0.5.0 — Rewind, filled 21:9 rooms, HD packs with 1.5

Rewind, a filled 21:9 picture in the small rooms, and HD texture packs that work with Digimon World 1.5.

Download digimon-world-0.5.0-windows-x64.zip below. It contains no game data: you supply your own Digimon World (USA) disc (SLUS-01032) and the first-run setup builds the game on your machine. Install guide: README.

Rewind is in. Press F8 (or Select + R3 on a pad) and a strip of
thumbnails from the last ~12 seconds appears. Pick a moment with Left/Right and
press Cross to go back to it: a fumbled battle, a wasted feeding, a missed
evolution. Turn it on under Mods → Quality of Life → Rewind; it is off by
default.

• The README has listed F8 rewind for a while, but no release ever had it. The
  framework component that does the work was never included in the package,
  so every build quietly left it out, 0.4.0 included. The release gate now
  refuses a package without it.
• It keeps 50 snapshots, one every 15 frames, and uses about 185 MB of memory
  at those defaults; both numbers are options. Taking a snapshot costs about
  2 ms, and jumping back about a tenth of a second.
• Tested in town (across a map change), leaving and inside a battle, and in
  the middle of a map load: position, clock, HP and the battle all come back,
  and the audio keeps playing.
• The history survives a savestate load, so going far enough back returns to
  before the load.

Widescreen at 21:9 fills the narrow rooms. The 36 smallest rooms are
narrower than a 21:9 view and showed a black bar on each side (88 px on the
three-tile rooms, 24 px on the four-tile ones; the three-tile rooms also had a
21 px bar at 16:9). Those bars now show the room's own edge art, mirrored and
fading to black at the screen edge. Where a room's edge is mostly black anyway
(17 sides), and on two rooms where the mirror looked worse than the bar, the
bar stays.

The clock and the mood gauges sit in the corners of the wide screen. In
widescreen they used to stay where the 4:3 picture had them, inset from the
edges; the clock, its needle and the gauges now move out to the wide frame's
corners, and still hide and return as before.

The launcher's memory card panel follows Digimon World 1.5. With 1.5
ticked it shows 1.5's own cards (saves/dw15/), and switches back when you
untick it. In 0.4.0 it always showed the normal cards.

HD Texture Packs work with Digimon World 1.5. With both ticked, the game
closed at start-up. The pack folder was being treated as part of the game, and
1.5's separate savestates require everything in the game to be checksummed,
which a folder of images cannot be. The pack is now treated as presentation
only, like the CRT filter, so it boots, 1.5's savestates work, and in netplay
the pack is your own choice rather than the host's.

HD Backdrops, a free optional download: all 242 pre-rendered backgrounds
redrawn at 4x, including the extra width in widescreen. See the README's "HD
Backdrops" section or the
release page.

Also:

• Netplay: changing a display option during a match no longer saves the host's
  mod list as your own.

Known at the time:

• The narrow-room fill is a mirror. At normal distance it reads as the room
  continuing; looked at closely, faint symmetric shapes show. It is not drawn
  on Vulkan, in netplay, or on Software with an HD texture pack; those keep
  the black bars.
• Rewind with Digimon World 1.5 has only had a short test (rewinding
  dialogue), not a play session.
• Widescreen: in Birdra Transport a thin black strip still shows right of
  the cage, because the original art stops there. Rooms drawn floating in
  black (the mansion, the caves, the igloo) show more of that black in the
  wider view; that is the game's own art and is left as it is.

HD Backdrops 1.0

HD Backdrops 1.0 adds an optional art pack for Digimon World — Recompiled 0.4.0 or later. It is not a game download: you still need the port, built from your own disc.

Every one of the game's 242 pre-rendered backgrounds, redrawn at 4x resolution. The colours match the original at every time of day, and the HD art also fills the extra width in widescreen. Characters, items and other 3D objects are unchanged.

Install

1. Download all four parts below (part1of4 to part4of4, 6.2 GB in total). You need every part; each one holds a different set of maps.
2. Extract each part into your game folder, the folder that has Digimon_World_Recompiled.exe in it: right-click → Extract All… → Browse to your game folder → Extract.
   Windows suggests a new folder named after the zip; delete that last part so the path ends at your game folder. If Windows asks about merging folders, say Yes.
3. Turn it on: run the game, click Mods, tick HD Texture Packs (under Visual), press PLAY.

It needs the OpenGL renderer, which is the default.

