Rayman Pirate-Community

RayCarrot wrote: Sat May 09, 2020 4:25 pm So while Bad Rayman is a copy of Rayman with another palette they never did the sprite for when he's scared. On PC this animation is completely broken since the sprite itself is missing, while on PS1 it switches back to Rayman's palette colors.

But then they made the grimace animation even though it cannot be seen in the game either?

#Rubber mark# wrote: Sat May 09, 2020 4:37 pm

RayCarrot wrote: Sat May 09, 2020 4:25 pm So while Bad Rayman is a copy of Rayman with another palette they never did the sprite for when he's scared. On PC this animation is completely broken since the sprite itself is missing, while on PS1 it switches back to Rayman's palette colors.

But then they made the grimace animation even though it cannot be seen in the game either?

I think in the Jaguar version it's possible to do a grimace by standing still when you press the run button. Why anyone would do that while being chased by Bad Rayman is a different question.

PluMGMK wrote: Sat May 09, 2020 4:32 pm Ah, so the "correct-colour Moskito" fruit chase sprite wasn't exclusive to the Jaguar version! I had always assumed that there was some limitation of the PS and Saturn versions that prevented the correct colour scheme from being used, even if that never really made sense… I think this invites another decade of ink-spilling on the Bzitt/Moskito situation.

Yeah, there shouldn't be any limitations for it. The same palettes are loaded for the chase and boss levels (2 world palettes and 4 allfix palettes). What's even weirder is that on PC Bzzit and Moskito appear as two separate sprite groups (DES files), even though they are identical and both share each others animations.

Ah yes, MST and MST2. I've wondered if there was any difference between them since I saw them in unusable always objects in Rayman Designer's EVE.MLT (since Designer didn't actually ship any of the boss DESs for some reason). I guess it must have been related to the colouring, even if the DOS version didn't have enough colours to actually show a difference between them…

Yeah, the mlt files have a lot of leftovers from R1. It also shows that event states originally had names, which is interesting. The object names are shown there too, but those we luckily could extract from the GBA port.
It would be cool to add the missing DES files to Designer, but sadly there's a texture size limitation which makes it impossible without modding the exe.

What sort of modifications would be required? I presume it's more than changing a few bytes (like the widescreen patches)?

Not sure. First the exe needs to be decompressed (which can be done with some old DOS program). Then we'd need to find where the game allocates the memory, which could probably be done by cross-referencing the functions with the mobile port. I'm not sure how easy it'd be too modify though, since I'm not sure how the PC version handles allocated memory.

PluMGMK wrote: Sat May 09, 2020 4:42 pm I think in the Jaguar version it's possible to do a grimace by standing still when you press the run button. Why anyone would do that while being chased by Bad Rayman is a different question.

This may be why, then. I love how Bad Rayman's tongue is green, it's almost like an Easter egg.

#Rubber mark# wrote: Sun May 10, 2020 7:26 pm This may be why, then. I love how Bad Rayman's tongue is green, it's almost like an Easter egg.

Yeah this is really cool to be honest. I wonder if this has anything to do with Jade's lips being green.

If anything, her lips must be related to Ly's! Though apparently they weren't always green (see the BG&E2 teaser from E3 2018).

I suppose this makes sense then, especially when both games have the same creator.

Time for yet another one of my big dumps of Rayman 1 info

This time from Rayman Advance! This version was pretty complicated reverse engineering. The game sort of acts as a layer around the original PC code, so the data is stored differently in the rom and then assembled into the original PC format in memory. Every sprite is also made out of a tileset of 8x8 tiles, but since the PC version uses 16x16 tiles they get assembled into that. One fun fact about the format though is just how similar it is to the Mapper (yes, not the built-in Designer levels, but the custom ones you make through the Mapper). It even more proves the theory that the Mapper is a leftover developer tool from making R1 they repurposed for the players.

Now onto the interesting discoveries.


Multiplayer
Rayman Advance was originally going to have a "Capture the Flag" multiplayer mode. This was sadly cut late in development. However the multiplayer maps still exist in the rom. There is one for every world and they oddly enough are all indexed as being in world 8 (world 7 doesn't exist...).

Here's the Jungle map as an example: Every map is symmetrical, most having two exit signs (these are the player bases and where you spawn). How do we know this? Well, turns out the mode is still in the game! By analyzing the rom I noticed there's a function it only runs if a flag is set in memory in the game loop (and this function references some unused multiplayer strings). Enabling this flag does indeed enable the mode.
As you can see the mode would have a map in the middle, and the flag score for each player on the sides. Sadly I couldn't do much else with this mode. It keeps respawning me at the exit sign after a certain time, so I think it's stuck in some sort of "waiting for the other player" mode.


Unused Maps?
By checking the map count two things stood out; Jungle has 22 maps and Music has 18. This makes it seem as if the Breakout stage and Bongo Hills 1 are in the rom... However loading the levels shows they're duplicates of other levels (Jungle 22 matches Jungle 21, Music 1 matches Music 2). They most likely did this to not mess with the original level indexing. I mentioned before how the game is sort of built on top of the original code? Well, same applies with the indexing. In Rayman 1 levels are usually indexed by a world index + a level index. In Advance they however use a global level index. But to not mess with the original code they then convert it back and forth between that and the original format

Interesting details
Ever wondered why the game looks so bad? Well there are two main reasons. The first one is the palette limitation. The game has 32 16-color palettes, with 16 being for the sprites, 10 for the tiles and 6 for the background. The sprite palettes are the same across every world, so they were quite limited on the color choices (especially since they couldn't easily jump between the palettes for a sprite, which means even less colors). Interestingly if you lower the brightness for the colors the game will start looking a lot more like other versions, so them increasing the brightness (to compensate for the original GBA's lack of backlight) hurt the game in the long run.
The other reason is a way to save space on the cartridge. Some sprites are stored in half the resolution in the rom and then upscaled in-game. This is why some of Mr Sax's sprites look so pixelated for example:
Unused sprites/animations from other versions also still exist here (as well as Breakout sprites): Also to end it of, I managed to extract the intro, which consists of several looping frames of animation:

this is super interesting

i swear rayman games have some of the best unused stuff

Some really interesting stuff indeed!

So, they left in the little Livingstone on a plum and then compressed Mister Sax to save space?

Oh it's even worse than that...! They even left in completely unreferenced sprites in the rom:

Probably should add this to raywiki

We just got the DSi version working in Ray1Map now and there's not a whole lot interesting. It's essentially the exact same version as on GBA, but with no downscaled sprites and the normal PC palette. The multiplayer maps have also been removed. What's most interesting is probably just how messed up some aspects of the port looks as shown here:

Blue lines on the notes: Wrong tile palette + the incorrectly placed spike from GBA (they at least fixed the placement of the pencil sharpener from GBA...): Weird new drum tiles which don't blend together well at all: And of course the famous 7th cage in Bongo Hills
The most interesting thing is probably the fact that the Breakout minigame is there and appears fully functional, which very likely means it can be accessed in the game, but no one has found out how.

Great finds!

The minigame fuctions 100%? Grafics intact and all?

I thought so, but I just tried hacking myself in there using an emulator and, well... it doesn't seem to work



The map itself is correct, but I guess they didn't port the code which handle the breakout events. Background is messed up cause it's not in the game I guess.