VOGONS


First post, by Truffon

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Hi everybody !

Long time lurker, first time poster 😀
I hope you are all doing well.

I usually find everything I need for my retrogaming needs here (tips, patches, etc.) but Metal Rage (Titus - 1996) is not very nice with me.
The game runs fine on my different retro machines, no problem whatsoever, but I stumbled across this a couple of weeks ago :
https://www.patches-scrolls.com/dl.php?file=m … eadd.zip&ref=ps
This game had an addon, a new world/campaign from what I gathered on the internet.

The thing is that there was no explanation on how to install this addon.
The game runs directly on the cdrom, so I copied the files on my hard drive ("D:\Games\Metal Rage" - That's important for what is next 😀)
I copied the file "Bank2.dat" in there, but nothing show up in the game, only the first world, as if the file was not there.
In despair, I hex-edited the game executable to see what could come up, and sure enough, there a string in there :
C:\METALR\BANK1.DAT
So, I created that directory, copied all the files and... sure enough, now the new campaign shows up in the menu !
The weird thing is that it doesn't matter where the game is located for it to run. It just matters for the addon to be loaded in the game. Go figure...

Anyway, all is fine and good, but I like to keep my hard drive tidy and I don't like games wandering around on my drive.

So, I tried modifying the string via the Hexeditor, replacing "C:\METALR\BANK1.DAT" with ".\BANK1.DAT" so it would (or so I thought) load Bank2.dat from the current directory of the executable.
No luck, it doesn't work.
And if I change it to "C:\Games\METALR\BANK1.DAT", the game doesn't start. It complains about a .BIN file missing.
In all my testing, I figured that the position of the string BANK1.DAT in the file matters for the game to load.
But writing garbage before that (ie Z:\ABCDEF\BANK1.DAT), doesn't the game stop the game from working.

I wonder if anyone here could have the skills and knowledge (and the game, it may be too much to ask 😀) to patch the game so it could run, with the addon, where ever it is located on the drive.

Sorry for the wall of text, not very nice on my part for a first post 🙁

And sorry if my english is weird, it is not my native language 😀

Thanks, and stay safe !

Reply 2 of 2, by Truffon

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Hi !

Thanks for your response 😀

I guess I wasn't clear in my explanations, but yeah, I figured that out, and that's what I would like to patch in the game.
All my games are in "D:\Games", and :
- Keeping the game as it is : it works, but the expansion is not showing up in the World menu
- Hexediting the path in the game executable prevent the game to start (if you don't keep the same number of characters in the string)

I'm not skilled enough to figured out how I can patch the game to work in a "portable" way, so it load the expansion (bank2.dat) disregarding the actual path of the game.
And I really don't get why the main game works (bank1.dat) and the expansion doesn't if it is not installed in "c:\metalr".
It really strange to me that the path matters only for the expansion.