Sage of Mirrors

Link's dead. Did you use several programs to do that? I once tried a RARC packer from the same site, but they created RARCs with bizzare formats, and I don't think the game likes them.

Oh. OK. Thanks. Kargaroc, what did you use to pack .arcs?

Tell me how you did this. Now. Please?

If I have to insert a larger file into the ISO, I just use GCR to rip the root folder out, replace the file I want to change, and convert it back to an ISO with GCR.

Does anybody know how I could go about extracting the audio files for Koume and Kotake's laughs? Specifically, where they are in the ROM and how'd I'd convert them to playable files? It's an odd question, I'm aware of that, but I thought it would be kind of cool to have the clean versions (no background music) on hand if I ever, for some reason, wanted to do something them.

On the first thing, I'm not sure what you mean. On the second thing... My guess is that the E3 version made it in because they changed Outset at the last minute- adding minor details, as well as the cave where Jabun is hiding. Compression-wise... I'm thinking that the Yaz0 compression used on most beta Roomx .arcs is left over from when they intended to have all files compressed; the majority of final room .arcs are just RARCs, uncompressed. On another note, I find it very interesting that they experimented with clear water (shown in Amos_T, the test area where it has the boat). It's a shame that they abandoned the concept. Using it in a hack might be a bit sketchy, as the water in the test room is somewhat buggy. One more thing: I've figured out part of how .bms files (music) work: -There's a section at the start that lists all the parts of the song. Normal format seems to be: C1 yy xx xx xx Where yy is the number of the part (starts at 00, then goes to 01 for the next entry, ect.) and xx is the offset of the music data. Then there's a row of bytes that has a varying length between files... It starts with 0E 00 78 FD and ends with an FF where the music data starts. The rest of the information after that is the music data, with each part separated by FF. I'm going to experiment with changing data in these sections.

I'm taking on a new project. I'm going to try and edit Laruto's entry cut scene to use Medli's model and a 'wait' animation. I've successfully added files to a .arc before, but this one has multiple changing pieces... then there's those .btks that we have no information about... Correction: I'm thinking about a new project, IF I can figure out why Dolphin keeps crashing when trying to play the unaltered cut scene.

Yes, Xdaniel; the game will read RARCs in the place of Yaz0ed files. I'm going to edit an explanation of what I did in detail later. Edit: Fixed the speed!

I didn't know Dolphin could do that. Thanks for telling me about it! The feature doesn't seem to cause a gigantic slowdown, so tonight I'll make a video of Kalle Demos in Jalhalla's room and upload it to Youtube.

Well, I'd like to, but my computer runs awfully slow when trying to use both Dolphin and Hypercam at the same time... do you have any free capture software to recommend? Eh, I'll try Hypercam again tomorrow.

Yup: Side note: Beating the boss triggered the event that normally occurs if that room's normal boss is beaten. Beating Molgera in Ghoma's room, for instance, lead to the warp out of Dragon roost to appear; beating Kalle in Jalhalla's room leads to the cutscene with Medli (though it crashed, probably cause Makar's model was still there?). One more thing: I couldn't get bosses to load outside of boss chambers. Putting a boss on Outset caused the game to crash. Going to look into dzrs and dzs files to see if we can get them working.

"Link! I thought Grandma told you not to play with the Tower in a Can!"

No, I don't think it's ever been confirmed. The heartbeats in Jabun's theme is probably the result of remixing Jabu-Jabu's dungeon music. As for removed dungeons, I don't think there's much left to find. An occasional unused room a la the Tower of the Gods, maybe, but really there doesn't seem to be much chance that we'd find rooms from entirely removed dungeons. The developers seem to have done pretty well with that. Interesting Fact of the Day: Dragon Roost Cavern's folder, M_NewD2, has an arc labeled Room9. But that arc is a dummy; there's nothing in it. It just so happens that Room9 is where the mini bosses of the dungeon (the Bokoblins and the Moblin) are fought. Seems like they decided to put Room9 outside the main dungeon's folder like the other mini boss chambers. They were a bit lazy, though- the folder containing Room9 is called M_Dra09. They also still called the arc Room9. I wonder if that was a last minute thing, and that's why it's different from everything else? Also, the Caverns' name, M_NewD2, seems intriguing. Could it imply Dragon Roost Caverns, like the Tower of the Gods, went though a redesign...? Edit: Also, some misc hacking stuff: Seems Kalle is programmed to attach to the closest surface if there's no roof directly above. Wonder why? Molgera's sand is actually part of its actor. Weird. Also, it looks cool with the effect of the sand being lighter underneath Molgera! Inappropriate image has been removed by administration. This oddly placed Tower is the actor called X_tower. I'm quite stumped as to why X_tower exists; there's already a room in Sea that has the Tower in it. My best guess is that this actor version is used in the cutscene where it rises, as the Demo for that scene doesn't contain a Tower model. On a side note, I had to put the cheat code "Have all goddess pearls" to make it appear.