Not working? If you still see the original, blocky backgrounds, check that mods\texture-packs\SLUS-01032\Hashes.ini exists (not one folder deeper) and that all four parts were extracted.

The full guide is in the README.

Notes

• The art was generated with local AI upscaling (4x-UltraSharp plus a diffusion detail pass), from tiles cut out of the game's own backgrounds. Now and then it adds a small detail that isn't in the original.
• Uninstall: untick HD Texture Packs, or delete mods\texture-packs\SLUS-01032.

0.4.0 — Digimon World 1.5, widescreen finished

Digimon World 1.5 support, finished widescreen (21:9 included), HD packs at every width.

Download digimon-world-0.4.0-windows-x64.zip below. It contains no game data: you supply your own Digimon World (USA) disc (SLUS-01032) and the first-run setup builds the game on your machine. Install guide: README.

Digimon World 1.5 is in the Mods panel.

Capablemite's fan mod, Test Build 1.3.1, is one tick away: Veemon, Wormmon,
Renamon and Guilmon lines, new eggs, new special attacks, a four-page
Digivolution Chart and a second Tech page. There is no patcher and no second
disc. You keep your normal disc; with the mod on, the launcher checks it,
applies the author's own patch file to it in memory and plays the result. The
disc file is never written. Untick it and you are back to the original game.

• Start a new game. 1.5's own notes say old saves may not work.
• Separate saves. While 1.5 is on, the memory cards are saves/dw15/
  instead of saves/, so a 1.5 save and a normal save can never overwrite each
  other.
• Mods that cannot run with it are turned off: Expanded Roster (both use
  the same free Digimon slots), Evolution Unbound, Guaranteed Item Drops and
  the Native Evolution Engine. Each edits bytes 1.5 changed, and one guard
  failing would have thrown out every mod. The list comes from
  tools/check_dw15_compat.py, which compares every patch and code hook
  against the 1.5 disc; the rest of the Trainer, Quality of Life, Tech Mastery,
  the cheats and Widescreen passed.
• Two of them have 1.5 editions, in the same Mods panel. Ticking one
  ticks 1.5 as well:
  • Guaranteed Item Drops (1.5). Every Digimon you defeat in 1.5 drops
    its item, the new species included. Tested in real 1.5 battles: 21
    drops from 21 defeated enemies, against 3 from 18 without it.
  • Evolution Unbound (1.5). Lowers the six stat requirements of 1.5's
    evolutions to 75% (Relaxed) or 50% (Open), the new lines included. 1.5
    reloads that table from the disc after every training session, so the
    change is made on the disc as well and survives the reload.

Three new Quality of Life options, all off by default and all working with
Digimon World 1.5:

• Save Anywhere. Pick Sleep in the field menu while your partner is not
  sleepy and you get the game's own "Do you want to save?" prompt. No time
  passes, nothing about your partner changes, and the menu comes back after
  the save. When your partner is sleepy, Sleep works as before. Sleep no
  longer looks greyed out or buzzes, so the ZZZ bubble is what tells you your
  partner is sleepy.
• Text Speed. Fast draws each dialogue page at once instead of one line
  per frame; Instant also opens the box without its zoom-in. A new message
  box appears in 18 frames (Fast) or 3 (Instant) instead of 21-27, with the
  same text. Instant drops the box-open sound, and mashing X can skip a page.
• Run Speed. The tamer runs 1.5x or 2x faster in the field. Collisions,
  map exits, doors and talking work as normal; walking with R1, menus and
  cutscenes are unchanged. Your partner keeps its own pace: on a long
  straight run it falls well behind and catches up a few seconds after you
  stop. A map exit puts it back beside you.

Overlays now compile to native code for everyone. Parts of the game that
load from disc mid-play (battles, training, menus) are compiled to native code
in the background. That step used to need the py launcher with exactly
Python 3.12 installed; without it, every attempt failed silently and those
parts stayed in the slower interpreter. It now uses the Python and compiler
bundled with the setup package, so it works on any machine.

The framework is updated to the latest upstream psxrecomp (two months of
work: 60 fps rendering, HD movie replacement, audio-sync and widescreen
fixes, and more). Speed in normal play is unchanged, measured side by side.

