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, plus load times are greatly reduced when you have the ISO on your hard drive, so this is the best way to run the game.

Differences from PC version

[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)".)
• 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, but the text has a different style.

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. The first intro movie contains the Rockstar logo sequence (with a special Konoko-based presentation) and the Bungie logo from the beginning of the PC version's intro.bik. This 30-second movie cannot be skipped. The animé portion of intro.bik is a second movie in PS2 Oni, and this can be skipped. The following patch in .pnach format disables the movie-playing function altogether so that the game skips right to the loading screen before the Main Menu:

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

OBD

The game data in PS2 Oni is structured similarly to PC Oni, but with some notable differences. [details coming later]