Outside the commotion, above the forest, a very battered pair of witches floated through the air. "What in Ikana is this place?" Koume wondered. "I don't know!" Kotake replied. "It looks similar to that place the Deku people go- Woodfall, isn't it? But something's off... and it's not in a swamp!" "C'mon, Kotake," Koume trilled. "Let's investigate. Maybe we can figure out what in the Giants' names is going on!" She promptly dived towards the entrance to the bizarre Forestfall Swamps. "Uh..." Kotake stared after her sister for a moment, wondering if that was the right thing to do. Finally, the sorceress of ice made a decision and followed suit. "OK, Koume."

I know, but... OK, so maybe my excitement was a bit overblown... sorry.

I think we've got a mystery on our hands! So I was going through the cutscene objects, right? Well, I found the cutscene where Fado appears to tell Link to give Makar the song. Here's his model, located in Demo32: So, that's Fado. HOWEVER. If THAT is the in-game Fado, then who is this character with Saria-green hair and outfit? This little guy is located in Demo45, which seems to be a mishmash of models. The .stb is named 'runaway_majuto.' Dunno what it is. Now, Makar does disappear from the scene where he plays the Wind God's Aria for the first time behind the waterfall... but it's replaced by the Demo35's Fado model! Fado is the only Kokiri in the game. So who is this guy? Judging by him holding the violin, it's in all likelihood a(nother) beta Fado. But why did they go with the one they did? Was the hair and sleeves too much of a reference to Saria? I actually like Demo45's model better. *Runs off to see if they have the same number of joints* Oddly enough, Demo45's version has 27 bones while the final has 25... why the difference...? Actually, he hasn't got anything associated with him. No proper animations (neither .bck nor .btp), no .btk... he's got a .brk (something about 'alfa_test?'), though. Looking at all the models involved (Quill, Grown-up Prince Komali, Valoo, and strangely the fat woman in the pink dress from Outset...!?), this may have something to do with the scene just after the Forsaken Fortress (where Valoo speaks to the King at the Tower of the Gods). Then again, it might just be some kind of filler data (fat pink woman, I'm looking at you), and they accidentally included the beta Fado in there... Edit: Also, I found this model, called jb_dummy in Jabun's cutscene: I think this very rough dummy model supports the theory that they added his cutscene in later in development, possibly even last-minute. They worked so quickly that they forgot to take out the dummy. Funny thing is that the final Jabun model has no tail.

