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 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 quickly from CD-ROM. Even after this work, the PS2 version has been noted for its long load times.

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. You can also easily apply patches from within PCSX2 instead of having to buy a cheat device for your PS2, so this is the best way to run the game.

Gameplay differences

• Cheats are entered differently; see HERE. Also, they do not require the game to be beaten first, which is extremely helpful since the console controls make this version harder.
• The cooldown exploit has been fixed.
• The AI for the androids in Training is glitchy or overly aggressive. They might try to attack you after beating Karen, and the training bots sometimes forget the defense/offense program they're supposed to be following and wantonly attack you. It remains to be seen if this is an overall glitch with AI in the PS2 version.
• In the opening cutscene for Chapter 13, Konoko fires two or three times at the glass in the ceiling instead of once. (This probably means you have fewer bullets in your clip when the level starts.)

Visual 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 an added Rockstar logo sequence (with a special Konoko-based presentation) and the original PC Bungie logo sequence; this movie is unskippable (but see "Patches" for a movie-skipping patch). The second movie contains the original anime intro.
• 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 for each level use the same images as on PC, but the title overlay has a different style.
• The text used for subtitles is larger. Character names in the fly-in portraits are also redone to be much larger.
• Lighting is handled differently; there seems to be a higher gamma to the graphical output.
• Karen in Training is using the dark-haired female cop model, probably a result of Rockstar's efforts to conserve resources due to limited memory.
• Some of Shinatama's un-subtitled instructions in the PC version of Training are subtitled on PS2, but not all. Some of these PS2 subtitles are abbreviated transcriptions:
  • SNDD: "00_01_76 Be careful, Konoko! Some attacks are so powerful that they can stagger you even if you block them. Some super moves are so strong they can't be blocked at all!"
  • SUBT: "00_01_76 Some powerful attacks can stagger you. Supermoves cannot be blocked."
  • SNDD: "00_01_89 I'll activate a training drone to walk up and down the firing range. Fire at it to disable it."
  • SUBT: "00_01_89 Fire at the moving training drone to disable it."
• ...and some wording has been re-distributed between SUBTs. Presumably these changes were due to limited screen space.
  • SNDDs:

"00_01_86 Shinatama: Perfect!"

"00_01_88 Shinatama: Let's try firing at some moving targets. Walk over to the table on the right. See the weapon lying there? That's a plasma rifle. Pick it up."

• SUBTs:

"00_01_86 Shinatama: Perfect! Let's try firing on some moving targets."

"00_01_88 Shinatama: Walk over to the table on the right. See the weapon lying there? That's a plasma rifle. Pick it up."

• Instead of using "Trailer" and "Farewell" for the credits, the PS2 credits have completely different music. This is probably because the PC credits are 171 seconds long, but the PS2 credits are 156 seconds (NTSC) or 204 seconds (PAL). (The differing frame rate of PAL's 25fps vs. NTSC's 30fps cannot account for this 48-second time difference, and the credits themselves are identical; the PAL version simply scrolls the credits 30% slower for some reason.) To cover these credits sequences of differing length, a new backing track with a house beat was composed by Rockstar Canada staff. The shorter version fades out arbitrarily as the credits end, whereas the longer PAL track then goes on an extended (and eyebrow-raising) riff on female pain sounds from the game and then closes with an actual coda.
• The text of the PS2 credits is somewhat different; see HERE for details.

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 /PERSIST.DAT and /2. (Note that Oni (PS2) saves its progress to the memory card like every other game, so these files are vestigial.)
• 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 IGMD, the files are simply named with consecutive numbers on disc, and the real names are given in INDEX.DIR files in the same directory. Here is the overall structure of the directory with decoded names and commentary:
  • 1/ - GameDataFolder/
    • 1/ - IGMD/, with the same unused level scripts found in German Mac Oni
    • 2 - intro.bik (unused by game)
    • 3/…17/ - the game's .dat files, but the corresponding .raw and .sep files have been moved to the subdirectories 20/ and 21/
    • 18 - outro.bik (unused by game)
    • 19/ - .pal ("palette") files
    • 20/ - contains the .raw files which go along with the .dat files in this directory
    • 21/ - contains the .sep files which go along with the .dat files in this directory
  • 2 - persist.dat (PC version, unused)
  • 3 - Preferences (another vestigial file, pointing to a GameDataFolder on someone's hard drive)
  • ICONS/ - contains one icon, the Oni icon, apparently in a PS2 format
  • INTRO1.PSS and INTRO2.PSS, discussed under "Visual differences"
  • LOADING.RAW - a new data file for the Main Menu loading screen added to PS2 Oni
  • MODULES/ - standard libraries for a PS2 game
  • OUTRO.PSS - the outro animation and credits, discussed under "Visual differences"
  • PERSIST.DAT (PC version, unused)
  • SLUS_200.64 - the game binary
  • SOUNDS/ - it appears that all sound data has been broken out into a new set of .dat/.raw/.sep files
  • SYSTEM.CNF - standard boot information for a PS2 game

• It's surprising to note that the original .bik movies from PC Oni are taking up space on the CD-ROM considering the game cannot play them and the PSS (PlayStation 2 video format) versions of these movies are already taking up 33% of the total space on the volume. It would seem like the GDF is a straight copy-and-paste from the PC version, except that it's not because all the game data was repacked and restructured.

Patches

Punk7890 of TCRF (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 (for the U.S. release of the game) 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. Create a plain-text file called FD9CD8FC.pnach (that's the CRC of the U.S. release of the game), and make sure there's no ".txt" at the end of the name. Place it in the "cheats" directory for PCSX2, and inside the file, create a line of text for each patch you want to use, using the following guide to convert the patch on the TCRF wiki:

TCRF wiki		pnach
0033A904 00000001	becomes	patch=1,EE,0033A904,word,00000001 # FPS counter

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, courtesy of Iritscen. Place this patch in a .pnach to disable the movie-playing function so that the game skips right to the loading screen for the Main Menu:

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