00:35 Banjo gameplay
02:36 Ryo Forklift gameplay
04:43 Avatar gameplay
07:01 Mii gameplay
Yeah, I'm talking about the first game, not Transformed.
I know it's not a secret that all the data of Banjo, Ryo-F, Avatars or Miis are already included on the "Racers.xpac" file on PC version (and probably other versions of the game).
Even PolygonJim/PeglegJimmy made a gameplay video of Banjo on PC version but he never explained how he did it. So I looked for info on Sonic Retro's wiki and found out that you can actually switch characters on mission mode by hex-editing "Base.xpac".
info.sonicretro.org/SCHG:Sonic...
So I just searched for the data of "Mission_03" and replaced "knuckles" for "banjo", "ryoforklift", "avatar" or "mii", and adding zeros on the names that were too short.
Just that, so simple. You don't need to fileswap 360 files or anything, just hex-editing a file you already have. I think Death Egg/Metal Sonic DLC is another story, as it seems to be proper DLC, not on-disc. At least Egg Hangar is on Transformed, so it's something.
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(2014 EDIT with a bit of more specific information on how to do this)
I opened "Base.xpac" with a Hex editor, and went to 0x0060b8d0 (I don't know if this will be the same for every version of the game, mine is Spanish as you can see) to find a "Mission_03" string. A bit down from there you should see a "knuckles" string like this:
i.imgur.com/4LGN1.png
(The other characters names should be the NPCs, you can probably edit those too, can't remember)
If 0x0060b8d0 doesn't get you anything near to the "Mission_03" string, go to the "Find" option of your hex editor, set it to find "Text String" and search for "Mission_03". I can't remember if the first result gets you there, but keep searching and hopefully you'll get to something similar as the screenshot.
So basically, you change "knuckles" with the name of the character you want to put ("banjo", "ryoforklift", "avatar" or "mii"). What happens if the name of the character is too short? You fill the blanks adding hexadecimal null zeroes. NOT a "0" text string, it SHOULDN'T look like "banjo000" or something like that (hex 62616E6A6F303030), the hexadecimal part should look like "62616E6A6F000000" - notice the last three bytes with 00.
Examples:
banjo: i.imgur.com/feoLL.png (62616E6A6F000000)
mii: i.imgur.com/QPWZS.png (6D69690000000000)
avatar: i.imgur.com/RNmCM.png (6176617461720000)
ryoforklift: i.imgur.com/VpIe1.png (72796F666F726B6C696674)
Ryo is way longer that "knuckles", so you don't have to add anything there. It should be short enough to leave a empty byte between that and the next string "billyhatcher_easy", though, close enough.
I hope this helps to those who tried to make this work and couldn't. If anybody has more information on this and knows how to play with these characters on every mode, feel free to put it on the comments, I'm all ears.
(END OF 2014 EDIT)
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I know all of this has been known since forever, and I don't want to be like "HAY GUYS I JUST DISCOVERED HOW TO HEX-EDIT", I mean, all credits goes to PolygonJim and whoever wrote that Sonic Retro wiki page, it's just I haven't seen a proper "how-to" other than the wiki in case people wanted to try this as well. Too bad I only know how to replace them on missions.
I wanted to see if I could replace them in other gameplay modes. So I tried hex-replacing in "base.xpac" every instance of "ulala", or "bdjoe" (or any character that has exactly 5 letters) with "banjo", but that only seems to crash the game. If I replace some instances of them, it doesn't do anything at all or crashes, I haven't found what is what you exactly need to edit to make them work on every mode. But well, I'm not a Sonic Retro Tech Member, so probably it's just that I'm doing something wrong.
16 янв 2013
