Hello,
I'm excited to see the recent progress people have achieved in contributing to Dominic Szablewski's advances in reverse engineering the original Wipeout games. If only I was able to grasp the amazing programming knowledge and skills required I would create a track editor and help to re-create the original game in c/++. (I've been programming in c/++ as a hobby for a long time now but i'm still only an amateur!)
Anyhow, all this has inspired me to do a mild "hack" if you could call it that. Its surely been done before but I can't find talk of it anywhere online. .. But here it is.
You will need a cracked copy of the original Wipeout. I used the "Wipeout CD (1995)(Psygnosis).zip" Hoson/Replicator crack about 15MB which has no music and no sounds.
Copy the track data from TRACK14 folder into a temporary folder, there is a couple of readable text files, you will know if this is the firestar track data folder as it will contain the words "MARSY" .. look for other cues, its a interesting read, looks like compiler output for the developers circa 1995.
Copy the track data from TRACK02 folder into the TRACK14 folder and from the temporary folder into TRACK02. Basically its just a swap.
Run the game, go through the single race, select team etc and then select ALTIMA track. Firestar should load up instead. However many of the textures are corrupt/flipped and in the wrong place. But it is playable. For 19 years I wanted to play firestar on the pc but i could never get there until two nights ago
I haven't tried swapping other folders yet but this might have some further hacking potential, especially if someone could figure out how to correct the textures etc hmm.. custom track editor now anyone?
Note: I ran it on my old retro gaming windows 98 pc, DOSBOX didnt seem to work. It also crashes if there is any kind of CD in the drive. Cracked version doesnt seems to work in windows either.
Kabuki
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Wipeout 2097 PC (Boxed)
Wipeout XL PC Disc
Wipeout 3d Rage ATI edition Disc
Wipeout PC x 2 (Boxed)
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