Amiga version editing

[PLPynton]

Hi,

I have Dune 2 1.00 on Amiga emulator.

have already read most of the topics. Unfortunately no usable tools from PC version can be used for Amiga except for unusable graphics and so on.

Do you know anyone did something for Amiga files like executables .ini ext?

I have already broke down and stripped completely Amiga scenario files but they are no plain text plike PC ones so it was a lot of work to discover everything from scrach as it was strictly hex based work. Still I am missing meaning for some of teams commands and things like that as they were never used in original scripts so there is i big guess what hex value they should have.

I noticed that Amiga version 1.00 is much more upgraded than PC one. There is no teambug for example, no turret bugs. Teaming or rather group follow friendly unit function works by default just like repeated reinforcements. Much stuff simply works here even if it was not operational on 1.07 of PC.

Whatever. I have a question:

1. Where can I find PC exe editor resources like how was techtree, unit restriction discovered in exe datasection? I could use that knowledge as the chance is very high that it is similar data structure to amiga one. I could of course reedit exe of PC that compare effect with unchanged version to discover what has been changed to achieve desired effect but it is nonsense at this knowledge is common for some ppl here. Just lost of time for me, better ask right?

2. Is there a chance to find what hex values of PC ini files correspond to plain text used for edition (i understood PC one uses plain text commands what leads to ex. teambug ect.)?

for example

define bloom at 05AAh and 05B7h

from pc would like for amiga more like

0142 0002 05AA 05B7h in the Amiga ini file

while ex PC Kamikaze, Normal team commands loke here like 4Bh & 4Eh

3. Does anyone know it another as battle for arrakis 1.0 war released ever on amiga? like 1.2 or whatever?

one conclusion have anyone tried to place structure 14h near your base on PC version and have it this cool effect as in Amiga 1.00 as well? I personally think it coud have been under development and never finished for release. I was never able to finish Ordos L9 with this structure implemented in player base so hard it makes the game here

[Nyerguds]

I don't really understand what you mean... my Dune II editor for the PC version is open source, and written in FreePascal. You can access all information about it in the editor thread and on my website.

[PLPynton]

I don't really understand what you mean... my Dune II editor for the PC version is open source, and written in FreePascal. You can access all information about it in the editor thread and on my website.

Thanks for your reply.

What your editor does is to simply change a value at offset in executable. Everything is nice but...

What you certainly have is your knowledge base. For example:

Tank has its data stored in executable starting at offset X. The data is Y bytes long. Each byte of it corresponds to props of this unit as follows:

b1- something

b2- unknown

...

b17&18 -energy

and so on till the end of this unit data

What I need is a simple info about how this data table looks like so i can trace it in amiga version.

Let us say the first entry of table is caryall. You just have to post me caryall default unchanged HEX data (so i can find it in amiga exe) and i will do the rest by myself.

of course buildings or techlimits for levels will have completely different structure and location but if you give me again 1 example how it looks in PC version I will find rest by myself ;)

what pisses me the most is that I have to follow originally designated tech limits for levels 1-9. I want to rewrite that but I do not have a clue how the data is organized nor how original unchanged values look like to find them with hex tool in that executable.

I will be really glad if you can post unit, building and techlimit structure from pc exe. just 1 unchanged entry as raw hex

here is your pic for my example. let us say the cost of caryall is ingame 800 and the builttime is 64. now i assume these values are simply next to eachother and cost is 2 bit just as the time? or is the time 1b value?

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/dune/dune2edit/images/d2editor_customfile.png

beaause if i start to look for with 2 byte of information like unit cost, i will find like 50 possible places in exe it would mean time consumption of 25 times restarting the game (in middle case scenario) ;)

EDIT:

F22E 9200 6F0A A23E 6D9C C104 7764 84B7

013B 96F4 3408 B73A E802 98A3 8B48 00C2

0155 AF9B C6CB 4535 A2B1 00D1 0098 5A15

ok i know where the units data is located i just have found where the launcher cost is stored C201 starting from last bit from line2

how is the tech limits for levels 1-7 handled in pc version? need to enable all from l1.

