3D!!1!!1

[kamiboy]

Gentlemen, it gives me tantric delight to present to you the future of yesterday's entertainment, today!



That is correct, soon you too can look as flabbergasted as the good folks above by this marvel of modern science, that most illustrious of turn-of-the-century technological implements, the Stereoscope. Though I can not guarantee that you will look half as posh doing so.

Anywaste, I have located those illusive 3D patches for various X68000 games made by a group of madmen back in the early 90's, just as the second stereoscopic 3D wave, having sprung up in the mid 80's by way of many an 8bit systems, had subsided.

I will chronicle the little virtual sleuthing adventure that this hunt took me on, because it certainly did dig up some rather fascinating details.

I had forgotten all about the existence of stereoscopic 3D support on the X68000 until a thread popped up here asking for the aforementioned patches. As the X68000 is my favourite gal the prospects of exotic gaming quickly got a raise out of the old brow. The other brow very quickly followed suite when I discovered that there was allegedly a patch for Akumajo Dracula X68000, on only whispered of in dank forgotten corners of the interweb super complex.

It would seem all that stood between me and such esoteric refreshments was cheaply acquired Famicom 3D goggles, and those long lost patches. The Glasses were easily won on Yahoo, so all that remained was to put on my best sleuthing hat and go digging in the dark abandoned alleyways of the web for those patches that wished not to be found.

The first thing that my search netted me was an old post covering the topic on these very forums, one in which I had posted no less. Oh, how quickly we forget.

Before long I abandoned the use of english search terms for Japanese ones. This gave me the one lead that put me on the right track. I found an old blog post by some Japanese fellow that was waxing nostalgic about fond memories of having played those fabled 3D patched games. A single sentence in the blog was all that was necessary to crack this case. He mentioned where he had acquired the patches. Thus, their origin was revealed to be a periodic Takeru floppy publication called Denno Club.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/満開製作所

115 of these self bootable floppies were eventually released by them, and each filled to the brim with all sorts of interesting goodies invaluable to the pre-historic Japanese computer jockeys. Games, software, tools, music, pictures, oh my!

Alas, the next problem presented itself. I now knew that one, or several, of these floppies had to contain the patches. But how could any sleuth hope to trace down these 115 individual super obscure floppy images for further perusal? A quick search on yahoo revealed that the purchase of these floppy images was in the realm of possibility, but would, as expected, come at a rather lavish price.

One small detail regarding the Denno club did give me hope though. According to the website the 115 Denno club floppies were eventually compiled and released on three CD's. This surely was the way to go, but if Japanese users were traditionally Squamish about sharing abandonware floppies, then they would surely be exponentially less likely to upload huge CD images.

Thus it was with a heavy heart that typed in the search terms, fully bracing myself for disappointment. Fret not though, dear reader, for we were all saved by those westerners and their cavalier pyrating ways!

It seems that the kind souls at Archive.com had taken it upon themselves to host all three ISO's, dumped by some unsung privateer. I raise my glass to ye good sir, and your disregard for intellectual property! Yo, Ho, Ho and a bottle of rum!

https://archive.org/details/cdrom-dennouclub-perfect1

https://archive.org/details/cdrom-dennouclub-perfect2

https://archive.org/details/cdrom-dennouclub-perfect1997

After searching for the term "3D" on those ISO's I happened upon three floppy images that contain material relevant for us raiders of the obsolete and esoteric.

It was within these that I happened upon the last fascinating chapter of this saga. Among the text documents provided with the patches was one from a so called "society for proliferation of stereoscopic gaming", or some such. These fellows had taken it upon themselves to help popularise and spread the 3D gaming potential of the X68000, since Sharp themselves apparently had no interest in doing so. Not that I can blame Sharp, they must have seen the writing on the wall as stereoscopic gaming, a staple of the most popular 8bit systems of the day, had failed to make any inroads, and subsequently withered away like a flaccid manatee carcass washed ashore.

Ah, stereoscopic 3D, this seems ever to be your fate each time consortiums decide to band together and force you back to life once every 30 years or so.

This X68000 stereoscopic society even went as far as promising to back hobbyist efforts with monetary rewards. It makes me wonder who it was that was bankrolling that operation, and why?

In the end several games ended up obtaining 3D patches. Akumajo Dracula, Dragon Spirit, Space Harrier and Xevious. Reading the patch notes of one of the authors it seems that he had plans to support other games, he mentioned that Etoile Princess was out of the question due to some technical issues, and how he wished he could do Nemesis 90' Kai, but these efforts must have not netted any success since I cannot find any patches other than the above.

Because I am such a gentleman I've decided to go through the trouble and provide you with a zip containing working patched HDD versions of the games as well as floppy images. The only game that I could not get to work on the HDD was Space Harrier, so that one you'll have to play the old fashioned way, via a floppy.

