v.0.1.5 - Startling Seven

I released 0.7 of MASGAU earlier today (yesterday). Not many new features, mostly interface and stabilizing. I decided to handle the Arkham Asylum problem by adding a save profile that just backs up the user's Game for Windows account information into it's archive. That way you can just restore the account info and the Arkham save should be ready to go. I tested it with my friend's computer earlier, and it went of without a hitch.

I've also added a fan page for MASGAU to Facebook, a link to which now exists in the right column of my blog.

v.0.1.4 - Baffling Batman

Arkham Asylum looks like an amazing game, but it's been giving MASGAU trouble. My buddy Mikey bought the game and played it through under XP. Soon after beating it he wiped his computer and installed Windows 7. Arkham was one of the games added to MASGAU in the last update, and he used it to backup his save files. He restored the saves after re-installing the game, and MASGAU indeed restored the files to the correct location. After starting Arkham we were informed that the save was corrupt. A little Googling led me to believe that Arkham was doing something to restrict transferring saves, most likely encrypting. I finally got an opportunity to experiment on Mikey's copy of the game and came up with some interesting findings.

Inside a user's XLive folder there is a folder called content that contains per-G4W-user folders. The folder names are 16-digit hex numbers, seeming to be a concatenation of two 8-digit hex numbers. I logged in with several accounts, and found that they all had the same last 8 digits, leading me to believe these digits are a machine identifier. The first 8 digits seem to be randomly generated the first time you log in with an account to identify it on the system.

In the Arkham save folder, there is a subfolder for each of the users that have logged in and made a save. The folder name is the 8-digit account identifier mentioned in the previous paragraph, followed by 00000001. I copied a save created with my own user to Mike's user and then logged in as Mike. I was surprised to find that the game did not report the save as corrupted. This led me to believe that the copy protection was a system-specific thing. I Googled around and found a save made somewhere around the Poison Ivy battle. I copied the save into Mike's user folder and was unsurprised to see it reported as corrupted. The save had included the XLive folder of the user who made it, so I extracted it to my own XLive folder. This added an extra user, one that could see the included save game as long as it was placed in the save game folder in a folder named after the user's hex identifier. Unfortunately Mike is the only person I know who has a computer powerful enough to run the game. Once I finish repairing my system I will be able to do direct experiments with transferring saves and account info between two separate systems.

All this is of course for MASGAU's benefit. If I'm able to perfect a method, MASGAU will be able to back up the associated account info for a save along with the save. Due to the motherboard failure of my desktop, development has been very slow. I do a little work here and there at my local college, but there's only so much I can do there. As a side effect, I believe that if I am able to successfully extract account information from G4W, I might be able to make some other games that use G4W and don't protect the saves (like Fallout 3 and I think Kane & Lynch) able to automatically choose what user to restore a save to. This unfortunately may invalidate the layout of saves for those games made with older version of MASGAU, but that's why it uses 7-zip files. Due to its how it saves, Arkham will probably never be able to do this automatically. We can only hope that someday the developer will be compassionate enough to remove the copy protection from the saves.

On the upside, MASGAU has been getting some interface polishing. Almost all the windows can now be resized at will, and the main window will even remember how big you left it. There is now a status bar that indicates things that are detected, such as Steam, G4W, and maybe whether a PSP is detected. The status bar also replaces the progress splash, allowing you to see the window that much sooner. Here's a screen:

See? Progress!

Due to n employment contract snafu, I should have the money to repair my computer the Friday after next. Another release of MASGAU probably won't happen until after then, but I'm considering upping its status from Alpha to Beta. Exciting!

v.0.1.3 - Mortal Motherboard

School has started. Work has picked up. My motherboard has died. All these things mean MASGAU development will be slower, especially for the next few weeks. There's an outstanding issue with Windows XP right now, and I was hoping to have a release ready last Sunday. That obviously didn't happen.

v.0.1.2 - Spreading Seagull

Well it's been a few weeks and MASGAU has already reached version 0.4 The wiki for MASGAU is finally the top result for MASGAU on Google, and a few sites have done brief write-ups on it. Here's what I've found so far:

The first I spotted

One based off the above one

This one's in Portuguese!

This one too!

