• Made the rest of my family grumpy because I’m getting to return to NZ before them, and they are the ones wanting to return
• Booked my tickets through the work Orbitz account, which by itself was not bad, I choice the lowest cost flights*, but:
  • I had US internal flights using American Airlines, thus I will not get any Air New Zealand Air Dollars (like miles), and I had to ticket in L.A. for the last two flights instead of back in Peoria
  • I flew to L.A. via from Peoria via Chicago which is 1 + 4 hours of flying verse 2 + 2 from via Denver
  • I was travelling to New Zealand via L.A. I have decided I prefer San Francisco, which is luckily my return route
  • I booked the international leg tickets under the United Airlines code-share (it’s Air NZ flight), thus could not use my free Air NZ class upgrade to travel premium economy (which looks so much nicer) and I’m not sure I’ll get the same value of Air Dollars
  • I travelled to Christchurch from Auckland via an domestic flight NZ501 instead of the international NZ303, which is way simpler to use, and I had to re-ticket again for some odd reason
• But all those issues aside, I’m here
• The travel was made hectic by finding out just after landing in Chicago that there had been an earthquake in Christchurch. Making contact with family in NZ and US used my spare time between flights
  • Thus is due to Michaela and I only having cell phones in the US. Mine is a work phone so has a toll bar, and Michaela’s is a new Verizon account, thus we are not allowed to make tolls calls on it for the first year. WTF! we already had to pay $400USD bond for the first year to open the account on account of not having a credit history in the US.
• Now I’m here in Christchurch there are water/sewer problems, thus staying at my mother’s was not going to work, but luckily my brothers farm is self contained or just well stocked, so am stay the night out there. Really wired seeing all the old brick buildings with toppled walls

So lots of lessons to learn for next time I book tickets for a trip. Next time I’ll check the price differences of some of these options…

* actually I could have travelled via Australia to get to Christchurch, but that would have made four more hours of air travel, just for $150 USD.

The reason I have to fix my Wii’s resolution, is I own a New Zealand Wii, which defaults to PAL, and I have a US TV that only supports NTSC. Thus when my Wii resets (due to no power) it goes back into PAL mode and thus is usable.

There are a number of solutions posted on the Internet for resetting resolutions. With my PAL Wii I can confirm a couple of methods reset to system default (for me PAL):

Powering down for 5 minutes

Power on Wii, give it a few seconds to boot
Hold DOWN on the directional pad of the Wii remote
While holding DOWN, press the RESET button on the Wii

However, given our US TV is NTSC resetting to PAL is of no use, thus I present the order of screens for my Australasian Wii. To help with future manual resets.

Wait until the screen looks like picture one, this can take 5-10 minutes

Then relying on the vibration feedback, and limited screen left/right feedback, follow the set of screens to turn your PAL Wii into 480p mode.

Some advice I found on the internet was to use only the green channel of the component cable to plug into the composite plug. This did work to allow seeing the picture (albeit black & white) it was equally scrolling badly, thus was not a better solving mode.

Side note: it seems that almost everybody in the USA pronounces Lego wrong when talking in the plural and it drives me batty. It’s one Lego brick, many Lego bricks, a box of Lego. No  ‘s’ anywhere. You can tell because the box with 251 pieces in the box, they write Lego, not Legos on the outside, there’s no ‘s’, unlike a box of cookies, it has an ‘s’ on the box…

Warm golden sand, warm sunny days and salt free warm water (that was real odd).

Here are some photo’s:

I had managed to break a number of parts of the game that were working correctly due to “refactoring” the code. Not sure I’ve learn my lesson, but there are a good many issues introduced, of which not all are fixed yet.

Fixed in this version:

• Issue 54, Fixed join items command, to not loose items
• Issue 55, Fixed crash from readying items from wrong class
• Issue 56, Fixed pooling of party money loosing gems and jewellery
• Issue 61, Fixed the group view display of AC
• Fixed colouring of sprites, missing black pixels
• Fixed sharing not removing treasure from ground

Thanks to Manning and Chaney for providing issue reports, and as always any issues found, post them here in the comments, email me directly (simeon.pilgrim@gmail.com), or post on the issue list.