Here's something odd. There are two objects, one called mo2 and one called mo2_si. Now, Mo2 is a moblin (Mo? Get it?), so what's Mo2_si? Thing is, we can't know. The .arc isn't formatted correctly, and just extracting a .bmd from the file doesn't work; the bmd has extra data in it that others don't have. What's weird is that this arc has a folder called MSG, with both entries in that called "zel_m100003.bin" and "zl00020.bin." They're nothing but jumbled numbers and letters, though. Mysterious! I wonder if there was supposed to be another version of the moblin. Edit: Information on JaiInit.aaf! 00 00 00 01 00 00 06 70 00 00 94 C0 Dunno what the first four bytes, 0x00000001, mean. 0x670 is the offset of some kind of table (instruments, maybe...!?). 0x94C0 is the size of this table. 00 00 00 02 00 00 9B 30 00 00 20 60 Don't know what 0x2 means. 9B30 is the offset of the first entry called IBNK. Another entry called BNK follows this, after which comes several other entries labeled INST. Skipping ahead... 49 42 4E 4B 00 00 20 60 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0x49424E4B is the ASCII for IBNK. 2060 is the length of the entire thing, from the start of this IBNK to the start of the next. 42 41 4E 4B 00 00 16 E0 00 00 17 20 00 00 17 60 00 00 17 C0 00 00 18 00 00 00 18 40 00 00 18 80 00 00 18 C0 00 00 19 00 00 00 19 40 00 00 19 80 00 00 19 C0 00 00 1A 00 00 00 1A 40 00 00 1A 80 00 00 1A C0 00 00 1B 00 00 00 1B 40 00 00 1B 80 00 00 1B C0 00 00 1C 00 00 00 1C 40 00 00 1C A0 00 00 1C E0 00 00 1D 20 00 00 1D 60 00 00 1D A0 00 00 00 00 00 00 1D E0 00 00 1E 20 00 00 1E 60 00 00 1E A0 00 00 1E E0 00 00 1F 20 00 00 1F 60 00 00 1F A0 00 00 20 The first four bytes are BANK. 16E0 is actually the offset of the first instrument relative to IBNK; this goes for all of the two-byte pairs (not sure what the lone ones, like 18, mean) All of the numbers here are offsets; ones like 18 are actually 1800. 49 4E 53 54 00 00 00 00 3F 80 00 00 3F 80 00 00 00 00 08 E0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 05 00 00 10 70 00 00 10 80 00 00 10 90 00 00 10 A0 00 00 10 B0 First four bytes are INST. The two 3F80s and the 8E0 are the same throughout this chunk's INST entries. The 5... looks to tell the number of pairs after it (there are five 10xxs, for example). But what do they mean? What is significant about these IDs? I'll have to figure it out later.

You know, I've been thinking... Maggie and Mila from the Forsaken Fortress cut scene, in their original clothes, load in one of the character test rooms. They act like normal actors. When you speak to them, they give the first message in the .bmg ("You can only call Tingle from places that have maps!"). I'm guessing that either A)the game loads the first string of text in the .bmg if there's no set variable, or B)both Maggie and Mila have their text variables set to 00. Later, after school, I'm going to see if I can change their text values. Maybe we can actually put them in the game with their original clothing. Now, what I wonder is if it's possible to add entries to the .bmg. It would require a lot of offset-fixing, but it might be worth it. Constructing an entry for text added at the end of the file could keep us from having to cannibalize other entries.

Kotake reeled at the heat blast. "Ouch!" she cried. "C'mon, Kotake! Time to get serious!" Koume shrieked. It was at that point that they twirled around each other, merging into the being known as Twinrova. "Now you've done it!" the superwitch crooned. "You can't possibly beat us now!" Twinrova then shot a blast of both hot and cold at the four.

"WHAT!?" the twin witches screeched loudly. "What fresh kids! Oh, they just make me want to-!" Koume suddenly emitted a large burst of fire magic, aimed at the three Links. "C'mon, Kotake! Let's get them!" "Uh, OK, Koume." The Sorceress of Ice sent a blast of cold behind Koume's fire.

Koume suddenly recoiled, sliding several feet back in the air, shrieking all the while. Kotake seemed confused. "What's wrong, Koume? Afraid of... er... what are you three, triplets?" "No!" Koume replied, regaining some of her composure. "That kid in green! He looks SO familiar! The sight of him just... burns me up!" Kotake stared at Green for a moment, before coming to the same conclusion as her sister. "Kid!" she snapped. "Have we met before?"

Koume and Kotake flew quickly through the air on their broomsticks, side by side. Both of them were confused; the land below was not familiar to them. "Where in all of Termina are we?" Kotake called to Koume. "I don't know!" Koume called back. "You tell me!" Kotake snapped around. "Don't take that tone with me! Is that how you treat your older sister!?" "How many times have I told you," Koume screeched, "That we're TWINS! We're the SAME AGE!" "Oh, cool down!" Kotake responded. "Look over there. It's some sort of castle. Maybe those multicolored boys can tell us where we are!" She then promptly dived towards them, Koume following without saying a word. "You three!" Kotake called to the three Links, hovering just above them. "Can you boys please tell us where this is? Or maybe direct us back to the Southern Swamp?"

Really? Cool! I'll take them both. And I'll try to stay in the RP this time XP

I might like to sign up for Koume, Kotake or both. They're actually two of my favorite characters. If I can't have both I'll stick with Kotake...

No- it seems to be a prerelease demo that would be used in stores to showcase the game.