Previously Lost 3D Groove Games

Hallelujah, bay-bay!

Adding on to this because it's also relevant.

So here's a bit of an odd case: something that was found a pretty long time ago back in 2016, but couldn't be opened because it was corrupted. At that time, Patrick Thiel shared a beta of the game Toonami: Trapped in Hyperspace, which was all that he had that remained of it. However, the file had been corrupted and would crash upon being opened. At the time, I didn't have the skill or knowledge to be able to figure out what had gone wrong. What I did notice was that another file it was sent with was presumably the page it was on, index.htm, and had been half swallowed up by a JPEG image. I knew that this meant the file must have gotten corrupted.

Today I decided to revisit the issue. I realized my initial guess that it was a sound related problem was wrong, because when I ran it in a debugger, the problem was occurring in a text related subroutine. I eventually figured out the cause: the ending few bytes of the file had become corrupted, and were all replaced with 0xFFFFFFFF - this was supposed to be a pointer to a Styled Text Cast Member's media, and so it caused an access violation. However, the text file in question (materials.txt) is used in every 3D Groove game, so I was able to substitute it for the one from there.

As per my original theory, one of the sound effects did get garbled as well - however, it is not the cause of the crash, and will simply stop playing prematurely. So, I have uploaded the fixed beta (mind you, still not the full game) to my 3D Groove MEGA Folder.



I should also note that this game will go faster depending on your CPU clock speed, so you'll need either era appropriate hardware or my Old CPU Emulator tool to make it run at the correct speed. (forcing on Vsync won't help because it uses a software renderer.)
github.com/tomysshadow/OldCPUEmulator/