Last time someone stepped into this thread was in 2024, and I have no idea how long ago the last thread was made, but it's time to change that.
In 2019/2020, Alisdairmills made a remarkable discovery. He managed to figure out how textures were stored inside the ISO of the PSP games. The .vpi file that seemed unbreakable, was broken. Even though he offered to send me the software he created, that according to him it was too complicated, I never gave him an answer since I would not be able to understand anything and because I had no Mac (apparently it was made in MacOS, so that's relevant)
Fast forward until this week.
I was interested in the game again, so I started to sleuth around the files. And oh, we're now on the age of AI so... Why not let the bot have a crack at it?
And wouldn't you know... He managed to get the texture out of the file, thanks to the directive given by Alisdairmills.
But Claude perfected it. Turns out, the 32 byte header keeps all the info of the file below. According to Claude, offset 12-13 and 14-15 tell the size of the texture, with 16-17 being the size in bytes(?). The first four seem to be unique to maillots, while the rest of the textures use always the same header, which makes me wonder if it truly matters at all, but we'll see.
To actually put the AI to the test, I remember that the Mercier legendary team had a bugged bike, this is because while some textures were supposed to be transparent, the vpi file had no transparency. ClaudeAI managed to get that fixed.
Another discovery is the fact that Xacobeo Galicia had their maillot inside the CM_TEXTURES, and it was in the databases in STA_TGA. Meaning they were planning on adding it, but never did. The Logo and Minimaillot are missing, however, but not for Unibet and Discovery, for some reason. There are also some loose Logos inside the Team_shirts.NIF, with no Minimaillots attributed. Placeholder Astana 2009 maillots are also there for Iles Baleares, T-Mobile, Discovery, CSC, Saunier Duval, among others. Replacing those and adding more teams seems to be useless, though...
I managed to add Xacobeo and change the value of another Team that was on the reserve list, meaning you can actually play Season mode with 20 teams! That seems to be the maximum, even though the game says the maximum is 22, but the game crashes at 21. Anyway, you can have 26 teams at max, 20 playable and 6 in the reserves, thanks to the Unibet and Discovery Logo/Minimaillot!
Legendary teams cannot have reserve teams. I tried. So we're stuck with the 40 legend teams, or less if you want.
And now stages. Big discovery of the day. You can actually add races and stages! Might be limited, as the race must be above Track and Podium IDs, but I'm still finding out if you can move them around to add more races. If so, you can technically clone stages, alter the XML file for the names of the mountain/sprints, and you have a brand new stage! Or potentially you can bring the stages from past editions to the 2010 game!
With that last discovery, I also found out World Championships in Season mode are possible, but they'll be simulated for some reason. I guess the National Teams code is still there somewhere, and since there are no National teams and you're not playing as them, the game simply simulates the stage. Still, a remarkable discovery.
National championships are also possible! But the thing is, they're bugged? Teams will participate in the championships even if they don't have the participating country. In fact, trying to do a France National Championship, whilst playing as Rabobank, the game decided that since I didn't have any French, I could only go with 5 riders, 5 random Dutch riders. So I think it chooses based on the country the race is in and on the team nationality if it can't find anyone from that country. Same thing happened in testing with Saxo Bank. Anyone can win because of that, which means you could have 2/3 different riders from the same nation win different national championships. Last one keeps the shirt (or maybe they all do, more testing to be done!)
With all this knowledge, I am thinking about making a 2026 update of the game, with the features I mentioned and an updated calendar. What do you guys think? Is anyone still playing these games? Am I only doing this for myself? Not that I mind, but I'd love to know.
The game seems to be limited to 128 stages. Or, rather, 126, because it needs one for Track and one for Podium. And as things stand, the game has 4 Stage IDs free. Also because the game needs a dedicated stage to a dedicated race, it means that you cannot just make 30 races all pointing to the same stage, which is a bummer. In other words, only 4 stages, while we have a lot more free slots for races.
Moving the Podium ID was proof that it wouldn't work. While placing it on ID 200, the game simply crashed at the end of the stage. Which shows that the limit is linked to something other than the database, and it's the game itself that won't load stages after ID128. I am still curious about moving the Podium into one of the free slots before ID 128. That'll tell once and for all that the limit is not linked to the Podium but to something else entirely, probably within the game code and not the database.
As for the national championships, so the game tries to filter through the chosen nation of the competition, but if the team lacks cyclists or if it has less than 5 riders for that nationality, then the remaining ones are random, based on which criteria it should pick. So I think it is random that the team will choose the same nationality the team is from, but it follows some reasoning.
Another data discovery. Saur-Sojasun maillot is also present in game. That's a second continental team. Considering that the Legendary teams are under ID 11 on division, which is Continental Tour, might mean that they initially thought to add Continental Pro teams... Or tried to get two extra teams and just scrapped them.
The update is probably still coming. I'd like to still add world championships, even if we're losing the National Championships. It would make no sense to have only one national champion each year, and the rest having nothing. Also the nation for the national championships... But I will try to see where that limit truly is, even if that means pulling out ghidra.
After some well deserved vacations, I am back in the metaphorical saddle and back on digging the game.
I changed textures to Sky (Netcompany Ineos now), Caisse D'Epargne (Movistar) and Lampre (UAE). Initially I had used just the textures available on pcmmod, but I noticed that those textures don't have that jersey feel, and that's because the newer games have overlays applied to the textures, unlike the older games where the Relief was applied on the texture itself. So I've replaced the textures twice after applying the base maillot which I got from one of the forums here. Now it looks like it belongs to the game, unlike the previous ones that seemed so out of place due to the lack of "texture". I have also changed the World Champion shirt and added a National Champion shirt to Portugal.
I finally found out where to move the start date. It's located on GAM_config. Surprisingly, changing that date will also change the strings related to the year of the game. That means, having the start date on 2026, the game in the menus will say that it's Pro Cycling Season 2026. Pretty cool!
Now the downside to that.
Season mode seems slightly broken. The player does not get any wages at the start of the game, having to start with 0€. Starting on 2010 will always have a budget associated with the team, even if the databases say that the budget should be 10. I've noticed that Sky is usually the team with the biggest budget, and ID 24 seems to be the lowest, at least from what I've seen. I've attributed that ID to Saur - Sojasun so it seems fitting. Changing the starting year to, say, 2011, does the same thing. I'm still wondering if the youth has anything to do with that, since changing the start date to 2011 means season 2015 will have no young riders to pick. I will still change the starting year of those and try to see if it fixes anything (wish me luck, because every season has 96 riders).
I've replaced GP Lazio with Strade Bianche, changed the route with Tour de Flanders as it was the most similar thing. I have no idea if it's possible to create stages for this game, but if anyone knows if PCM 2007 stage editor is compatible with this, let me know. I have seen that the stage is controlled by a BIN file, with the NIF file containing the geometry. There's also a XML file, which seems to have the info that the game receives to load the correct stage and podium. The influence it has is extremely limited. At best we can change when the final sprint starts, the Podium, the name of the sprint/mountain passages, but that's it.
As for the extra stages... I believe it's more effort than it's worth, especially since I don't know what's making the game do what it does. And now with the starting date situation? It's starting to seem like the game is very tightly packed and organized in a way where what I'm trying to achieve should not be possible. If someone knows where to look, which I doubt, because PCM Daily is mostly dead and nobody ever tried to do something like this on the PSP game, let me know. I could use the help.
