Interesting discovery and an inquirey to the community...

[Wally123]

Since my account was banned from Dolphin's forums...I have just been playing and tweeking...I love the 16x9 aspect ratios in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess...I made a strange discovery.

The following is the decoded Action Replay code for 16x9 in Wind Waker for GameCube (NTSC):

043FA998 3FE38E39


The following is the decoded Action Replay code for 16x9 in Twilight Princess for the NTSC GameCube:

0445391C 3FE38E39


Notice anything strange about this? Check the second set of each code...it is the same. I have a hunch that the first sets of those codes involve identifying the game in some way shape or form..What that is I do not know as I am not entirely knowledgeable in that realm...If anyone knows..please reply...especially if you know how to identify a game that way in an indexed manner...This might allow for a few games to use 16x9 without distortion or corruption.

 

[Truth Unknown]

I don't know details about how exactly the Action Replay defined the structure of its codes, but that first number is definitely not going to be a game identifying code. Most cheat devices are really memory address modifiers, simply changing a value in the game's memory and nothing more. So seeing how the second part of the code is similar, I would assume the first number defines where in memory to make a change, and the second number defines how to modify the memory address by locking a number of a given length to the aspect ratio.

 

[Wally123]

This means that we can now start searching around for where the various memory address are.. So basically the first tells us where (and it is totally game dependent) and the second tells us how much...Time to start fiddling around it seems...

 

[SubDrag]

3FE38E39 is a floating point value, it is approximately 1.777777777777778, which is 16/9. Presumably it's aspect ratio. I don't know what original is, but it I'd guess adjusts it. If you don't know your way around hacking GC, this won't help

 

[Cyberman]

3FE38E39 is a floating point value, it is approximately 1.777777777777778, which is 16/9. Presumably it's aspect ratio. I don't know what original is, but it I'd guess adjusts it. If you don't know your way around hacking GC, this won't help

FYI people just to be precise and accurate about that number:
1: it's a single precision floating point number, the reason I say that is their are several formats in IEEE 754 specification and it's VERY important to say which it is
2: in a single precision floating point value you only have 7 significant digits, the value you gave is actually wrong because of that in fact if one gave the value to the number of digits you used it should read "1.777777791023254" but in truth only 1.777777 is really relevant.
3: Aspect ratio has a number of uses. As for what the number means it's the ratio of the horizontal to vertical pixels (4:3 for NTSC 5:4? PAL SECAM I have no idea <french always do things a bit differently> and of course wide screen is 16:9). The game was released for a number of display outputs whilst the newer HD definitions were in flux (game cube) so this makes sense as at that time their were still 4 widely available analog formats).

Anyhow history is the lesson the programmers in all likely hood changed that aspect ratio so that things looked right regardless of the display format. The Wii was a more powerful GC (likely the U Wii is the same deal not a bad idea really). That's what I would have done.

Side note writing float point numbers out correctly in decimal is not for the faint of heart.

Cyb the not so faint of heart

 

[Narann]

3FE38E39 is a floating point value, it is approximately 1.777777777777778, which is 16/9. Presumably it's aspect ratio. I don't know what original is, but it I'd guess adjusts it. If you don't know your way around hacking GC, this won't help

Did you recognize this number just reading it or you try to convert it and realize it's 1.777? Sorry for the silly question but I've been impressed.

 

[SubDrag]

Oh it was pretty recognizable, 3F800000 is 1.0 in float, and it was likely to be a float anyways. Then converted #, and saw was ratio.

 

[Narann]

Impressed here. O_O

Thanks!