Driver Madness

I am requesting an ePSXe savestate that's at the car selection screen for San Francisco and Los Angeles. My memory is fuzzy, so I'm not quite sure when this occurs. Reason I ask is because FLAT.LEV is, as we all guessed, a beta level, and so I figured if I can get a savestate in FLAT.LEV on the PSX, we might get some beta textures.

Please and thank you!

FLAT.LEV was the desert area right? if so than i can provide one.

No, FLAT.LEV is the apartment(s)

There's a car selection screen in the PSX version? Do tell cause I've been playing it in ePSXe lately.

I'm almost 100% positive there's a car select screen on the PSX, because you can choose between:

-Pontiac LeMans (Purple car)
-Chevrolet Chevelle (Green car)
-Chevrolet Camaro (Brown car)

But you have to choose the right path in the missions! Or, I could just be on crack. :/

According to the mission ladder on the PC, there should be a car selection message right after the Assassination at the Chinese Theater...but I watched a walkthrough and nothing happened. I'm kinda worried now...

Dr. Doom wrote:No, FLAT.LEV is the apartment(s)

Aha, thx dude, i will provide an savestate for ePSXe later today then

I'm hoping you can select a car on PSX...this may suck if I'm wrong

*hopes*

I can give you a gameshark cheat to be able to switch cars, and one more question about the savestate, do you want one for every room even though they are in the same .LEV file? Otherwise i just give you one from the missions in Miami.

No no, I don't want the apartments, I already have one of those. I was hoping there was a car selection screen one (from Frisco or LA). But like I said, I'm starting to doubt one even exists...

And no, I don't need a car selection gameshark. That's not the point. If the car selection screen exists on PS1 during missions, I could possibly find beta textures in the savestate. But like I said, this is starting to make me doubtful.

I never saw an car selection screen and i did all missions at least once, and i'm starting to gett a bit confused but if i can make savestates on my psp (which i doubt) than i can give you one in Frisco (motel room offcourse). I personally would rather make savestates of the interview mission or New Castle because there's more chanse that they are in there. But then again, a savestate only contains textures that are actually used. Sorry if i couldn't help dude :/

Small edit: I highly doubt that the car selection screen can be found without hacking the .LEV in a rom.

I would suggest after doing all the Undercover mode in PC game - in some places "you have 2-3-4 new messages" - you can choose ONE of them and then you avoid the other ones - and possibly avoid car selection mission.

So if you have more than 1 message - save the game and try all the options.

I know what Mark does want to get, as soon as I get internet to my PC, I will contact him over MSN.

Also, it's true, if PSX's flat.lev does hold similar stuff like PC's flat.lev, double the fun!

I was probably wrong the entire time. I don't think a car selection screen exists on the PS1, and that I'm thinking of the PC version.

To those of you who are confused - I'm talking about the car selection screen you get when you have a voicemail (on the PC anyways) telling you about some hot new wheels that came in. It's one of the first things you can do in Los Angeles on the PC, lol.

Anyway, you can mod the dmladder with CARSEL 0,1 or 2 as you need .fbd file. I need to check PSX's dmladder if it has this line too.

Hate to say it, but the PSX files are encoded...they're not simple notepad txt files like the PC version. *sigh* nobody understands me what I'm trying to say.

.LEV files are in theory the same as in the pc version. I dare to say it, if you extract them from the rom then maybe you can acces them via the texture tool (which i forgot the name of).

Unfortunately they aren't, and in fact they are much harder to use than the pc levels, which is why I haven't been able to extract the images. I hasn't been my main focus though. And the texture tool is the Driver Texture Editor .

!! I !! understand! And respect it
Maybe hex editing however?

About textures: there is quite nice program called "PSicture".

^ Have you ever opened a PSX file using PSicture with success?

I use improved version of psxvram, so I basicly open a savestate without making it archive and crap.

I opened with success some fonts from Crash Bandicoot series. But I don't remember from which version.

It working with other games... it's PlayStationIcture program anyway. But you can hardly get any stuff from Driver, sadly. Seems like Reflections is using really hard to decode format on the PlayStation.

I thought some time about data structure in Driver, and now I see, it is quite similar to GTA3 engine. One big archive with models and textures of the world.

I think that Driver is so hard to encode, because it was written in some archaic programming language, for example Pascal or Delphi, i don't know...

I was able to use PSicture last night to find some pictures. Basically, you need to know where the start of an image is using a HEX editor. The number of palettes is in a DWORD ([pal] 00 00 00) which after that comes the image data. On the first address right after the last 00 in the DWORD, that's the address you need to use. All images are 2048 byte aligned, so to skip to the next image, you need to use the equation 256*128+2048 and add that to the decimal address you just used. Well, that one works for the following example, anyways.

In a HEX editor, go to address 10B804. You'll see that the beginning of the address is "10 00 00 00" which is the DWORD that contains the palette. Translate the HEX 10 to get the decimal number of 16. That's how many palettes there are - 16. Now, using this newfound knowledge, we know so far that:

Address = 1095684
Bits per pixel = 4 (this is what Driver uses)
# Palettes = 16

Still missing some data. For the image size, use 256 X 256. This may work for every image, but this is unknown.

To calculate the offset (which is very important) use the equation 2048-4-32*[pal], so basically, in this case, we take 2044 and subtract 32*16 (which is 512) to get the offset of 1532.

Now we know that -

Address = 1095684
Image size = 256 x 256
Bits Per Pixel = 4
Offset = 1532
# Palettes = 16
(DO NOT CHECK "PALETTE AFTER IMAGE")

Punch those in, and if all goes according to plan, you can use F7 and F8 to scan through each of the palettes from left to right.

About the 2048-byte aligned thing, basically use the equation to get 34816 and ADD it to the address 1095684 to get the address of 1130500. Use your HEX editor to go to this address and figure out the number of palettes. If you go into PSicture only to find out there's no images there, you probably ran into the end of an image. Same thing for me.

I have a feeling 256*128-2048 is multiplying the image size and subtracting 2048 to align the next image as 2048-byte aligned. But alas, maybe Jeff can reiterate on this a bit more. This is, afterall, what he taught me last night. Yes, PS1 LEV files are being looked into, but no guarantees!

I am not the one you should ask for help. I only know the basics, lol.

Have fun!

Quite interesting.