Speedrunning and Modding the Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer (opens in new tab)

(farlow.dev)

78 pointsfarlow10mo ago7 comments

7 comments

Back at THQ we published this. The story goes that there’s some language in the deals between Pixar and Apple that forced Disney to publish a Mac version of all Pixar-based games.

There was Mac hardware that was only used for testing Pixar games; the testers there are the ones that told me the story.

Also I remember now some tester made a Redman/Methodman music video with video clips from the first game and was of course fired.

Unsolicited oral history of the Incredibles games I guess.

farlowOP10mo ago

Neat, thanks for sharing!

declan_roberts10mo ago

It's fun to have game traditions like this. I always wished there were more coop games growing up for N64 because I had a lot of fun playing them with my brother.

Then we moved away and switched to PC gaming but it's just not the same.

bombcar10mo ago

The number of coop games is already low, the number of GOOD ones is even lower.

It’s sad - coop is some of the best fun you can have on a console.

sumeno10mo ago

As someone who has done some reverse engineering of SNES games it's interesting to see how it differs from more "modern" systems.

For SNES we only have the 65816 assembly so digging through the source seems harder, but there are mature tools built into SNES emulators that make the modding very straightforward with Lua

Starlevel00410mo ago

There's no substance in this post. It goes from "I put it in a decompiler" to "Let's setup a toolchain" to "here's the mod". How did you write the mod?

farlowOP10mo ago

The mod is ultimately just C code that is called from hooks installed into the game engine. Concretely, we overwrite an instruction in the game engine's render function with a jump to one of our C functions. Then we jump back to continue the render function when we're done.

The C code can do anything at this point. The remaining work is to crawl through Ghidra to find interesting addresses to read/write to and useful functions to call to affect the game engine. That entails some combination of reading through function and variable names, setting breakpoints in the Dolphin debugger to check values, and writing the mod code and testing if it does what I expect.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

7 comments

someone7x10mo ago

Back at THQ we published this. The story goes that there’s some language in the deals between Pixar and Apple that forced Disney to publish a Mac version of all Pixar-based games.

There was Mac hardware that was only used for testing Pixar games; the testers there are the ones that told me the story.

Also I remember now some tester made a Redman/Methodman music video with video clips from the first game and was of course fired.

Unsolicited oral history of the Incredibles games I guess.

farlowOP10mo ago

Neat, thanks for sharing!

declan_roberts10mo ago

It's fun to have game traditions like this. I always wished there were more coop games growing up for N64 because I had a lot of fun playing them with my brother.

Then we moved away and switched to PC gaming but it's just not the same.

bombcar10mo ago

The number of coop games is already low, the number of GOOD ones is even lower.

It’s sad - coop is some of the best fun you can have on a console.

sumeno10mo ago

As someone who has done some reverse engineering of SNES games it's interesting to see how it differs from more "modern" systems.

For SNES we only have the 65816 assembly so digging through the source seems harder, but there are mature tools built into SNES emulators that make the modding very straightforward with Lua

Starlevel00410mo ago

There's no substance in this post. It goes from "I put it in a decompiler" to "Let's setup a toolchain" to "here's the mod". How did you write the mod?

farlowOP10mo ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse