The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Let's stop faking and make this happen people!!! I think we can get Star Control 2 on X-box Live(tm) in no time! We need instant satisfaction! I’m hearing allot of talk about “tweaks” to the ships, and of course “The real Star Control 3”. I think that great games like SC really suffer from limited support! Sure there are mutants like us that love the hell out of these games, but don’t you think that if SC2 sold more than 10,000 copies we would already have the Toys for Bob SC3! The likely success of a port for SC2 tournament play on a console like the PS3 or X-Box is a good bet!
Gems for those who care: You can play a burned CD-Rom in your 3DO! That means you can actually edit the ISO in a Hex-Editor! (We did it) I am the proud owner of a VUX ship that will out thrust a SPATHI! “Talk about a smack down!” Mail me to find out how..
More gems coming soon…..

Burned CD-ROM in a 3DO? How does that work? Have the encryption keys been recovered? Exploiting some bug? Modified hardware?

Well to be legal you must first obtain a SC2 3DO game disk. Then create an ISO 9660 with a program like Nero. (I think default settings will work but you might need a CD-Rom drive that supports RAW mode.) And before you waste your time I would suggest burning a copy and attempting to play it in your 3DO first. (Tested good on both the Panasonic and Goldstar 3DO’s) (This is also a great way to recover good game-play from a scratched disk!) If it works you can now use a program like Hexplorer to edit the ISO file. Now there’s just the simple task of going through hundreds of thousands of pages of hex until you find the right values and change them! ;) There is talk among my friends to create a DOS SC2 ISO trainer program that will enable you to tweak all attributes of ship performance and then save the ISO with the new settings. (Viva geek mutants!) I think they’re just plain nuts, but we all do LOVE our SC2 tournaments!
p.s. If we can’t come up with something usable soon; (or give up), I will tell how we supercharged the VUX ships in a SC2 ISO.

The problem isn't copying 3DO CDs per se; that just works like copying any other CD. I thought you were talking about a way to bypass the 3DO's RSA signature, which is necessary to run modified binaries.
Your enthousiasm made me think there was actually some new development in this respect; I should have read your posting better.

It actually shouldn't be much of a problem to figure out which values to change (there's a posting around here somewhere telling more about it). The source is available nowadays, so it doesn't require much reverse engineering.
But instead of running SC2 on a 3DO, why not run UQM on a PC? You don't even need to hack binaries that way, as you can change the values directly in the source.

The only problem is we are addicted to the 3DO version. There is a dispute amongst our little group about the timing in melee. Although the PC version seems not to bog down as easily, there does seem to be a slight kinetic difference in game play. At least to a few of our longtime players… (please vote everyone!)

The difference is probably so small it doesn't even matter. Honestly, kinetic difference. In my unproffessional opinion, you'd have to have OCD to even realize there's a problem. There are pills you can take for this sort of thing. Check with your doctor.

Reminds me of that show, Corner Gas, though.

"Should I put my logo on the outside left, or the inside right of this mug?"

Hehe, nobody ever thought to tell the guy, the mug is round.