Funny thing I found also caryall and other units. unfortanately some details are shared between units, lazy programming. example changing siegetanks cost you will change as well costs of ornithropter and sonic tank, while changing its builttime will change ornithropters but not sonictanks. fcukt up situation. most unexpected changing caryall builttime factor it will change it movement speed as well. that sucks!

[Nyerguds]

Tech levels are handled by the combination of the unit's "Upgrades needed" and the structure's "tech level" and "1st upgrade tech level", "2nd upgrade tech level" and "3rd upgrade tech level" settings.

So basically units are theoretically always buildable, but the building that builds them needs to have a certain amount of upgrades.

The building that builds them has the real tech level restrictions, on its first build level and on when it can do its upgrades.

As for the shared settings, that's compiler optimization. Not really surprising for a console version; console media (cartridges 'n' stuff) usually don't have much space on them.

I've had to untangle some stuff like that in C&C1 too. For one of the trees, the "theater ownership" value (meaning, in which terrain tileset you could use that tree) was the same value as its unit ID, so the data was set once for the ownership and since it was still in memory it was just used again for the unit ID. When I added a new terrain tileset to the game, I had to change those ownership values so the trees could be used there, but since it also changed that one tree's unit ID, it caused serious problems :P

Problem with consoles is, they have a different CPU type than PCs, so unless you got a disassembler for the Amiga chip instruction set, it's going to be hard to fix that kind of stuff.

As for how the values will be stored in the rom, I have no idea. In PC Dune II, it's all raw data, one value after the other, which makes it hard to separate them. In C&C1 however, all values of the unit are pushed into the stack one by one to serve as parameters for the make_unit function, which has the advantage that there's an easily identifiable 'push' command byte between each value. Since amiga is an entirely different architecture, I honestly have no idea how it's done there.

[PLPynton]

Shit, it remembers me x-com apoc editing somehow...

btw. I have installed 1.07 PC and editor of yours. Quite a nice work mate, grats... Have found most of the stuff in ami version but as said before is not worth an effort since executable is really fcuked considering acceptable programing habits.

Do not have to contribute nothing yet for exe editing but if one is interested I have broke down scenarios editing WIN&LOSE flags that are btw. really confusing. Well it allows to mix even the time countdown conditions into winning or even losing scenario, together with stuff like you lose scenario if you harvest to much spice or destroy enemy buildings or any combination you could imagine here. There is still 1 bit unknown and I think it has to do with defeating one enemy regardless to others.

[Nyerguds]

ohh, yeah... I remember some guys here researching that (the bit flags being just one number in the ini files), but I don't have a clue where that research went.

[MrFlibble]

First of all, Minniation knows a lot about the Amiga version of Dune II. You could try contacting him and check out his site.

Secondly, if you want to do some scenario editing, TCH's Dune 2 Scenario Editor supports both the PC and Amiga scenario formats.

I noticed that Amiga version 1.00 is much more upgraded than PC one. There is no teambug for example, no turret bugs. Teaming or rather group follow friendly unit function works by default just like repeated reinforcements. Much stuff simply works here even if it was not operational on 1.07 of PC.

As far as I can tell, the Amiga version is based upon the PC Dune II v1.07. As for the "team bug", it's not the ability to follow friendly units, it's the bug that prevents the AI from using attack team scripts (read more here).

one conclusion have anyone tried to place structure 14h near your base on PC version and have it this cool effect as in Amiga 1.00 as well? I personally think it coud have been under development and never finished for release. I was never able to finish Ordos L9 with this structure implemented in player base so hard it makes the game here ;)

Do you mean that there is an unused building in the Amiga version? :O I don't think there are any obsolete structures in the PC version, but no one really looked into this yet. Can you post a screenshot please? :)

So basically units are theoretically always buildable, but the building that builds them needs to have a certain amount of upgrades.

The building that builds them has the real tech level restrictions, on its first build level and on when it can do its upgrades.