So when this code here (seg000:00F6) calls the sub_21979 it goes via a sub function sub_10180

Which jumps to the actual function when it has been loaded into ram (after swapping some other code out and other magic!)

here the actual called function

And IDA Pro links this all together auto-magically so life is good.

But really we want to remove the jump functions out of the loop, as we can have the whole project in memory. The main advantage of cleaning up is that sub_21979 only shows one place the refers to this function (green code in top right of picture), but the jump function may have many callers, and we don’t see that, and to explore the code requires jump in and out of the jump function, which gets annoying.

Here an .idc script to fix this up. It finds all the overlay jump functions, then loops across the referencing locations and rewrite those to call the actual jump target.

#include <idc.idc>

static main()
{
	auto seg, loc;
	auto off, base;
	auto xref;

	seg = FirstSeg();

	while(seg != BADADDR )
	{
		loc = SegStart(seg);

		if( Byte(loc) == 0xCD && Byte(loc+1) == 0x3F)
		{
			Message("Fixing segment %s jumps\n", SegName(seg));

			loc = loc + 0x20;

			while(loc < SegEnd(seg))
			{
				if( Byte(loc) == 0xEA )
				{
					off = Word(loc+1);
					base = Word(loc+3);

					xref = RfirstB(loc);
					while( xref != BADADDR )
					{
						Message("Loc %x ref from %x\n", loc, xref);

						PatchWord(xref+1, off);
						PatchWord(xref+3, base);

						DelCodeXref(xref, loc, 0 );

						xref = RnextB(loc, xref);
					}
				}

				loc = loc + 5;
			}
		}

		seg = NextSeg(seg);
	}
}

And now our original calling function calls the real function

And the jump function has nobody call it, but we leave it there in case some later decoded code does call it…

And our called function correctly refers to the code that calls it

Pool of Radiance Forgotten Realms series:

• Pool of Radiance cheat code is ‘start.exe STING’
• Curse of the Azure Bonds cheat code is ‘start.exe STING Wooden’ as noted here
• Secrets of the Silver Blade cheat code is ‘start.exe Hoop Gem’ as noted here
• Pools of Darkness cheat code is ‘game.exe 2 2 Helm’ as noted here
• FRUA doesn’t seem to have obvious cheat code. aka not based on PoR code

Savage Frontier Forgotten Realms series:

• Gateway to the Savage Frontier currently needs a hacked executable (here) and then ‘game.exe Super Wooden’ press the Z button on your turn and ‘-’ on the monsters
• Treasure of the Savage Frontier ‘game.exe 2 2 Helm’

Dragonlance series:

• Champions of Krynn cheat code is ‘start.exe Woof Helm’
• Death Knights of Krynn cheat code is ‘start.exe anything Helm’
• Dark Queen of Krynn appears the same code as FRUA so again not sure.

The two Buck Rogers game are using the PoR code base, but all the normal cheat code has been removed. And there is no obvious “Gods intervene!” in the text strings of the engine

Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace  is a different code base, the previous games PoR based code bases are Pascal where as this one is C/C++, I couldn’t see anything that looks like a “Gods intervene” text string ether.

• Skips the title screen
• Allows turning on/off of the debugging
• Allows player affect dumping

Parameter 2 set to Gem

• Skips the copy protection
• Allows ‘The Gods intervene!”, via alt-x
• Allows area view in all locations
• The code has support for ‘Turning on/off free training, via J in training menu’ but as the menu’s no longer use keyboard short-cuts, so I can’t see how to activate it

The first: adding a 1 as the first parameter skips the title screen, and copy protection.

game.exe 1

Then there are three choices of third parameter

• Gem – Allows view of the area map in all locations
• HALIBUT – Allows editing/modifying of experienced players
• Helm – Allows ‘The GODS Intervene!’ – a.k.a. kills all enemy in combat, via alt-x

Thus to play the latter you would type

game.exe 1 2 Helm

What I don’t know yet is how to control what game is loaded if you use the 1 parameter, and the game ends up in a slightly unplayable mode. From reading the code it looks like it should load saved game Z. But that’s not working out for me so far.