Someone was kind enough to post a review on the Sourceforge page

Not really a write-up, but an independent mirror

How awesome is that? Now if only more people would submit save information...

v.0.1.1 - Mosying MASGAU

I've been spending the last month or so working on a backup program called MASGAU. It's purpose is to backup saved games from your computer, then restore them wherever you please. It uses XML definition files to automatically detect saves on your system, and can restore any backup to any detected install of the same game. I just posted version 0.2 to the site, so if you're interested, go check it out.

http://masga.sourceforge.net/

Be sure to check the Supported Games list to see if you have any games you could help out with!

v.0.1.0 - Stopping Semester

Only one more week left for college this semester, finally leaving me free to devote more time to the projects I've been working on. My OpenDb Tango theme hit a bit of a snafu when I accidentally deleted the only current copy. I was able to recover the majority of the icons from a copy of an older version, but all of the CSS was lost. It's not really that big of a deal, as most of the work was just figuring out what color to use with what.

I've also been getting more work done on my Music Chooser for d2x-xl. It's more or less done, there's just a small issue with detecting the current theme. No biggie, I might even have it hammered out by the end of the day. From there, I just have to make some packages for distribution. It's all good. Here's some shots of it in action:
More on this later.

v.0.0.9 - Trepidating Tango

One of the other projects I've got going is a Tango-style theme for OpenDb. The progress on the theme can be seen at http://sage.sytes.net/~opendbtest/. I had done a lot of progress on it for OpenDb 1.0.x, but apparently the 1.5 release (which is in alpha) will introduce some changes to the themeing system. I'm not sure of the severity of this change, but I decided to start making the theme over again. The biggest hurdle has been making Tango-style icons for the various video game consoles. For example, here is a Playstation 2 icon that I made:
I still have plenty more to do though, so I'll probably make a release once the colour scheme is complete, and then update as I finish the rest of the icons.

A bit ago I tried to upgrade DarkholmeIII (my dedicated server) to dual-Pentium IIIs. Traditionally when I have upgraded the system to a new motherboard I have added to the number on the name, but when faced with renaming it DarkholmeIV I decided that maybe the name had run it's course. So, I decided to rename the server after Sage. Unfortunately the upgrade did not go as planned, what with the crashing and the data loss. So, I ended up going back to the old hardware (but with a bit more RAM) and I decided to keep the name. So, that means all addresses that used to be on darkholme.sytes.net are now on sage.sytes.net. I've still got the old address registered and will keep it for some time, but it won't be forever. I also rewrote Sage's front page to be cleaner and facilitate the quick reloading of pictures on the front page. It can be accessed at http://sage.sytes.net/.

I haven't had much time to work on my music launcher for d2x-xl over the last week but I'll post a preview of what progress I've made later. I'm not on my home computer so I can't get any shots or anything. I'm going to work on upgrading MonoDevelop (which I'm using to write the launcher) to the latest release candidate when I get home, and then I'll post some shots of the launcher.

One thing I'm excited about right now is the (relatively) new Animated PNG file format. I had for the longest time wanted MNG to gain popularity so I could use it but patent problems combined with a lack of support from web browser developers seemed to doom the format. APNG is already supported in the latest Betas of both Firefox and Opera. The editor for putting them together is currently a little cumbersome, but with any luck support will make it into the GIMP. Here's an example APNG I made from an Animated GIF I found:

I'm planning on buying a Playstation 3 in the next month. As most people know, the 40GB model has no PS2 compatibility and the 80GB has crappy PS2 compatibility. I've got a good 50 or so PS2 games so this is a very important feature to me. Right now I'm looking to find one of the old 60GB models (which have great PS2 support) on eBay. This decision has become complicated though, as Sony has discontinued the 80GB model and there are rumours going around of a new 120GB or 160GB model with Dualshock 3. I've also heard that Sony was thinking about reintroducing 40GB style PS2 compatibility, and I've a hunch that all these rumours might come together into a system that I would much rather get than a used eBay model. So, if any of you out there are Sony execs that are privy to pertinant information, could you please let the world know what's going to happen?

To finish off this post, I downloaded the latest preview release of Inkscape and I noticed that they've added a 3d box tool that is really fun to play with. I made this in a matter of seconds ->

Cool stuff.