Moreover, the "tech level" parameter for units is ignored by the game, so it is simply not possible to make a unit available from a specific level unless it requires an upgrade or a building.

Do not have to contribute nothing yet for exe editing but if one is interested I have broke down scenarios editing WIN&LOSE flags that are btw. really confusing. Well it allows to mix even the time countdown conditions into winning or even losing scenario, together with stuff like you lose scenario if you harvest to much spice or destroy enemy buildings or any combination you could imagine here. There is still 1 bit unknown and I think it has to do with defeating one enemy regardless to others.

It would be very nice if you posted your research results for the win/lose flags, as information on this subject is still scarce. The time countdown bit is especially interesting: this option seems to be present in the PC version as well (there's a string "Timeout win" in the EXE, and the TimeOut parameter in the scenarios), but no one had been able to identify the correct flags for this mode so far.

[Nyerguds]

Do you mean that there is an unused building in the Amiga version? :O I don't think there are any obsolete structures in the PC version, but no one really looked into this yet. Can you post a screenshot please? :)

Not really true... I've looked at the data in the exe file, and the exe section stops after the last building (the Outpost). There's no more structure data in the list. And this is structure.

I think it's more odd that there's no structure 0 or 1.

[MrFlibble]

What I meant was no one ever thought of any obsolete units or structures in the PC version (especially since all zero-terminated headers are in use), so there was no search for possible exceptions or code leftovers that would indicate that such a structure or unit ever existed. However, there were rumors about hospitals in Dune II, I have no idea whether they were based on any fact or just pure fantasy.

[Nyerguds]

well, I could look into the demo's exe... think that's the earliest we got. but I doubt there's anything in there.

[PLPynton]

thanks for replies, i will read amiga hint thanks. i have a very little amount of time today however short reply i can do.

building 14h on amiga is 1x1, it removes fog of war in radius of about 55 squares. nor sure if this one can be rendered fully functional or buildable with exe editing nor if there is sense for it- one is certain it quite upgrades scenario difficulty as you will be attacked in the instance you started playing ;) it behaves like building completely gets even attacked but it has really low priority on that.

lose/win flags

bit0 is a timeout flag

bit1 is a quota flag

bit2 is a enemy buildings destroyed flag

still experimenting with bit 3 as this one seems to be functional as well

set no lose conditions and just win condition to perform lose scenario at a given condition meet (quite confusing)

winning is quite easy but mind setting lose contdition here in some cases. quite confusing i know but i have all noted on paper and will share it asap

[MrFlibble]

Thanks for the win/lose flags info, that is very insightful :)

building 14h on amiga is 1x1, it removes fog of war in radius of about 55 squares. nor sure if this one can be rendered fully functional or buildable with exe editing nor if there is sense for it- one is certain it quite upgrades scenario difficulty as you will be attacked in the instance you started playing ;) it behaves like building completely gets even attacked but it has really low priority on that.

Interesting. Does this building have its own graphics, or does it use graphics of another structure?

On a somewhat related note, I remember that when playing Super Dune 2 (v1.0 from 1994), in one mission (I'm not sure which side it was) there was a structure in the enemy base that messed up the screen colours when I clicked on it. The structure was partially concealed by the fog so I don't know what it was (maybe an Outpost, but it was really difficult to discern anything with the wrong colours). The screen would only go back to normal after calling up the game menu or entering the Mentat screen. I did not check the scenario files specifically for presence of anomalies, and this is most probably not the case of an obsolete building, but I though it was worth mentioning anyway :)

[minniat]

Do you know anyone did something for Amiga files like executables .ini ext?

I have already broke down and stripped completely Amiga scenario files but they are no plain text plike PC ones so it was a lot of work to discover everything from scrach as it was strictly hex based work. Still I am missing meaning for some of teams commands and things like that as they were never used in original scripts so there is i big guess what hex value they should have.

I made some work regarding scenario format from Amiga version of Dune 2. Here you can download scenario converter for Amiga. It converts scenario from Amiga format to plain text. Note that these are Amiga executables.

http://minniatian.republika.pl/Dune2/Files/ScenPack.lha