Castlevania Dominus Collection

[Arthandas]

I tried using MArchiveBatchTool like in Advance and Anniversary collections, but it doesn't work. I think getting proper roms will be harder this time as the games have music and various movie files extracted outside the alldata.bin file.

[ZoruaLoL]

I think the "seed" is just different from what was used in previous re-releases, gotta find the new seed.

UPDATE: Looking into the .exe file in comparison to that of GetsuFumaDen (which uses the same seed as the Castlevania Anniversary & Advance Collection) it appears there's no seed on this one (where the seed should be there's a message that says "Illegal function call")? Is that possible? If then, what do we do?

[kjetil-f]

I would not be surprised if the games are modern ports instead of emulation. There were a lot of touch screen stuff on these games originally.

[Arthandas]

I would not be surprised if the games are modern ports instead of emulation.

You must be doing some hard drugs if you think those are native ports...

[kjetil-f]

I would not be surprised if the games are modern ports instead of emulation.

You must be doing some hard drugs if you think those are native ports...

I have not tried it myself (nor hard drugs or the games), so I'm just guessing here. If my memory serves me right, some of the games on those Mega Man collections was in fact ports instead of emulation, so it could be the case here as well. Not saying it is, but just saying it could...

[Arthandas]

it could be the case here as well

It couldn't because the games are clearly emulated. The file structure is the same as in the previous collections and the roms are inside alldata.bin. Even if by some divine intervention Konami decided to make native ports, they would have to make 9 separate ports to cover each version (not to mention both Haunted Castles)...

Still, M2 put a lot of care in this. Normally I don't even touch those compilations without extracting the roms, but this may deserve an exception. We now have uncompressed music and videos, can display all three screens at the same time, there's even integer scaling. The emulator runs great too.

[ZoruaLoL]

Making native ports isn't as hard as it seems as long as you have the source code at hand (or else you have to reverse-engineer it, which it is much harder but still doable). Can't 100% rule out the DS games not being ports seeing how they included such features as uncompressed audio and high-res video (things you can't just inject into a DS ROM) but also reworked the Magic Seals to work with buttons instead of a touch-screen, the fact that both the map and the status screen can be displayed at once doesn't seems like something that could be done through emulation if not by running two instances of the game at the same time (unlikely) and regional differences such as language and graphics don't actually require separate ports but just merge the code and set flags based on user choice
But the OG Haunted Castle probably has to be emulation at least

[DrAzathoth]

I was able to find the seeds in other collections by M2 (like Ray'z) by searching the .exe for locations similar to where the seeds are found in other games. Unfortunately for Dominus, the seed is not located in the same spot and/or obfuscated.

For the record, I also checked the .dll files as well.

[SilentHeII]

Someone already discovered how to extract the data, which does not appear to be traditional ROM format. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3320592802

[ZoruaLoL]

So the seed was "Illegal function call" after all! Only thing that wasn't working out was the number afterwards

[DrAzathoth]

I genuinely never would have bothered trying that...

Edit: Here are the commands in case the Steam page gets nuked.

Windows
MArchiveBatchTool fullunpack --keep alldata.psb.m zlib "Illegal function call" 92
Linux
./MArchiveBatchTool fullunpack --keep alldata.psb.m zlib "Illegal function call" 92

[SummerX5]

I genuinely never would have bothered trying that...

Edit: Here are the commands in case the Steam page gets nuked.

Windows MArchiveBatchTool fullunpack --keep alldata.psb.m zlib "Illegal function call" 92 Linux ./MArchiveBatchTool fullunpack --keep alldata.psb.m zlib "Illegal function call" 92

It works like a charm!
But there is a new problem, seems we cannot repack it and get the new files to work, even we don't change anything.

[hadess]

In case anyone else missed it, the Steam page says:

AT THE MOMENT, NO ROM FILES CAN BE EXTRACTED FROM THIS COLLECTION. THE GAME DOES NOT USE TRADITIONAL ROM FILES, BUT STILL USES FILES FROM THEM. IF A WAY TO CONVERT THEM TO ROMS IS FOUND, I'LL POST ABOUT IT.

[Arthandas]

In case anyone else missed it, the Steam page says:

Yes, it was already posted.

Seems like it really is a (mostly) native port, I'll be damned:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2369900/discussions/0/4759829624073203842/#c4759829624073906862
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2369900/discussions/0/4759829624073203842/?ctp=2#c4759829624074945510