First post, by rinale
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello everyone!!
This is my first thread on the VOGONS forum but i've been a long-time lurker checking mostly resources for Windows 98 and running my old games, however this time I decided to register to explain a bit about the issues me and a friend are finding attempting to make Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst work on it's original Legacy OS (starting from 98SE)
Phantasy Star Online is a very famous online game released on Dreamcast and Windows PC back in 2001 with the latest version of the game Blue Burst released on 2004 with an additional update on 2005 to include new maps, monster, etc. We are currently running private servers for this game using the new open source newserv project which allows you to host your own PSO server (of any version) very easily on *NIX systems, the server isn't really a source of headaches anymore as the setup is pretty straightforward.
A year ago or so I made a backup of the very latest official installer of the game with the last game patch pre-applied to it before the servers shutdown back in 2010.
The problem with these games as you know is bypassing their DRM (GameGuard) + other compatibility shenanigans my friend created for this purpose a universal drop-in patch solution that allows you to very easily modify internal client parameters such as the IP/hostnames to point to your personal server or any other servers, switch between japanese/english support, among other things all via a simple modification of the included .ini file. The rationale of this solution was to let the users preserve the original game binaries without ever touching or modifying them in any way.
For the most part the patch works just fine on Windows 10/11 systems, the problem is when we attempt to make the game work on it's original legacy OS such as 98 or 2000 as well as wine it all kinda falls apart due to the DLL using unsuported Win32 APIs that didn't existed at the time as well being compiled using the very latest Visual Studio on Windows 11....
As you can imagine the game despite being compatible it cannot run because the patch doesn't run alongside to bypass the DRMs and patch the packed routines and launch the game properly, It has been a whole year since this started and we've been going in circles attempting different solutions but honestly we are in a roadblock due to lack of resources to test on legacy PC's (we rely on VM's and 86box to do the testing) and also lack of understanding of old Windows APIs to "port-back" the functionality so it can actually work (Detours for example).
This is the point where we kinda need some help, not sure if you guys ever faced a similar problem with other games discussed here or honestly any pointer can really help us out manage to fix the patch functionality in a proper way.
There's another solution by using another client commonly distributed called Tethealla which has already been hex pre-patched to work locally and it does indeed work as it had its GG logic stripped out, but the issue with this one is that other undocumented modifications were made to it so is not an original copy of the game anymore. From a preservation standpoint is not ideal.
There's more I want to tell about this effort but I didn't wanted to make this thread too long but I will be glad of answering any questions feel free to also download the clients posted above and run the current patcher on a Windows 10/11 machine for tinkering around with this old but legendary game.
The patch project in question is AzureFlare you can find it on github
https://github.com/Repflez/AzureFlare
You can also find the original newserv emulator here
https://github.com/fuzziqersoftware/newserv
And nice to meet you all~
