It Is A Mystery…

Here are a couple AURA rating icons I came up with to use with the system. Combinations could probably work similarly, and I could shrink it or make a dark matte if you like… (more…)

I’ve already given a bit of thought on Galaxy after having taken a couple of days break from the purple coin quest. For my review, read on… (Thanks to Nina for letting me use her Coin and AURA rating systems)

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So apparently Nintendo actually made Galaxy suck.  That’s right, I got 104 stars, beat Bowser to get the last, and then, as expected, out came ‘collect the 100 purple coins.’  Of course, having first collected purple coins in the process of unlocking the best powerup in the game, I figured that these purple coin stars would have said powerup, or at least be challenging and fun, but instead, it becomes a monotonous grindfest.

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“Not bad! I guess I chose the right guy to be my archenemy. At least you always put up a fight.”

P.S. 68 stars and JUST beat the Bedroom Boss.  I want to clean up the Engine Room before heading to the center of the universe.  I just like breaking the game where all 5 galaxies appear at once.  It’s rather amusing that way.

Really it is. A true successor to Mario 64, it looks like, and much more ‘Mario’ than Sunshine was.

Not much to speak of lately, as I’ve been hacking on Pokémon Pearl/Diamond as well as fiddling with trying to render the decompressed models of the Pokémon from Colosseum. (Thanks for the LZSS tool and Model Viewer, pika!)

Other than that I picked up 3 Mews (Sassy, Serious, and Rash) today.

Seeing how the Gamecube-Linux kernel patches now include a gcdvdfs driver, I’ve tried examining files on Gamecube discs, particularly Pokemon Colosseum for the purposes of model rips. Sadly, however, this seems to not be so great, as even though the FSYS files have been described (Search for gcfsysd on Google), the enclosed compression ‘files’ marked with a LZSS header are unknown.  Oh well…

It’s fairly obvious that they have the format:

struct lzss_file {
char magic[4]; // "LZSS"
int decompressedSize;
int compressedSize;
int empty;
unsigned char data[compressedSize - 16]; // Data...  I think.
};

While it’s definately compressed, and the header suggests LZSS, the actual implementation of LZSS is unknown. Even if the size gets within 16 bytes by using it with some fiddling with constants, it keeps filling with pre-initialized data, and as such, isn’t properly working (as LZSS should rely only on the bytes given than bytes filled in by the decompression algorithm before hand).

If the Wii is backwards compatible with the Gamecube, what about broadband adaptor games? If they work normally with Wi-Fi or the USB-Ethernet adaptor, you can say hello to cheap Wii Homebrew and Wiinux…

Hmmm…