Finding texture address N64(ssb)

[Luke]

Hi I am new to this forum and was wondering if anyone could give me advice on finding texture addresses for super smash bros. I have done a full texture hack of Super Mario 64 using Toads tools and n64rip. I have tried looking through the game's textures using tile molester and have found 1 texture of Kirby's face and a lot of textures of fire and energy balls and that sort of stuff and nothing else. I don't know much about hacking Ive only used toads tools n64rip, tilemolester and cheat engine. I think all the textures are compressed using some sort of method I don't understand. If anyone could give me any advice it be greatly appreciated.(and I know you shouldn't use tile molester to edit textures for n64 i'm using n64rip to edit textures i'm just using tile molester to find them)

   

[mib_f8sm9c]

I'll tell you what I know, though I can't guarantee it's 100% accurate, nor will it help you at all. I haven't got too much experience in this, but it's enough to give a bit of background.

A lot (possibly all?) N64 games use a microcode called Fast3D to store 3d model information. So in the case of Super Smash Bros, the 3d models for the characters and the levels would be encoded in this format. There are several different types as well (Fast3D, F3DEX, F3DEX2). This microcode also contains code for loading textures and applying it to the 3d model faces. Because of that, the specific lines of this microcode will have references to the location in memory for the textures used in the game.

To tldr; it, it's possible to find the locations of textures through looking for the Fast3D microcode that loads these textures. There's difficulties, like figuring out which of the Fast3d types it is, figuring out how the code is divided up (the raw data of the ROM can be split up so that they can be loaded separately, and the Fast3D code will reflect that splitting up), MIO encoding, and probably more.

SO

If you can be patient, I'll take a look over the Super Smash Bros rom within the next week and see if I can figure out how the ROM is put together. If I can figure it out, I can give you a list of locations you can look at with tile molester. No guarantees on the size of the textures though. Honestly you might go through it faster by yourself looking through Tile Molester, but this sounds like a fun challenge.

For what it's worth, I did the exact same thing as you for when I was trying to edit textures (find them with Tile Molester, edit with N64Rip). Just thought I'd mention that, it kinda caught my eye.

[shygoo]

I've looked into this briefly before; you would need a vpk0 decoder/encoder to get the textures in and out of the rom. There might be one available somewhere on the web.

Excerpt from my unreadable notes

Code:

​
ssb64

8021FE40 castle wall texture f3d

Rom uses vpk0 compression
80002E18 (a0 = dest address, a1 = rom address of vpk0 block, a2 = load function?)
80003648 (a0 = rom address of vpk0 block, a1 = dest ram address, a2 = pointer?, a3 = ?)
80003690 (a0 = rom address of vpk0 block, a1 = dest ram address, a2 = ? word following vpk0 signature)

​

To find locations of textures in ram with cheat engine you would want to search for 0xFD100000 and then adjust all the addresses in the list by +4, that should give you a list of texture pointers. This game doesn't seem to use ram segments so the pointers should all be absolute.

[mib_f8sm9c]

But cheat engine is cheating : (

Actually I looked up that vpk0 stuff you mentioned, found this asking for almost the same in ssb.

http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=14927.0

Darn that Zoinkity, he's popping up everywhere. Is he still around? He sounds like he'd be fun to talk to.

EDIT:
Putting down some links about decompressing the ssb rom that I want to look at later, might interest you guys too:
http://www.emutalk.net/archive/index.php/t-55095.html
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=17146.0

[Luke]

Thanks for the advice it really helped I used Universal game decompressor by SubDrag to decompress the rom. Then once it was decomprssed I looked at the indiviual files through tile molester to find the textures. This took me 4 hours to figure out so i'm gunna take a break.

[mib_f8sm9c]

Nice! Glad I was able to help in some way.