Also:

• Widescreen fixes that had silently stopped working: fades dim the whole
  screen again (the side strips stayed bright), the hidden clock no longer
  shows sliced at the left edge, and the backdrop fills the left edge on wide
  maps. The updated framework only runs function-entry hooks a mod names, and
  Widescreen did not name these three.
• Widescreen now fills two rooms whose pre-rendered art stopped where the
  original 4:3 camera did, so the widened view showed a flat black strip: the
  Item Shop's right wall and the left side of Jijimon's house (the larger
  room). The new art uses each room's
  own colours and is loaded by the game itself. It comes with widescreen;
  there is nothing extra to turn on, and with widescreen off the rooms are the
  original ones.
• Widescreen no longer drops to 4:3 for about a second after a won battle or
  an evolution; the field stays wide while the game reloads it. Characters,
  your partner, chests and doors stay drawn in the extra width instead of
  vanishing at the old 4:3 edge, and an enemy you can see there can join the
  fight. The smallest rooms now sit centred with an even 21 px bar on each
  side instead of up to 53 px on one side. The thin black strip that flickered
  at the edge behind you while walking is gone, maps that could open with a
  black edge (seen after loading a savestate) open clean, and the backdrop's
  widest column is read from the disc, so it can no longer show garbage after
  a battle.
• Widescreen: fades, flashes and the closing circle after a lost battle now
  cover the whole wide screen; before, the side strips stayed bright. Snow
  falls across the full width, and mist on the misty maps no longer stops
  short of the edges. Animated scenery (water, torches, doors) no longer pops
  in at the outer edge of the wide view. Fishing near either shore of
  Dragon Eye Lake no longer swings the camera to where a black strip shows
  past the edge of the lake.
• Widescreen on OpenGL now draws the room backdrop from the room's own tile
  file instead of the game's four-column tile ring, so every column of the
  wide view is the real art: no void at the edges after a battle, a flee, an
  evolution or a load, and the middle of the screen is pixel-for-pixel what
  it was. The Software renderer keeps the previous method at 16:9 and 16:10,
  which stays clean there and costs nothing extra, and uses the tile file only
  at 21:9 (see below). Netplay keeps the previous method too; HD texture
  packs now use the tile-file backdrop like everything else, and their
  replacements apply to it. Savestates
  made with widescreen on and with it off are no longer interchangeable
  (memory-card saves are unaffected), and savestates from earlier builds will
  not load.
• Widescreen offers 21:9 (ultrawide), on OpenGL and Software (on
  Software at a price: the backdrop is drawn twice, about 12 ms of CPU per
  frame at the default 4x supersampling). The 36
  smallest rooms are narrower than a 21:9 view and show an even black bar on
  each side (88 px on the three-tile rooms, 24 px on the four-tile ones). HD texture packs work at 21:9: their
  tile replacements apply in the extra width as well as the middle. Nothing
  wider is offered.
• "Shrink your own collision box" now works with 1.5. 1.5 moved the Digimon
  table, so the cheat checks which game is running and writes that game's own
  copy; before, under 1.5 it wrote into an unrelated table.
• Savestates work with 1.5. With any mod that changes the game's code, the
  savestate file name carried a 64-character fingerprint, and in a deeper
  install folder the path passed Windows' 260-character limit, so every save
  failed. The name now carries 16 characters; existing slots are renamed.
• Cheats no longer write to memory before the game has started. 1.5 parks its
  new code where the game later keeps its variables, so a cheat poking that
  spot while the disc was still loading (as "Skip all movies" does by default)
  could have damaged it.
• The setup package is now named digimon-world-*-windows-x64.zip.
• The game's mods moved to mods/preloaded/packages and are staged by the
  framework. Done the old way, the updated framework replaced this game's
  Widescreen with its generic one (which lacks this game's own plugins and
  repainted rooms) and, on first launch, would have deleted the game's mod sources that
  the setup wizard rebuilds from.
• 1.5's patch contains glyphs from two SIL OFL fonts (Ark Pixel, Cubic 11);
  their licence texts now ship beside it, as the OFL requires.
• The release gate tools/verify_setup_package.py fails if anything other than
  a manifest ships under mods/preloaded/packages, except the 1.5 patch and
  its two licence files, each checked by hash.

Known at the time:

• With 1.5 ticked, the launcher's memory card preview still shows the normal
  cards. The game itself uses saves/dw15/.
• Widescreen: in Birdra Transport a thin black strip still shows right of
  the cage, because the original art stops there. Rooms drawn floating in
  black (the mansion, the caves, the igloo) show more of that black in the
  wider view; that is the game's own art and is left as it is.

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