I pieced this together from a few places, there was a mislabelled 1.00 pkg on NoPSN.org, which when I extracted it was fairly obvious it was 0.41 and that the version in PARAM.SFO was wrong. This would still not work though out of the box, but when combined with the SELF from Pongos 0.41 build, Pongos build would not work without TM, well anyway long story short, combined some bits and it now works fine.
This is a real piece of Playstation History IMO and it was a lot different to what they eventually released, with the avatar GFX taking a bit of a downgrade, PSP being removed and more stuff. I get the feeling Home was going to be aimed at an older audience at first.
Some notes::
- Fixed all screen links so all screens now work. Over 1 hour of video content included.
- Added a main menu to start up screen with options for online and offline mode. Previously there was only the option to connect online. Now offline mode can be accessed without typing into command console with a USB keyboard. For casual play you do not need a keyboard anymore using this build.
- Fixed up PSP menu to allow jumping between all available scenes and some other little bits.
- Added a few more backgrounds for the Virtual PSP from later versions.
- Fixed a main menu stability issue by removing some NPCs from start up sequence, there were too many NPCs spawning and this made it a bit unstable where it could crash sometimes on PS3, and would crash on RPCS3 if you did not use a keyboard to quickly type "map apartment" (or some other scene)
- Extracted and mapped NPBOOT.BAR, CHARACTERS.BAR and DYNFILES.BAR, so now that content runs directly from USRDIR, this makes it much easier to apply mods going forward.
- Enabled bald hair style for male and female, the textures were in there but they were not an option before. Added some colour variations to the accessories and hair styles.
- Patch to EBOOT to prevent localisation string errors.
- Patch to EBOOT to make all console commands lowercase, before it was case sensitive but commands were a weird mix of upper and lowercase.
- Created some missing scene links, like from Cinema back to Lobby, also tweaked the position of some others. Now you can go everywhere without using the PSP or the command console.
- Spoofed this as FIFA16 in case $ony start banning people who are playing discontinued beta content IDs
- Fixed and tweaked a few other small things, too many to remember, if you don't like that, you can get the original base I started with on NoPSN.org, and take the EBOOT from this pkg.
This still needs more work really, but hopefully this gets the ball rolling. It looks like there was an official LAN mode too based on some svml files that seem to show menus for setting up LAN parties, It would be great if we could get that working too someday. Maybe Pongo would help us with that in the name of preservation if he ever sees this?
The package is approx 2GB, a lot of this is due to all the screen content being BIK format, Maybe someone who knows more about Bink encoding could optimize those videos more for PS3. Or maybe someone with more knowledge of these old beta versions would know if other formats can work here. AFAIK there is not much documentation for these old builds. There can be a bit of a screen tearing effect on the ingame screens sometimes too, normally loading the scene again fixes it.
Quick look:
Original 2007 GDC video:
Code:
https://youtu.be/DOyQD3wprlMList of console commands for 0.41, press L3 at the main menu or anywhere in game for the developer console. Usage on all these is not documented anywhere afaik. If you type in just what is written below it will tell you what arguments to put after it if there are any required. Mostly they are toggled on and off with true, false, 0, 1, on, off, but some require more than that.
Some interesting ones:
- debugmenu
- wireframeenable 1
- showskeletons 1
- enabledemonpcs 1
- walkspeed 5.0 (normal is 2.3)
- map scenename
NOTE: This is not the GDC demo build exactly, afaik Pongos 0.41 build is not it either, some of the menus look slightly different if you compare this and the GDC 2007 video, even the character GFX look better in this version IMO. Seems there are a few builds of 0.41 going around, anyway afaik this is the most complete version and the only one that does not require DEX &TM or RPCS3.
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