Kingdom Hearts 2 HDL?

[Micjohvan]

Hi fellos.

Like many of you I have a long list of games to buy and play. On my list were the Kingdom Hearts games. I was waiting until I found them on sale or something to pick them up. Well last Saturday I got a copy of KH2 at a yard sale for 3 dollars (also got Spiderman 3 and Soul Calibur 3 for 5 each)

I have a modded PS2 that uses HDL. I mostly use it for RPGs that require long hours of play and lots of load time. So naturally I was inclined to make sure KH2 would work. I had known for about a year and half it was broken at a certain spot but had high hopes it was fixed by now with a patch. Turns out it still hasent been fixed as far as I can tell.

I have done lots of digging and found out much about the problem. I was wondering if anyone here would be interested in helping me make a ppf patch that can fix the game to work. I have found HUNDREDS of people looking for this patch still to no avail. Most have givin up hope and are trying to use AR codes to get around the parts that cause the problem.

Developer software and debugging really isnt my thing, nor do I know much of Assembly or PS2 hardware. However I think some people here might. I am ok with a hex editor and some other things like resource editors although I think I am a bit short on what I will need. Do you think any of you can help me take a look at the problem and maybe get it fixed. It shouldnt be to difficult as I have heard there was a similer problem with a diffrent game that was patched some time ago, this leads me to beleive its just a matter of altering a patch to work for this game.

Anyways I have talked enough. If anyone cares to offer me assistance I would be greatly in debt. :thumbsup:

[Johnny]

Hi fellos.

Like many of you I have a long list of games to buy and play. On my list were the Kingdom Hearts games. I was waiting until I found them on sale or something to pick them up. Well last Saturday I got a copy of KH2 at a yard sale for 3 dollars (also got Spiderman 3 and Soul Calibur 3 for 5 each)

I have a modded PS2 that uses HDL. I mostly use it for RPGs that require long hours of play and lots of load time. So naturally I was inclined to make sure KH2 would work. I had known for about a year and half it was broken at a certain spot but had high hopes it was fixed by now with a patch. Turns out it still hasent been fixed as far as I can tell.

I have done lots of digging and found out much about the problem. I was wondering if anyone here would be interested in helping me make a ppf patch that can fix the game to work. I have found HUNDREDS of people looking for this patch still to no avail. Most have givin up hope and are trying to use AR codes to get around the parts that cause the problem.

Developer software and debugging really isnt my thing, nor do I know much of Assembly or PS2 hardware. However I think some people here might. I am ok with a hex editor and some other things like resource editors although I think I am a bit short on what I will need. Do you think any of you can help me take a look at the problem and maybe get it fixed. It shouldnt be to difficult as I have heard there was a similer problem with a diffrent game that was patched some time ago, this leads me to beleive its just a matter of altering a patch to work for this game.

Anyways I have talked enough. If anyone cares to offer me assistance I would be greatly in debt. :thumbsup:

From what i know the game locks up at the Gummi Ship parts.

If the game loads these parts as a different ELF file, i don't think there's nothing you can do.

[Micjohvan]

Thats one of two theroys on it. However several things throw up flags to me. The first being that people say sometimes the game loads the battles fine. (as best I can tell its about 2 out of 15 times you will get it to load and play fine)

Anyway as for what causes the problem there are 2 ideas. The first being the game loads a diffrent ELF file for that mini game.

The second being that the memory is flushed.

Im not really sure what we can do about a mem flush but if the game loads a diffrent elf I cant see it being hard to fix. I am gussing that when the ship battle takes place the game says to load the elf from the game disc and the path to the disk would be the DVD drive. Since its running from the HDD it wouldnt be able to find the elf and would crash. If thats the case someone just needs to change the code so it looks for the elf on the HDD.

I havent had time to tear apart the games files to see if theres more then one elf anywhere but Im new to PS2 hacking :(

[Johnny]

Well, a good start point would be PSX-Scene Forums (http://www.psx-scene.com/forums/portal.php)

All the latest HD Loader upgrades came from there. There's also a new HD Loading tool being developed, but it's on early stages.

[Micjohvan]

Ok I have been monitoring them as I am a member there but I hadent heard some of this stuff.

I have a member here who is helping me out. He has official PS2 DevHardware and knows what he is doing. I wont say who because I dont know if he wants me to tell or not lol. Anyway I will keep you all updated on my progress and if anyone else here can help out it would be super. I will gladly entertain all ideas and solutions ;)

[Johnny]

That's cool! Let's hope "He" finds out a solution for it. I played KH2 on the disc, but most people would like to use the HDD for that.

[Micjohvan]

I know lol. I really want to get it working. I love having the games on my HDD so I dont have to mess with the discs. Also its saving my precious laser (I bought the console back in 03 and its been my only PS2 and never broke lol) Not to mention super fast loading ;)

[Johnny]

I know lol. I really want to get it working. I love having the games on my HDD so I dont have to mess with the discs. Also its saving my precious laser (I bought the console back in 03 and its been my only PS2 and never broke lol) Not to mention super fast loading ;)

Mine was bought in 2002 and it's working flawlessly till today :clap: Been playing PS2 CD's, PS2 DVD's and PS1 cd's. Never used DVD movies though.

I have a 80'GB HDD full of stuff (it has 1.7 GB free). I installed some games with the same purpose as yours, but some games are way better on the HDD, because of the super fast loading and so on.

I also have a Winning Eleven 10 version patched with Brazilian Clubs called WEBrothers. This one i didn't even burned on a DVD. I installed with HDL DUMP through an ethernet cable connection between my PC and the PS2.

SMS is a fantastic DivX Player. I sometimes watch movies and series from the pendrive! Got a translation file and the SMS app is fully translated to brazilian portuguese

My DEV.2 Boot app is uLaunchELF, fully customized as well, with a wallpaper i did, fully translated to portuguese, and so on.

It's just to bad most homebrew programmers forgot about the PS2 after the PSP was launched. At least we are lucky to have SMS and uLaunchELF constantly updated.

[AntiPasta]

Should you need someone with proficiency in MIPS assembly, do drop me a line. This sounds like an interesting project.

[Micjohvan]

I am currently waiting on the guy here who is helping us out. He lives in Europe somewhere and dosent have any rental stores around him. So he is having to track down a PAL copy before he can start. I have already sent him some files from my NTSC copy he requested. I will tell him if needs help to contact you antipasta and thanks!