MIPS assembly
6 entries
- QL-0020
Tekken 4’s sound system, from the hidden driver to the music tables
Tekken 4 (PS2) hides its sound driver inside the executable as a compressed, bit-inverted package; the project unpacks and repacks it, and the repacked driver runs identically. The banks, the sound-effect tables, the music track tables and the stage-to-music map are decoded, and music swaps, shortened tracks and replaced sound banks all work in PCSX2. Every result was read from memory: nothing has been checked by ear.
Rev. B - QL-0016
Tekken 4’s stage format, and building a new stage from scratch
Each Tekken 4 (PS2) stage is four archive files, and the biggest is a 15-section container holding the geometry, textures, floor, walls, crowd and start positions. The geometry and wall formats rebuild the stock stages byte for byte, and a new stage 17, with its own geometry, textures, props and collision, loads and plays in PCSX2.
Rev. B - QL-0015
Tekken 4’s moveset files, decoded and edited in game
How Tekken 4 (PS2) stores each fighter’s moves: an LZSS-compressed “Character Data” file of twenty tables. The format is decoded well enough to rebuild all 22 stock movesets byte for byte, and edits made with it work in game: a move’s damage changed, a button rerouted, a brand-new move added, and one fighter’s whole moveset run on another’s body.
Rev. B - QL-0014
Tekken 4’s 2.57 GB archive keeps its index in the executable
Tekken 4 (PS2) stores almost everything in one 2.57 GB file, DATA.BIN, with no index inside it. The index is a 1,121-entry table in the game’s executable, and the archive’s only protection is a reversible flip of each file’s first 4 KB. Both are decoded, every checksum passes, and a modified disc that appends new files to the archive boots and plays.
Rev. B - QL-0022
The “round timer” patch that was really editing rand() % 60
An early Tekken 4 (PS2) cheat targeted what looked like the round timer. The code was a division by 60 whose remainder, not quotient, was kept: a random 0 to 59 frame countdown per fighter. The disassembler of the time hid the instructions that gave it away. Three other early patches were wrong too. None of them ever ran, for an unrelated reason.
Rev. A - QL-0013
Tekken 4 (PS2): a map of what’s known
A status map of the Tekken 4 (PS2) teardown as of 2026-10-22: what is decoded and proven in game, what is decoded but unproven, what is partly understood and what is still unknown, across the archive, movesets, characters, stages and sound. Also the claims that turned out wrong, and the open problems in order of how much they block.
Rev. A