Enabling the dashboard for AI vehicles in replays

[racing_elise]

I have been trying to enable the onscreen dashboard (tachometer, gear, speedometer) for AI cars. Just for my own amusement, to see what speeds the AI can do.

The only tool I have so far is Duckstation's Memory Scanner. At first I was wishfully hoping that there would be just a simple toggle to show/hide the display, and I found various RAM values that represent settings for on-screen displays for the player car, but they had no effect when you change the replay view to an AI car.

I've also been able to find in memory car details such as throttle, speed and importantly the RAM address offset to each AI car, but changing the offset didn't affect the dashboard values at all.

But it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack even on an 8bit/16bit game and this is my first time to try this on a 5th gen console.

At this point I to reach out to the community to see if anybody else has tried to do this.

Anything you can share; extra memory addresses (I still have many more to map out) or new tools will be very helpful.

Thank you.

 

[racing_elise]

I've discovered PCSX-Redux and its excellent debugging tools and stepping my way through the logic, it's a lot more helpful.
I'm still hoping that PD implemented the dash for all cars but then hid them for AI cars to hide their sins.

 

[racing_elise]

I have succeeded in getting the OSD to show for AI cars, but all of the data overlays are from the player car. I did this by finding the code that loads the display and changing the register value back to that of the player so it tricks the data overlay into displaying.

So far that has seemed like the easiest part, for now I'm suffering lots of segfault crashes in the PCSX-Redux as i am trying to change memory references of things like vehicle speed, to point to those of the AI car instead.

 

[submaniac93]

Nice one, this puts it on the same level as GT1 where your hud displays despite looking at other cars. Hopefully you manage to do it!

 

[racing_elise]

Thanks @submaniac93 ! Do you know if people share RAM address maps or is the kind of thing they keep to themselves? It's a lot of work trying to find all of the data points especially if someone has already done it.

But the AI cars are fairly well simulated and a lot of data is there; gear, RPM, etc, except for throttle/brake inputs.
Ideally there'll be an offset so I can just transpose all the onscreen references to each car.