Hey everybody! First post here, though I've been following this place for quite some time!
I really appreciate everybody's contribution to this thread, it's something alot of people have been complaining for long time now.
I really enjoy the Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix+ patch, it's perfect, makes me wonder why Square Enix still waits to release an HD remake of the game despite 2012 being the series's 10th anniversary.
I also noticed the Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain Of Memories one. Well, respect to the person who posted it BUT it's actually wrong, it modifies both W and H values which results more into a zoom out effect than a proper 16:9 hack.
If you remove the H value and leave it as is, it kind of fixes the issue, but it's not directly to a 16:9 aspect ratio, you need to find a better value for it, and so I did! You can grab the patch on the end of this post.
Also, here are some WIP stuff I did too:
Digimon Data Squad (NTSC-U)
The Good:
-It's a pixel perfect 16:9 hack
The Bad:
-Stuff like the intro logos, pause menu and text bubbles are 4:3 centered on the screen and they don't get streched (atleast without a hard way I can't find for now), resulting into pillarboxes or garbage on the sides of the screen, simmilar to how NullDC handles 16:9 hacks.
-The speech text starts from the center of the screen and gets streched to the right. In some cases, speech text might end up outside the speech bubble, though it never goes offscreen.
The Funny:
There is a cutscene that you see an enemy on an empty stage, or atleast it appears its! Normally you only see an empty room in 4:3 but in 16:9 you can see a treasure box which kind of spoils what will happen next in the game. I guess that happens on alot of games where things should be hidden in the extra area/field outside 4:3 aspect ratio.
Crash Bandicoot Wrath Of Cortex (PAL)
The Good:
-It's a pixel perfect 16:9 hack
The Bad:
-Notice the highlighted Coco in the image I provide. She appears slimmer even though Crash isn't, or atleast till he starts to move... It appears that in non-idle animations characters have one (or more) different value(s) that define the Width of the model. The result is that models will change/pop randomly from thick to wide versions of themselfs which is a bit funny and annoying.
Some games I tried working on with no success so far:
Digimon World 4 - Found values for many stuff but the closest related value I could find is the zoom value but nothing related to width.
Tekken Tag Tournament - Even if you would patch that, it would look bad since (like in the funny part of Digimon Data Squad I said above) when on TAG mode and you'd change fighter he supposed to appear just a bit outside 4:3 field so in 16:9 he would POP! out of nowhere middle screen, UGLY. Either way I can't find values that dont give weird results to the game.
Tekken 4 - Any value that I found modifies the fighter models and that only, nothing about the stage or something...(weird)
Fahrenheit - The values I found only modify (in a bad way) the models or change the view of the camera, nothing else.
Crash Nitro Cart - same as Fahrenheit.
Digimon Rumble Arena 2. - Whatever I do only results into terribly deformed stuff, also tends to crash ALOT.
Death By Degrees - That one is definitely patchable but it needs a more experienced person than me. What I understood is that it's like 2-3 values that you need to modify, one affects the stage, one the models and one everything related to 2D stuff like text and menus.
Kingdom Hearts (1) - AAAAARGHHH. This thing is sooo tricky. It may not have different values everytime you reboot the game BUT I can't seem to find any value that modifies the aspect ratio. There are values that modify the width of the models but intrestingly, when you modify them the game will do it's best to try to put them back to their normal value. If you forced it to keep that value and the game's mechanism will fail after some tries to recover it, it will assign a new random address for it on the fly. When I reallised that, it kinda made me angry, why would they do that? Sounds like an error handling mechanism to me. I reaaally need help on that.
I provide for all the patches above a 4:3 and 16:9 comparison photos that prove that they are pixel-perfect 16:9 hacks indeed and not "nearest neighbors" to 16:9.
3A03D62F.pnach (Size: 169 bytes / Downloads: 668)
7E582398.pnach (Size: 192 bytes / Downloads: 717)
A287DF74.pnach (Size: 98 bytes / Downloads: 632)