I've been working on it for a while, Castlevania The Lecarde Chronicles can be run on Hourglass, but the game REQUIRES mouse operation during the start of the program (video test process). If one can get rid of the mouse operation process then the game is re-recordable and even TAS-able...
Is there any way to bypass the self-checking screen of video mode? Maybe it needs further cracking/advanced trick inside the program itself?
EDIT: Using Hourglass shows the fan project's internal (temporary) name as "Castlevania Moonlight Opera" instead of its final name
Checked and it seems that "Castlevania Moonlight Opera" is actually its temporary name during development...
Well, the game consists of five executables, four of which are tiny and the fifth is huge. It seems to me that the four small executables are the graphics menu shown in your screenshot (clicking one of the 'test' buttons would quit the current executable and load one of the others), and the fifth one is the actual game. So these four menu exes call the game exe with some command line parameter, and you can probably use a hex viewer to find out what these are. That should let you bypass this menu entirely; starting an executable with a command line parameter is a valid and standard operation in windows.
Yeah I got it to work. But the problem here is that it seems to be impossible to handle AVI capture/output on win7 (IT KEEPS CRASHING when I attempt to run AVI capture command, IN NO TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).......so the plan would be dropped for a long time until I got a different OS to work on "virtual systems" the time may be infinitely......
...Anyway there's a LONG vid that was the most thing I could do with the game. And I have a couple of words to share specifically with you TASers... The length for a casual real-time run is as long as a Living Hell should be
Link to video
The run costs me about a whole year to deal with and was finished in sometime in 2015... No idea about Hard mode because Hard mode has too much RNG-related things that were literally Hell ITSELF and I thought it would be the Hell of any TASer
I don't think even a no death hard mode single segment run is possible without TAS-related external methods. If there's even a chance that the runner's skill must be REALLY horned that could be on par with the guys on AGDQ every year. Or a guy that was REALLY familiar with the game like it was his very own home (I don't think the last situation is possible; this game is so tough that most of my friends thought even easy mode was a challenge for them. I'm the one that can beat normal mode in a single segment but can't even master all details in hard mode myself)It's really FAR beyond what human can deal with (mainly because the killer length. No one will like testing result of a huge monster, like this game, like a Spartan trial; Not to mention the Hard mode itself is IMPOSSIBLY hard if you aim to no death that it could be listed in the casual "top *** hardest in any video games" thing...) that made me really sad.I love the game because it shocked me with amazing quality not lost to that of official Castlevanias'! So filled with shame/disappointment the Hard mode no death run is all up for you TASers but I can give help/informations as much as I can, if any...
I can do nothing but waiting for the research of you TASer as by now... My research is basically ended since how strange this game's position is, and now Lecarde Chronicles 2 is coming...
The RTA route needs at least 1h,45min in hard mode, with input miss/RNG bowlshit counts ... The game's length is there, anyway
Link to video
Finally done with this game.
Link to video
It's definitely a human-killing pain to deal with RNG and I must re-do several hundreds times in casual run/RTA for a better result... For TAS I would say I barely have any patient/mood left for it and the TAS project was abandoned because nobody cares about this game. If anyone can handle TAS of it please contact me and let me know I can give support as many as I can
Is there any way to bypass the self-checking screen of video mode? Maybe it needs further cracking/advanced trick inside the program itself?
EDIT: Using Hourglass shows the fan project's internal (temporary) name as "Castlevania Moonlight Opera" instead of its final name
Checked and it seems that "Castlevania Moonlight Opera" is actually its temporary name during development...