PlayStation Development Network

Hello good sirs and madams,


I am trying to work on a project with a friend of mine, we hit a couple of speedbumps.
The first one,probably asked here a gazillion times but search engine gave no result, is there a way to extract 3D models from existing psx games? Or is extracting from an existing game not possible at all....

The second speedbump is, working with the tools of the SDK, trying to execute .exe tools results in opening an msdos program and immediatly closes it, did this with Windows XP Mode(virtual PC). Am I doing something wrong? Or do you need to drop the file on the .exe tool?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Every game is programed differently. To extract 3D models will require you to figure out their encoding method, and reversing it. Something that can take a lot of hard work. The best thing to do is find a really simple game (such as a yaroze game), or using a Sony Psy-Q example.

Some of the Psy-Q SDK tools are MS-DOS based and Win32 based. So you will need to open a DOS (command) prompt and call the exe independently to see its help and variables to enter into it to do what you need it to do. This is basic Windows computing, so you should know this. As for the Win32 applications, you can simply run them, where a GUI menu will pop up and you will do what you need to do in that.

torxe wrote:Every game is programed differently. To extract 3D models will require you to figure out their encoding method, and reversing it. Something that can take a lot of hard work. The best thing to do is find a really simple game (such as a yaroze game), or using a Sony Psy-Q example.

I was thinking about this, would be possible to get all the Cool Boarders 3 files and modify the original game adding new characters and others?

It's up to the game you prefer...
You can explore the game and manipulate some files, music and so on. after changing something, you need to compare with special tools the original iso and the modified. after minutes you will have a created "PPF file" with all changes in it.

now you can inject the PPF into the original ISO and burn it back on CD and voila --> now you have changed the game.

Come to think of it, I would LOVE to see models from Wild Arms 2.

jpsxdec you already tried? (google)

@bizarro2011
interesting.

How common was Lightwave 3D for PSX modeling?

Extremely popular. I find Sony used more SGI machines for modeling though. Depends how complex the game was they were working on however. Today you can use 3D Studio MAX.

Shadow wrote:Extremely popular. I find Sony used more SGI machines for modeling though. Depends how complex the game was they were working on however. Today you can use 3D Studio MAX.

I'd heard about some early Blender support for the PSX also... and after doing some digging in their source bin found this: http://download.blender.org/source/ches ... on_engine/

So there must be something to it... the neogeo directory has me wondering if this was an in-house tool though, before the whole Blender scene. It would be great to use an early Blender version as I'm somewhat already accustomed to it. 3DS is $$$.

I suppose this is the Blender PSX support:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCK22gE9DSk[/youtube]

KrossX wrote:I suppose this is the Blender PSX support:

Impressive, but sadly the tense is wrong:

YouTube description of that video wrote:The Blender Game Engine originally was able to deploy for the Playstation One architecture. This video shows the demo CD made by Ton Roosendaal to attract investors to Blender.

A working playstation with the demos running will be showed tomorrow during the Blender Conference 10th anniversary edition in Amsterdam. This recording was made in the Blender Institute a day before (today).

The audio quality is not very good (mobile recording). But Ton gives a nice explanation of what you are seeing here.

The description is right about the audio; more or less all I could make out was, at quite separate points, that they had pre-rendered lighting working per vertex, and were unable to get a publisher to pay for further development.

Shadow wrote:Extremely popular. I find Sony used more SGI machines for modeling though. Depends how complex the game was they were working on however. Today you can use 3D Studio MAX.

Certainly the Crash Bandicoot retrospective blog talks about using SGI machines at length and contrasts the costs with what they describe as the industry standard Windows PC. But there's quite a lot of hagiography in there and proclamations about how every other PlayStation developer in the entire world said Bandicoot must be fake because it was so technically accomplished, how they invented a whole bunch of revolutionary gameplay ideas, etc. Which isn't my recollection.

It sounds like, given that the camera in that game is more or less on rails, the SGI machines were used to do an in-advance version of what we'd now use occlusion queries for — antiportals, in effect. But right down to individual polygons because they were preprocessing anyway so why worry about a broad phase? I guess that means they ended up at what amounts to PVS sets, but not stored according to a BSP tree as per the Quake/etc view of the world.