Oni (PlayStation 2)

Midway through Oni's development, in 1999, Take-Two Interactive purchased a stake in Bungie and became the publisher for the upcoming game. In addition to their investment, T2 stipulated that a PlayStation 2 port would be made, to be released alongside Oni for Windows and Macintosh. That port was created by Rockstar Toronto (known at the time as Rockstar Canada), and because the game had been designed for a PC with a hard drive, changes had to be made in order to load the game more optimally from CD-ROM. Even after this work, the game's long load times on PS2 have been noted.

Today, Oni runs well in the emulator PCSX2. When using this emulator, load times are greatly reduced by placing an ISO of the game disc on your hard drive, plus you can easily apply patches (cheats, etc.) without having to buy a cheat device for your PS2, so this is the best way to run the game.

Game differences

[pictures coming later]

• The intro and outro movies are 30fps instead of 15fps, and intro in particular looks better on PS2. (These movies were turned into mod packages for PC Oni called "HQ Movies (Mac)" and "HQ Intro Movie (Windows)".)
• The intro on PC starts with the Bungie logo sequence and then plays the anime intro as part of one movie, but on PS2 there are two intro movies: the first contains the added Rockstar logo sequence (with a special Konoko-based presentation) and the original PC Bungie logo sequence, and this movie is unskippable (unless you apply the patch below). The second movie contains the original anime intro.
• Outro's credits are somewhat different; see HERE for details.
• Instead of using Trailer and Farewell as the backing music for the credits, PS2 Oni has an original house beat. This is probably because the PC credits are 171 seconds long, but in the NTSC version of PS2 Oni they take 156 seconds, and in PAL they take 204 seconds. (Running video at 25fps vs. 30fps does not account for this difference, and the credits are identical; the PAL version just plays the credits much slower.) In any case, to cover these new credits sequences, a new backing track was composed.
• Different Main Menu.
• When loading a level, instead of a progress bar against a black background, PS2 Oni has a proper loading screen – the game cycles through three different backgrounds for these.
• The splashscreens and win/lose screens for each level use the same images as on PC, but the text has a different style.

Binary differences

The game files in PS2 Oni are structured similarly to PC Oni, but with some notable differences.

• The disc contains duplicate copies of a strangely-small persist.dat, at the paths ONI/PERSIST.DAT and ONI/2. (Note that Oni (PS2) saves it progress to the memory card like every other game.)
• Renamed files. It appears that PS2 file naming is subject to the 8+3 limit seen in DOS. In order to work around this for the longer names used in the IGMD/ directory, the files are simply named with consecutive numbers on disc, and the real names are given in INDEX.DIR files in the same directory.
• The folder ONI/1/ is GameDataFolder. Inside of this, the usual .dat files are present, but the .raw and .sep files have been moved to the subdirectories 20/ and 21/. Additional .pal ("palette") files are also stored in a subdirectory, 19/.
• The files ONI/1/2 and ONI/1/18 are the original .bik movies from PC Oni, taking up space on the CD-ROM for no reason. This is in addition the PSS (PlayStation 2 video format) versions of intro and outro at root level, which take up 33% of the total space on the volume!
• In the IGMD folder (ONI/1/1/), the same additional level scripts are found as in Big Blue Box Oni.

Patches

Punk7890 of the TCRF community (The Cutting Room Floor) found that a number of Dev Mode features were still present in the PS2 port. Some need hex-patching in order to activate them, and some can be toggled using the controller once activated, showing that Rockstar found these features useful during their port work. The patches are found HERE.

In order to apply the patches on a PS2, you would use a cheat device like GameShark, which few people have. If you're running Oni in PCSX2, you'll have an easy time adapting these patches. Note that these instructions assume you are using the U.S. release of the game; other versions will require different patching. Create a plain-text file called FD9CD8FC.pnach (make sure there's no ".txt" at the end of the name), place it in the "cheats" directory for PCSX2, and in the file, create a line of text for each patch you want to use, in the following format:

TCRF wiki   .pnach line
0033A904 => patch=1,EE,0033A904,word,00000001 # FPS counter
00000001

The comment at the end of the .pnach line is optional, but you will definitely want to label your patches.

An additional patch for skipping the intro movies is below. This patch in .pnach format disables the movie-playing function altogether so that the game skips right to the loading screen for the Main Menu:

patch=1,EE,001C726C,word,00000000 # no movies