For crazyc/Zer0-X - What's wrong with R&C 3?

[felipaopl]

Hey, first of all, hell of a good job that you guys have done. Please note that I'm not complaining/requesting anything, just a question.... why Ratchet and Clank 3 is one of the remaining games that don't work? What kind of "data access" (please, I'm a noob, so forgive me) is wrong when the game is loaded form the HDD that prevents it to work? (assuming that you have a clue of what could be, of course).

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

[Random21]

Hey, first of all, hell of a good job that you guys have done. Please note that I'm not complaining/requesting anything, just a question.... why Ratchet and Clank 3 is one of the remaining games that don't work? What kind of "data access" (please, I'm a noob, so forgive me) is wrong when the game is loaded form the HDD that prevents it to work? (assuming that you have a clue of what could be, of course).

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

I would also like to thank crazyc and Zero x for they amazing skills in making a games compatable and ask why is ratchet and clank still not compatable?

My guess is its heavily encrypted not to work with HDL/HDA.

Midnight club 3 doesn't work too.

[darkpoet]

Naw, good guess though. I don't quite remember what was said but Ratchet and Clank 3 will probably never work with HDLoader. I tried multiple fixes on my own and it always always locks up on any screen that attempts to autosave to the memcard.

I think I remember dlanor (or crazyc maybe) saying that at these "Autosave" points it was actually doing direct disk access to the cd-drive. Putting it on the HDD just causes it to crash at these points. Maybe you could hack the DVD IRX in R&C to look for sectors or whatever but you've got the added problem that the DVD appears to contain less then 1 GB to WinHIIP (And HDL too I think)... Funny that I know the DVD can be copied but why it appears so strangely small.... well, hmmm... maybe it is possible. But so complicated that it would probably need some sort of hack to extract the whole CD (including the raw info on the CD somewhere), hacks to the way it reads (changing direct disk to ISO maybe), and possibly it's own completely hacked HDLoader just to make sure...

That's just too much hacking. And as someone said before, it probably won't improve load time for this game anyway...

[dlanor]

I think I remember dlanor (or crazyc maybe)

It wasn't me. I don't have this game, so I never tested it.

Funny that I know the DVD can be copied but why it appears so strangely small....

That's probably due to the same technique Squaresoft/Square-Enix uses for most of their releases. FFX, FFX-2, and Star Ocean 3 all appear to have files adding up to only a few megabytes. (FFX-2 PAL == 4.26 MB !!!)

In fact the real files are stored in places not indicated by the disc TOC. Presumably their development package keeps track of LBA locations in a special file during development, and uses this file to 'hard code' the LBA numbers into the routines accessing the files. This way there is NO easy way for anyone with access only to the binaries to figure out the LBA base of each 'file'. The only way to do it would be to disassemble the entire code and analyze all of it. (Would probably take many man-years of hard work per game.)

Best regards: dlanor

[skaz]

yes thats exactly the case for R&C 3... if u open it with ultra iso or daemon tools u willonly find 129 mb of data... the rest is hidden