I’ve shown off a load of inline hooks in previous posts but I don’t think I’ve ever done any mid-function hooking on this blog before. Shocking, because there’s a ton of cool stuff you can do with it and, as luck would have it, I recently came across a library that makes both inline and mid-function hooking easier and safer than anything I’ve been using in the past.
Now that we know what requests look like, let’s try creating and posting some of our own. We’ve already captured one that gives us versions, checksums, and links to various game files. Now it’s just a matter of periodically re-issuing it and checking for changes.
It’s important to keep track of updates when you’re hacking on an actively maintained game. Admittedly, I’ve been slacking in this department as of late, and enabling push notifications on an official Twitter account probably isn’t the best way to be notified when an update comes out. I suppose it’s finally time for me to dive into the network side of things.
I recently finished writing a Discord bot to play audio and video from YouTube, Twitch, and various other sources. It’s not all that efficient, reliable, or even terms-of-service-legal, but it was fun to build, and hopefully this post will inspire someone to make something better so I can switch to using that instead.
I’ve been wanting to set up recording hardware for the players at my local arcade for a while now. Unfortunately, plugging a few cables into a capture card and calling it a day doesn’t make for a very interesting blog post, so I had to be a bit more creative.
At long last, this is the final entry in the ‘streamlining score sharing’ series. With all of the data now at our disposal, all that’s left is to render it out to an image and submit it to Discord. In this post, we’ll turn our hook library into a server, create a matching client, and finally, share scores with a single button press.
After a long day of downloading event packs, creating BGM loops, converting graphics from INFINITAS, dual-booting Windows 10 on the game PC and fixing encoding issues, I had finally set up beatoraja to my liking. There was just one thing left to do: figure out where to put the on screen camera for recordings.
This is the second in a series of posts on streamlining score sharing in beatmania IIDX. Using the data we found last time, we'll build an internal library to read score data from memory, find and hook a function to run our code on the result screen, and finally, hijack an import to get our library loaded automatically.
Sharing scores is a big part of the rhythm game community. For me, it's been a great way to keep track of my progress and meet similarly skilled players to compete with. On the other hand, taking pictures of the screen with my phone each time got old fast. The process needed some streamlining and I had a plan.
After moving all my computer stuff into a larger room I noticed that the short HDMI cable I had previously been using to connect the gaming and streaming machines together would no longer be a viable solution. Solving this turned out to be quite an ordeal, but the interesting kind that's worth writing about.