hex editing and so forth

[sporkit]

hi, i think this is the best place to post this.

recently somebody in the tony hawks pro skater online community managed to unlock some unfinished levels that were actually left on the games disk. i believe he changed some code that told the game to load the lost levels instead of a standard one.

i got this to work by extracting the game iso to my pc, extracting a file called skate5.wad (from the iso), hex editing it (with the code he told me to change), injecting it back into the iso, copying it to the ps2 hd with winhiip, and then booting with hdloader. i understand how all this works and why, but how in the world would this guy knew what to edit in the hex code. theres just so much of it.

i managed to explore a little bit and use a program called wadrip.exe to view the contents of the skate5.wad. im guessing he edited these files then managed to repackage the wad or something. i also noticed some .ps2 files were extracted and was wondering if there is anything i could do with them.

anybody have suggestions or pointers on figureing out how i might learn do to this on my own?

[sporkit]

well i managed to find out a little bit of information on how he did this.

apparantly the xbox uses an uncompressed wad so he used some tools to read the different file types. apparatly there is a .pre file ripper out there that works on xbox. is there any sites with more information about the different file types on these systems?

[s00pcan]

Gah, you got thug on your pc? I can't get iso files over 4gb to transfer, otherwise I'd have done this by now. Btw, editing the whole wad is pretty simple since wad files aren't compressed at all, so you can extract the file, change whatever, then find the file in the original and change it again.

Pre is a compressed format that contains serveral files. I've been looking for the .pre ripper and can't find it. (It'd be useful for every thps game) I also want a wad compiler that works with thps4 and thug (the one I have only works for thps3).

[sporkit]

ahh! sup s00p. didnt think id see anybody from the thps community over here.

anyway, getting the iso on your computer shouldnt be hard. did you try dvd decrypter? i used that then winiso to extract. iman gave me a wad ripper but i know mudda has got to have something for the pre files.

heh i think i might just start a site about this or something.

[s00pcan]

FAT32 can suck it. It has a 4gb limit, so I just changed it to NTFS and I'm transfering thug to my pc right now. Can I get the wad ripper?

[s00pcan]

I would have this done, but hex workshop can't save a 800mb+ file.

edit: got it, but I had to use like 3 different hex editors.

[sporkit]

lol. hit me up on aim sporkit17. ill help you out.

[Den Leiw]

hmmm I'm also interested in playing this level of tony hawk

sdo you plan to post on how to do it?

[s00pcan]

As soon as I get it to work I'll make a simple ips patch.

[sporkit]

do you plan to post on how to do it?

http://www.gameroom.com/zyno/index1.htm

its actually pretty simple to do. what im more concerned with is understanding how they knew what hex to replace. did they read it with a tool or what?

i know the wad they hexed can be expanded into other files which they edited.


edit: www.hackthps.no-ip.com
i put this up for a centeral place to discuss hacking the game and such.