Table of Contents for
Gaming Hacks

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Gaming Hacks by Simon Carless Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2004
  1. Cover
  2. Gaming Hacks
  3. Credits
  4. Contributors
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Foreword
  7. Preface
  8. How to Use This Book
  9. How This Book Is Organized
  10. Conventions Used in This Book
  11. Using Code Examples
  12. Comments and Questions
  13. Got a Hack?
  14. 1. Playing Classic Games
  15. Legal Emulation
  16. Play Commodore 64 Games Without the C-64
  17. Play Atari ROMs Without the Atari
  18. Use Atari Paddles with Your PC
  19. Run Homebrew Games on the Atari 2600
  20. Create Your Own Atari 2600 Homebrew Games
  21. Play Classic PC Graphic Adventures
  22. Play Old Games Through DOSBox
  23. Play Reissued All-in-One Joystick Games
  24. Play Arcade Games Without the Arcade
  25. Add and Manipulate a MAME Frontend
  26. Keep Your ROMs Tidy and Organized
  27. Learn Game-Specific MAME Controls
  28. Filter Inappropriate MAME ROMs
  29. Autoboot into MAME Heaven
  30. Play Emulated Arcade Games Online
  31. Play Classic Pinball Without the Table
  32. Emulate the SNES on the Dreamcast
  33. 2. Playing Portably
  34. Play Games on Your iPod
  35. Mod Your Game Boy
  36. Take and Print Photos with Your Game Boy
  37. Compose Music on Your Game Boy
  38. Explore the GP32 Handheld Gaming System
  39. Take Your Console with You
  40. Explore the Bandai WonderSwan
  41. Play Real Games on Your PDA
  42. Install a PlayStation 2 in Your Car
  43. 3. Playing Well with Others
  44. Practice Proper MMORPG Etiquette
  45. Understand MMORPG Lingo
  46. Grind Without Going Crazy
  47. Make a Profit in Vana’diel
  48. Write MMORPG Macros
  49. Build an Effective Group
  50. Catch Half-Life FPS Cheaters Redhanded
  51. 4. Playing with Hardware
  52. Build a Quiet, Killer Gaming Rig
  53. Find and Configure the Best FPS Peripherals
  54. Adapt Old Video Game Controllers to the PC
  55. Choose the Right Audio/Video Receiver
  56. Place Your Speakers Properly
  57. Connect Your Console to Your Home Theater
  58. Tune Console Video Output
  59. Tune Your TV for Console Video
  60. PC Audio Hacking
  61. Optimize PC Video Performance
  62. Build a Dedicated Multimedia PC
  63. Use a Multimedia Projector for Gaming
  64. 5. Playing with Console and Arcade Hardware
  65. Play LAN-Only Console Games Online
  66. Hack the Nuon DVD Player/Gaming System
  67. Play Import Games on American Consoles
  68. Find a Hackable Dreamcast
  69. Play Movies and Music on Your Dreamcast
  70. Hack the Dreamcast Visual Memory Unit
  71. Unblur Your Dreamcast Video
  72. Use Your Dreamcast Online
  73. Host Dreamcast Games Online
  74. Burn Dreamcast-Compatible Discs on Your PC
  75. Burn Dreamcast Homebrew Discs
  76. Buy Your Own Arcade Hardware
  77. Configure Your Arcade Controls, Connectors, and Cartridges
  78. Reorient and Align Your Arcade Monitor
  79. Buy Cart-Based JAMMA Boards
  80. Programming Music for the Nintendo Entertainment System
  81. 6. Playing Around the Game Engine
  82. Explore Machinima
  83. Choose a Machinima Engine
  84. Film Your First Machinima Movie
  85. Improve Your Camera Control
  86. Record Game Footage to Video
  87. Speedrun Your Way Through Metroid Prime
  88. Sequence-Break Quake
  89. Run Classic Game ROM Translations
  90. Change Games with ROM Hacks
  91. Apply ROM Hacks and Patches
  92. Create PS2 Cheat Codes
  93. Hack Xbox Game Saves
  94. Cheat on Other Consoles
  95. Modify PC Game Saves and Settings
  96. Buff Your Saved Characters
  97. Create Console Game Levels
  98. 7. Playing Your Own Games
  99. Adventure Game Studio Editing Tips
  100. Create and Play Pinball Tables
  101. Put Your Face in DOOM
  102. Create a Vehicle Model for Unreal Tournament 2004
  103. Add a Vehicle to Unreal Tournament 2004
  104. Modify the Behavior of a UT2004 Model
  105. Download, Compile, and Create an Inform Adventure
  106. Decorate Your IF Rooms
  107. Add Puzzles to Your IF Games
  108. Add Nonplayer Characters to IF Adventures
  109. Make Your IF NPCs Move
  110. Make Your IF NPCs Talk
  111. Create Your Own Animations
  112. Add Interactivity to Your Animations
  113. Write a Game in an Afternoon
  114. 8. Playing Everything Else
  115. Tweak Your Tactics for FPS Glory
  116. Beat Any Shoot-Em-Up
  117. Drive a Physics-Crazed Motorcycle
  118. Play Japanese Games Without Speaking Japanese
  119. Back Up, Modify, and Restore PlayStation Saved Games
  120. Access Your Console’s Memory Card Offline
  121. Overclock Your Console
  122. Index
  123. Colophon

Play Movies and Music on Your Dreamcast

Turn your favorite bargain console into a multimedia workstation.

