Are POP2's controls supposed to be this bad, or is something wrong with my setup?

[FluffyQuack]

Correction to something I had written above. There's 8 frames in the run animation loop -- not 6. Realizing this, I re-calculated how far the player moves between the 2 jump-able frames, and each interval is very close to one tile. I wonder if they had the logic of "We only need to check once per tile if the player is trying to do a jump while running, and with that change we can throw out the system from POP1 where we delay jumps until player is closer to an edge" and then they just didn't fully consider the fact that the player has a granular, sub-tile position and they'd need to drastically increase the range for "locking onto" a tile when doing running jumps.

[David]

The game soft-locked after the epilogue when entering my name into the hall of fame. Tapping buttons on my controller just resulted in random characters being written and there was no way to press "enter"

By the way, how is the player supposed to enter their name on a real Xbox?
Did the developers even consider that? Or did they just assume that PoP2 is so hard that nobody is going to finish it?

And here's the glitch on the Hall of Fame screen: https://www.twitch.tv/fluffyquack/clip/ ... x2nr6UVjmt

The random characters are: (&''''&('(&(ss

Hmm, it's as if the Virtual Key Codes of arrow keys were interpreted as ASCII codes.

Namely:
left = 0x25 = %
up = 0x26 = &
right = 0x27 = '
down = 0x28 = (

(Seriously, when I saw those symbols in the video, my first thought was "Windows virtual key codes of arrows". How do I even know these kinds of things? )

The percent sign does not appear in the video, though.
I can't type it in the DOS version of PoP2, either, and I think I know why.
The zip at the bottom of this post contains the fonts from PoP1 and PoP2.
font00010.fn2.txt contains the font used for the Hall of Fame and saved games.
It has no glyph for the percent sign. That may be why it cannot be typed.

[FluffyQuack]

By the way, how is the player supposed to enter their name on a real Xbox?
Did the developers even consider that? Or did they just assume that PoP2 is so hard that nobody is going to finish it?

The random characters are: (&''''&('(&(ss

Hmm, it's as if the Virtual Key Codes of arrow keys were interpreted as ASCII codes.

Namely:
left = 0x25 = %
up = 0x26 = &
right = 0x27 = '
down = 0x28 = (

(Seriously, when I saw those symbols in the video, my first thought was "Windows virtual key codes of arrows". How do I even know these kinds of things? )

The percent sign does not appear in the video, though.
I can't type it in the DOS version of PoP2, either, and I think I know why.
The zip at the bottom of this post contains the fonts from PoP1 and PoP2.
font00010.fn2.txt contains the font used for the Hall of Fame and saved games.
It has no glyph for the percent sign. That may be why it cannot be typed.

Good finds! That would explain why those symbols were the ones to pop up. If I recall, I tried pressing every single button the controller.

I kind of wish I still had my original Xbox so I could be 100% sure it happens on a real system. I know Xbox 360 has a system-level feature where a game can request a virtual keyboard to pop up and then the user writes on that using the gamepad. I have no idea if the original Xbox had that. You do write your profile name in the main menu for Sands of Time, and that uses a virtual keyboard that's part of the game itself.

I stumbled on this video, which I think is the only video on Youtube showing the game get completed on a real Xbox:


At the end of the video, you can see the Hall of Fame screen. You only see the screen for 3 seconds, but I feel it's rather telling how the list is empty and that you don't see any virtual keyboard pop up. So, yeah, it's looking like this is just a very, very silly bug. Maybe they ran out of development time and figured it was a shippable bug.

[AJprince]

I managed to find the same code in v1.0 (I must have done a mistake when searching for it the other day). So people can apply these changes to the v1.0 DOS EXE if they want running jumps that feel the same as in POP1:

Offset: 0x3197F: change 74 to 7D (jz to jge)
Offset: 0x31A53: change 0B F6 7D 09 83 FF 04 75 04 2B C0 EB 28 to 83 FE 00 7C 08 83 FF 04 75 03 EB 25 90

I just finished the POP2 1.0 version with this change and it felt great! Not having to stop and position the prince for a jump is a game changer. Kudos to FluffyQuack, yay!

[FluffyQuack]

I managed to find the same code in v1.0 (I must have done a mistake when searching for it the other day). So people can apply these changes to the v1.0 DOS EXE if they want running jumps that feel the same as in POP1:

Offset: 0x3197F: change 74 to 7D (jz to jge)
Offset: 0x31A53: change 0B F6 7D 09 83 FF 04 75 04 2B C0 EB 28 to 83 FE 00 7C 08 83 FF 04 75 03 EB 25 90

I just finished the POP2 1.0 version with this change and it felt great! Not having to stop and position the prince for a jump is a game changer. Kudos to FluffyQuack, yay!

That's good to hear! I'm glad you found this to be an improvement. I found myself enjoying the game a lot more when I did a playthrough with the change, and it makes it so much easier to bounce between POP1 and POP2.