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grimdoomer / Halo-2-HD

HD patch for Halo 2 on the original Xbox
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Feature request - Different GameID folder on E for isolation #2

Open thelamer opened 1 month ago

thelamer commented 1 month ago

Right now I am running into trying to run both this HD pack at 1.0 and a clean 1.5 version for Insignia. Because both games have the same title ID you basically brick Halo 2 HD when adding 1.5 and map packs.

If the patch also modified the games title ID it should in theory use a different path on E and allow them both to co-exist, though I do not know this with certainty.

Has anyone set this up or tested this out in any way? I have to imagine the same crowd playing HD would also be using Insignia.

thelamer commented 1 month ago

I am on Linux and all these xbe tools are for Windows xp I could find. So I just opened the patched xbe with a hex editor and located the tile ID:

halo_unchanged

So here it is a hex string in reverse (6400534D) which is MS0064 (MS is UTF-8 title 0064 in u16) I just swapped the 64 to 70, which is an unused title ID according to this: https://github.com/jeltaqq/Xbox-Original-GameList/blob/master/Xbox%20Original%20GameList.tsv

Will look like this:

halo_changed

This seems like something along these lines should be default behavior for the patch to not only keep it isolated but I have to imagine the vast majority of modded xboxs out there have something in UDATA and TDATA for 4D530064 given it was the most popular game for the console.

With this change the patched Halo 2 HD uses its own E UDATA and TDATA paths and you can have both the up to date Halo 2 for Insignia and Halo 2 HD, heck with this change you probably do not even need 2 Halo folders, just plop the xbe in there with a different name and launch it from the file explorer.