusive and "cut" them. Then I load up the file in the emulator and...

Disaster! The movie file loads just fine, so at least I didn't break anything, but my characters just wander around bumping into walls like I've gone senile. What gives? Well, I'm an idiot: I loaded up the save file from the start of the session, so of course applying the set of inputs from later in the session wouldn't work. I needed to run it on an updated save! So I loaded up part one, ran it through, and then loaded up part two.

...It still didn't work. What the hell?

Well, as it turns out, so as to ensure that a movie will execute identically every time, the movie file actually embeds an emulator savestate. This makes complete intuitive sense, but I had no idea that it was doing it; I'd been carefully making and restoring back-ups of my save files during my previous recording/playback sessions like a fool! So now I had a new challenge: I had to somehow embed an updated savestate in the movie file for the second half. That's considerably more complicated that just manipulating button presses!

First things first, back to the header spec:

So, just like for the controller data, this too had a pointer than I had to find and follow. To spare you the specifics this time, this eventually lead me to, you guessed it, that giant block of gibberish at the start of the file. Fortunately, I had started to engage my brain by this point, so what I did was load up the first movie and run it again, and then paused it just before the end and stopped playback. Then I reset the ROM and started recording a new, fourth movie file from this new state, which had the save file that I needed from midway through the session as a baseline. I saved this brief recording, then opened the new movie file in the hex editor and copied and pasted the chunk of data representing the new save state over that same chunk in the second half file. Then I loaded up the second half movie yet again and crossed my fingers...

Success!

...of a sort. At first, everything seemed fine. I hit the file menu, loaded up the new mid-session save, and the file continued to play. I walked around a bit, talked to an NPC, and everything seemed fine. Then I started walking in circles and randomly casting spells from my menu. Oh no! What had gone wrong now? What was I missing?

I played back the movie a second time, and it went wrong in the exact same fashion. I tried a 3rd time, and then I saw it: there was an NPC standing in my way that completely put the entire next two hours out of sync. My heart sunk. I had the right inputs, and I had the right save file, but there was still one vital piece of the puzzle that was missing, and I realized exactly what it was with steadily growing dread: I had the wrong Random Number Generator seed. The randomly moving NPCs weren't moving in exactly the same fashion as they did when I recorded those inputs, which made the whole movie file worse than useless. I was sunk. I had no idea how to manipulate an RNG seed...

...Or did I?

Now, as you might imagine, Tecmo Secret of the Stars is not Final Fantasy. There's no in-depth guides on how the game determines RNG, or how to determine or manipulate that RNG. But I've watched enough speed-running to have an inkling, so I tried an experiment. I opened back up the second half movie file in the hex editor and I added a few extra blank 00 00 inputs at the start of the controller input section. Then I saved the file and loaded up the new movie. This movie also filed and stumbled around comically inept but, and this is crucial, it did so differently. Introducing an arbitrary pause at the title screen before starting the session has successfully manipulated the RNG seed.

So I had a goal, and I had a method, and I had what I hoped were a set of sound principles: that if I was able to manually test, one by one, every possible RNG seed, I would eventually stumble across the one, and only one correct seed such that everything would magically work and the update would be saved. So I set to work. I would run the movie, evaluate it, and, once it failed, reopen the file and add a single additional blank 00 00 frame of controller input at the start of the controller data. Then I'd load it up and try again. Sure enough, I was getting different random results. At this point all that was left was brute force and prayer. I had no idea how many possible RNG seeds there could be, but hopefully it was less than 128, or maybe even 64 or 32 if I was lucky.

There were a lot of ups and down over the hours that I worked away at this. Each seed change took me several minutes, as I had to carefully execute my process. Any missed or screwed up steps might cause me to miss my one correct seed, after all. One seed in what I estimate to be the early 20s (I long gave up counting) initially seemed so promising that I was sure I had it, going a full 10 minutes before suddenly failing spectacularly. I was starting to make up names and personalities for these NPCs that kept getting in my way. I began to rue one old man in particular, whose random movement could only read to me as malicious as I descended ever further into this madness.

But then. But then. Finally, a light at the end of the tunnel. Everything seemed good...? Five minutes became ten, and ten became twenty, until suddenly I was looking at the comforting SEE YA message from the end of a session. I'd done it! I could scarcely believe it. I was so sure that I was doomed. I'd climbed the mountain, taught myself new methods and tools and concepts that I never knew and never thought I'd need. I'm just so... incredibly pleased with myself. Now I hope to never, ever need to do anything like this ever again. God.

Originally Posted by Beowulf

...your LP methods are very different from mine, and while I admire your madness, I do not share it.

Originally Posted by JBear

And I too use Irfanview for bulk image operations (although not on this LP; I'd have preferred bigger shots, but I wasn't happy with the fidelity of any resized shots that I tried, no matter what settings I used, so I ultimately just decided not to resize them at all)

Originally Posted by JBear

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