One last note, one of the floppy images actually provides alternative patches that enable the use of 3D glasses via the joystick 2 port, which would be useful for people with X68000 models without the Stereoscopic port. I did not apply these patches, so I leave that exercise to you.

In addition, those Denno CD's are filled with all sorts of other goodies. So any prospecting X68000 users are sure to unearth some valuable nuggets if they go digging.

[kamiboy]

More (this one assumes it is installed in a:\games2\DSpirit3D)

[kamiboy]

Even more

[kamiboy]

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[kamiboy]

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[kamiboy]

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[kamiboy]

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[kamiboy]

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[kamiboy]

Finally, let it be said that uploading the files on these forums was a pain in the ass, between the 2mb upload limit, and 30 second post limit.

[NFG]

Finally, let it be said that uploading the files on these forums was a pain in the ass, between the 2mb upload limit, and 30 second post limit.

So why not use the file uploader or the FTP?  =P

http://nfggames.com/X68000

[kamiboy]

Didn't know that was an option. Well, I'll try to remember for the future.

[SuperDeadite]

Awesome work, Fantasy Zone has 3d built into the retail release though.  There is no need for a patch, its just a secret option.

[famiac]

At first, and on many occasions, I had been apalled by your verbose writing style, kamiboy, but reading that was pretty funny. I had scoured the dennou club disks for 030 patches before, but i'm surprised i didn't come across the 3d stuff. Good work!

[kamiboy]

Right, about Fantasy Zone. I just modified that one to force the game to start in 3D mode. Might as well have that here since it seems it can only be forced into 3D mode via an obscure command line option.

[frankmonk]

OMG!!! nice stuff!! thanks for your afford Kamiboy....hardly can wait to test Dracula this evening......
Thanks Again

[SuperDeadite]

If anyone tries making the controller port adapter, it should also be compatible with FM Towns.  The games Final Blow, Image Fight, and Operation Wolf all support 3D on Towns.  Back in the day, you could mail order an adapter cable directly from Ving to connect a Fami 3D system to controller port 2.  There was no official 3d hardware from Fujitsu.

[NFG]

I'd be very keen to have plans for the controller adaptor.  I've been looking for one for my FMT/Image Fight for -years-. 

[kamiboy]

There was an image illustration of the plans on one of the disks in some obscure x68000 format. I converted it to png and put it in the 3D test zip.

Man, between the X68000 and FM Towns those famicom 3D goggles suddenly are a great investment. They are dirt cheap too, which is unusual for exotic hardware of that vintage.

[SuperDeadite]

Hey, how did you setup the Harrier 3d patch exactly?  I'm trying to redo it myself, but using the updated version of the game that supports analog control (cyberstick), that came with afterburner 2.  so far it seems to not be compatible, but i might be screwing up the install...

[kamiboy]

Oh, dear. My bad memory strikes again. I am afraid that I do not quite remember how I did it. The steps were outlined in the patch text file.

I think it involved making a freshly formated disk, sysing it so it is bootable. Then copying over the Space Harrier executable onto it. Then booting from this new disk, with the patch containing disk in the other drive. Then running the patch to do it's magic.

Don't quote me on that. The end result was that the harrier executable is patched. You may need to actaully run another executable before you launch it though, and of course have the real harrier in the 0 drive. They want you to first boot with the patched disk, then swap to the real harrier disk. This was done to avoid manipulation of your precious original harrier copy. Me, I just copied over the executable from the custom boot disk to the real disk.

Since patches look for specific areas in an execuable I think patching a manipulated image might very well not work. If the patches apply themselves to different areas of the same file it might be possible to merge the changes, but you will need to know what you are doing in order to achieve that.

Just the other day I was think how cool it would be to have the 3D, joystick and midi patches all working at the same time. Like a sentai show they would all combine to form the Ultimate Harrier.

[SuperDeadite]

ok that's what i thought.  I did a lot of testing, today and the 3d patch seems to not be compatible with the analog and midi/cd patches.   The MIDI/CD patch not working didn't surprise me, but the analog patch was an official dempa update...a shame, but any 3d is better then no 3d.

[kamiboy]

It might not be possible the regular way, but perhaps there is a hacking way. Do you have a Harrier executable with the midi and analog controller patches both applied? If so upload it here and I can take a look at doing some sort of crude merge.

Don't hold your breath though, it prolly won't work.

[neko68k]

@kamiboy @superdeadite I'd take a crack at that too.

[SuperDeadite]

Ok here you go.

AJOY.X is the analog controller driver.
MOUSE.X is the mouse driver.
HARRIER.X is the official Dempa updated version of Harrier that uses the analog and mouse drivers.
SH_MIDI_ADP.X is the main file that runs the MIDI patched version, it officially supports the above HARRIER.X file.