Since the Dreamcast is a relatively powerful beast, it’s easy to play MP3-encoded music and watch reasonably good quality movies on it using self-burned discs. However, there’s a multitude of players available, and some of the rules for encoding or playing content aren’t exactly straightforward. Let’s sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to ways to turn your $30 console toy into a jazzed-up multimedia player.

Watching Movies

It’s both easy and difficult to play movies of your choice on your Dreamcast, whether it be home videos you’ve created or freeware movies you’ve downloaded from the Net. Both easy and difficult? How can that be? Well, it’s easy to find good-quality, multiple-format-reading freeware movie programs for the Dreamcast, because there are two of them:

  • DC Movie Player (http://www.decemulation.com/dcmovieplayer.shtml), from the Japanese coder Bero, copes with a multitude of complex movie formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG4 (DIVX4/5 and XviD), and Microsoft MPEG v1, v2, and v3 (Div-X 3), but lacks good English-language documentation.

  • DCDivX (http://www.dcdivx.com/), despite its misleading name, actually supports a host of different movie formats (OGM, VP3, DivX 3.xx, DivX 4.xx, DivX 5.xx + Pro, OpenDivX, XviD, AVI) and has much better documentation, but lacks the common MPEG formats that DC Movie Player supports.

Both players allow disc switching, and both are reasonable at keeping audio and video in sync, often a significant problem with homebrew console video players.

However, it’s difficult to use movie players on the DC, since it has so little RAM for buffering, which also limits the maximum available resolution. This means that almost any reasonably sized movie you download from the Internet may well have too much throughput or too high a resolution to play properly. You’ll need to reencode your existing video files for them to play well.

If you want to know exactly how to encode video properly for playback in DCDivX, there’s an excellent tutorial available at http://www.decemulation.com/zacmcd/DcDivX4dummies/. Here are the salient points:

Playing Music

If you want to listen to music on your Dreamcast, the multipurpose freeware DCPlaya (http://sashipa.ben.free.fr/dcplaya/) fits the bill. You can also download this popular, French-authored program from the DCEmulation Homebrew site (http://www.decemulation.com/dcplaya.shtml). It sports a full GUI, great graphics, and gorgeous functionality for a free title, as Figure 5-3 shows.

A menu screen from the gorgeous DCPlaya

Figure 5-3. A menu screen from the gorgeous DCPlaya

The versatile player works with MP3s as well as the free alternate OGG format, the archaic but cool-sounding MOD and S3M formats, the Atari ST-associated SC68 format, and the even more archaic and funky Commodore 64 SID sound format. It even plays cool-looking VMU effects in time to the music, if there’s one plugged in.

You don’t need to burn the MP3s or OGGs that you want to play on the actual disc; the DCPlaya executable will stay resident in memory after you boot the CD-R. You can swap in a disc of your choice, and the player will still memory-resident and play anything you throw at it. Unfortunately, the current version of DCPlaya doesn’t support variable-bit-rate MP3s, so be careful when burning or using existing MP3s.

Although you can’t create M3U files on your Dreamcast, you can burn playlist files onto discs and use them to play MP3s in any order you choose.

DCPlaya uses the Lua (http://www.lua.org/) API, a powerful lightweight programming language designed for extending applications. You can find the DCPlaya source code from the project’s Sourceforge page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dcplaya). However, nobody has yet built on the DCPlaya base to add visualizations, alternate formats, or anything else; it would be amazing if someone would start. One often requested feature is the use of the broadband adapter to allow Shoutcast or Icecast streaming audio over the Net.

Playing DC Music Without a TV

Suppose you want to put your Dreamcast somewhere in the house where you don’t have a TV—for example, next to your amplifier or your hi-fi in your bedroom. The Dreamcast is a versatile console, but it’s hard to make up for the lack of visual output. Maybe you can muddle through the menus on something like DCPlaya by memorizing button presses, but that’s no real answer.

Well, actually, I lied a little. The Dreamcast can make up for no TV-based visual output by using the Spinal Tap-influenced To 11 MP3 player (http://www.decemulation.com/to11.shtml). This clever player shows all of its interface on the Dreamcast’s VMU, so you won’t even need a television to play music.

Apart from the two previous choices, there are alternate players with TV-based visual interfaces; some are definitely worth checking out. Examples include DreamMP3 (http://www.decemulation.com/dreammp3.shtml) and DreamAmp (http://www.decemulation.com/dreamamp.shtml), but they can’t really hold a candle to the majesty of DCPlaya.

Finally, if you’re interested in trying earlier media players along with homebrew games and other interesting utilities, check out the DCEvolution Dream Selection Vol.1 pack (http://www.dcevolution.netfirms.com/ds_vol1.shtml). This 36-MB download has 25 programs on it, including To 11, DreamMP3, and more. It includes a cool-looking GUI to boot.