Linking Intro’s Infront of Psx Games

Many people would definitely like to link intros or trainer screens infront of PlayStation games. There are, like always, some little obstacles thou:

Absolutely no PSX game is simply file-copyable. This is the simple reason why you can’t just add your Intro.exe and LoadExec the root file afterwards. First reason for that are the .STR files and the like. Plenty of them get destroyed or modified when beeing filecopied, resulting in movies without tone, no movies at all or a simple crash.

Second reason is the SONY license data contained in the first CD sectors. However, if you have a game that doesnt have .STR files, you could naturally simply add the license info into your remastered ISO with an appropriate tool and you are set. If you think that using Sony STR tools to extract and SONY CD tools to re-master let me know the result. I must admit that i never bothered because i can’t stand Windows tools :).

This brings us to a fairly better idea: Calculating the intro/trainer right into the ISO image. The problem is that you cannot easily append to the original file structure, so you want to re-place the original file by itself PLUS your intro/trainer/whatever. Only one little hint: packing. (If the root file IS already packed – bad luck. See if you can find a dummy file that could be replaced by your intro and alter the system.cnf file.) Now you just calculate your new .exe into the ISO.

These are naturally only some basic things (and there some more troubles you will have to cope with). Needless to say that you need a good hexeditor, a good PSX debugger or dis-asm, knowledge about ISO9660-filesystem, PSX disc formats, PSX exe structures and a sum of other things that you may think are of minor importance, but that turn out to be quite bitchy in the end, resulting in a nice frisbee collection or a brand new PSX after you hit it hard with your fist 🙂 I still wonder why noone figured some of the above stuff from the .blk patchfiles anyhow, maybe I set you on the right track now that you are done with this little text. Naturally this text could have been much more specific – but I think one can expect a little bit of own research and understanding. After all, i am sure there is more than one single way to reach the desired.

Have phun,

Freefall/Paradox