[kamiboy]

Hmmm, I did not anticipate the launcher executable approach. This is prolly bad news I fear, but I'll giive it a go regardless.

[neko68k]

It's not just the launchers either. The 3D stuff has a patched X(at least some tables are different) and uses its loader TSR that contains a TIMER-A based page flipping/shutter toggling setup. The changes to the X file don't seem major but it's kind of hard to tell. The analog/midi/pcm8 patch seems to not really work with any version of HARRIER.X I can find, including the one that was sent above. I dunno. I'll mess with it more later when I'm back at my desk.

[edit]
and the midi/etc wrapper program contains large(ish) binary patches. :|

[kamiboy]

Bad news I fear. I compared the changes of the joy patch and 3D patch made to the harrier executable and they actually make some changes to the same area in the file. As such a crude merger is out of the question.

[SuperDeadite]

It's not just the launchers either. The 3D stuff has a patched X(at least some tables are different) and uses its loader TSR that contains a TIMER-A based page flipping/shutter toggling setup. The changes to the X file don't seem major but it's kind of hard to tell. The analog/midi/pcm8 patch seems to not really work with any version of HARRIER.X I can find, including the one that was sent above. I dunno. I'll mess with it more later when I'm back at my desk.

[edit]
and the midi/etc wrapper program contains large(ish) binary patches. :|

Sorry everyone, to be more specific, the Harrier.X I posted, isn't truly a HARRIER.X file.  It is infact AJOY_HARRIER.X (or something similar).  The analog version was included as a bonus on Afterburner II disk 1. 

When using the MIDI patch, if you want to use the analog version, you simply rename AJOY_HARRIER.X to HARRIER.X.  The MIDI patch was programmed to recognize the differences despite the same name.  If you really want to be confused, look at the CD-Audio patch, which requires the MIDI patch, and then needs it's own drivers/patches as well.  It works very well once you get it setup though.

Honestly I wasn't expecting much progress from the MIDI patch, but it would be great to at least get 3D and Analog working together.  Once you get used to playing with the cyberstick, it is really hard to go back to the pad.

Thanks for trying though!

[neko68k]

The MIDI patch checks for HARRIER.X or AJOY_HAR.X and checks the datestamp to see if it is one of 3 "supported" dates as mentioned in the README. It applies one of 3 fairly large binary patches to the X file then runs it. It'd be a real chore to even figure out what's in the patches It may be possible to dump the loaded X after it's patched and disassemble that. Maybe later.

Getting analog and 3D to play together is probably possible. I'll poke at it some more. I have a setup where I can disassemble, modify, and reassemble and things still work so maybe I get some stuff done ~shrug~. I also got the debugger working which is helpful but a little janky.

[kamiboy]

Bad news about the Joy and 3D patche merger. I have been looking at the areas of the executable that they each modify and there is some overlap. This rules out a crude merger, which is the extent of my abilities. Perhaps a more sophisticated approach could work though, where, as suggested above, one uses diassebly and other tricks that go above my head.

[neko68k]

I haven't taken the time yet but it seems like the majority of the changes for 3D, compared to the original X, were some tables and a couple of small things early in the code, probably related to the framebuffer write position and sprite locations to support the page flipping setup in the loader. I haven't managed to get a really legible DIFF out of it though because the labels are different due to some added stuff near the beginning throwing everything off. So it ends up looking like a lot more changes than there really are. :/ The analog patched X is substantially different than the original, which is a real bummer. And like I said, the MIDI stuff and presumably the CD stuff are a real elegant solution but it's going to be a major chore to do anything new with it ://

[SuperDeadite]

Got my minidin6 in today and wired up the famicom glasses.  The effect is really really good.   Dracula is mind-blowing due to it's multiple layers of parallax scrolling.  Absolutely worth the effort.  Makes me wish more games were supported, but these 5 all rock.

[llioncourt]

@SuperDeadite Could you post the matching pinout? I'd like to do it myself. Thanks.

[SuperDeadite]

Very easy, it's only 3 wires.
Famicom ->minidin6
white -> pin 2
orange -> pin 5
brown -> pin 4

[llioncourt]

@ SuperDeadite thanks! But I really don't want to "destroy" my Famicom 3D system... Anyway, I downloaded the 3Dtest file, and inside the zip has an image with the information I needed. Even the wiring to the 2nd joystick port.

[SuperDeadite]

You don't have to destroy anything.  If you open up the Famicom expansion port end, you will find that the wires actually plug into a tiny pcb socket.  Soldering is not required to change the connector.

[llioncourt]

You're the man! Twice tiday you gave hints to problems that I was having. Thanks again!

[llioncourt]

Anyone know how to patch it for 3D on joystick port while keeping it for HDD loading?

[kamiboy]

Which game?

[llioncourt]

Castlevania?