About and How To
Dinosaur Planet was announced in 1999 and would eventually become what we now know as Star Fox Adventures. Before the move to the GameCube, the game was significantly more ambitious. Six SpellStones were to be collected, alongside eight Krazoa Spirits. Additionally, there were two more factions meant to push the narrative; the unscrupulous Quan Ata Lachu and the draconic race of Kamerians. A vast majority of the original content ended up being cut, repurposed into less substantial elements, or falling victim to classic television tropes that haven't aged particularly well.
Flash forward to February 2021 where Forest of Illusion unexpectedly announced and released a ROM dump of Dinosaur Planet, specifically a build from December 2000. It has a wealth of unused content including music, characters, and entire areas in various stages of development, most of which were previously unseen by the public. Because this is a development build of the game, it is quite broken and incomplete and is very difficult to fully enjoy in its unaltered state.
A small but dedicated community on Discord has since been creating tools and updates for Dinosaur Planet in the hopes to expose all of the unused contents and provide an experience closer to what the developers had originally intended. These updates are typically in the form of BIN replacements, hex edits, and xdelta patches. While these methods are nothing new for some, for the general majority of people this can be overwhelming and not worth the trouble.
Enter DinoLauncher. The intent here is to make these updates easy to install and experience, removing the most common barrier to entry: ROM hacking. In its infancy, this application is still quite simple, however I have a wish in my heart that one day it will become more robust with unique features to experience the game in more ways than ever.
- Start by selecting an update branch.
- Stable is slower to update but typically easier to deal with
- Nightly is more frequent but can suffer from unforeseen hiccups.
- Browse for your Dinosaur Planet ROM file. It will typically be named "rom_crack.z64" from most sources.
- Click Check for Updates to check the DinoLauncher repository for any new patches.
- Once updates are done downloading, click Apply Patch.
- Optionally, you may check the box to use HQ player models at the cost of performance.
- Once the patch is complete (it's usually quite fast) the game directory will open and you'll be given the option to LAUNCH the game.
- Have fun and enjoy this formerly lost piece of video game history!