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Registry Expose - not for amateurs (was forum=10)Follow

#1 Jul 13 2004 at 11:25 AM Rating: Excellent
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221 posts
This is something I wrote months ago, and never shared it. I figure it might be useful to somebody here. So, here it is.

==========================================
FFXI REGISTRY DETAILS

Registry keys can be changed without exiting PlayOnline Viewer.

Types:
H - DWORD (2 Hexadecimal words, meaning 4 places of hex allowing 0000-FFFF or decimal 0 - 65,536; assuming unsignedness)
B - Binary (1=yes/on, 0=no/off)
S - String

Name  Type Default Description 
0000  H    0
MIP Mapping (0=disabled, 1=enabled) Further raises blur textures more times - no noticeable differences after 6 or so.

0001  H    640
Display mode width (X)[/pre]
Config queries DirectX for possible modes

0002  H    480
Display mode height (Y)
Config queries DirectX for possible modes


0003  H    512
3D width (X)
Config program gives choice between 256, 512, 1024 and sets equal to key 0004.
Maximum is 2048, minimum is 1

0004  H    512
3D height (Y)
Config program gives choice between 256, 512, 1024 and sets equal to key 0003.
Maximum is 2048, minimum is 1

0007  H    1
Sound: 0=Disabled, 1=Enabled

0011  H    1
Environmental Animation: 0=Off, 1=Normal, 2=Smooth
Further raises do not enhance animation quality.

0017  H    0
Bump mapping: 0=Disabled, 1=Enabled
Further raises do not enhance bump mapping quality.

0018  H    1
Texture compression: 0=High, 1=Low, 2=Uncompressed
Other values are apparently ignored and the engine defaults back to 2.

0019  H    1
Map compression: 0=Compressed, 1=Uncompressed
Other values are apparently ignored and the engine defaults back to 1.

0020  H    1
***FUNCTION UNKNOWN - does not appear to affect main menu screens

0021  H    0
Enable hardware mouse cursor: 1=Yes, 0=No

0022  H    1
Show opening movie: 1=Yes, 0=No

0023  H    0
Simplified character creation visuals: 1=Yes, 0=No

0024  H    0
***FUNCTION UNKNOWN - does not appear to affect main menu screen

0028  H    0
Gamma Base: 0x3f800000 = 1.0, 0 = 0.0, 0xbf800000 = -1.0

0029  H    12
Maximum sounds: Config pgm allows 12-20

0030  H    0
***FUNCTION UNKNOWN - does not appear to affect main menu screen

0031  H    0x3bc49ba6
***FUNCTION UNKNOWN - does not appear to affect main menu screen

bFirst B   00
***FUNCTION UNKNOWN - does not appear to affect main menu screen

padmode000 S    0,0,0,0
Enable Gamepad, Force Feedback, Slider, Hat Switches

padsin000 S    ?
Button-function association.
Values are base-0 while button numbers are base-1 in config program, so convert appropriately

padsin000 places/buttons:
1. Toggle Auto-Run
2. Macro Palette A (Ctrl)
3. Change View
4. Macro Palette B (Alt)
5. Heal / Lock Target
6. Cancel
7. Main Menu
8. Select/Confirm
9. Active Window / Window Options
10. Hide Menus
11. Operate menus with movement controls
12. Operate camera with movement controls
13. PlayOnline
14-25. Function unknown ???
26. Screenshot

=========================

Hex Table
Hex-to-Decimal table for display modes:
128 = 80
160 = A0
224 = E0
240 = F0
256 = 100
320 = 140
360 = 168
384 = 180
400 = 190
450 = 1C2
480 = 1E0
512 = 200
524 = 20C
576 = 240
640 = 280
720 = 2D0
768 = 300
800 = 320
864 = 360
960 = 3C0
1024= 400
1080= 438
1152= 480
1200= 4B0
1280= 500
1344= 540
1392= 570
1440= 5A0
1536= 600
1600= 640
1792= 700
1800= 708
1856= 740
1920= 780
2048= 800

Other Hex Conversions
The Windows Calculator does this type of conversion. It always has, since Windows 3.1 to the best of my recollection. Click View-Scientific to put it into Scientific mode, then select "Dec", enter a number, and click "Hex" to see its hexadecimal equivalent.

Inputting Decimal into DWords in Regedit
On XP Pro, and maybe others, you can input decimal values into the Edit dialog by selecting the Decimal radio button.

Common Resolutions
Using those values, you can easily come up with the values for the following common display modes and background resolutions: 256x256, 320x240, 400x300, 512x512, 512x384, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1792x1344, 1800x1440, 1920x1080 (1080i HDTV), 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2048x1536, and 2048x2048.

Note: Make sure your video card and monitor can handle a display mode before setting it.

Aspect Ratios and You
CRT monitors and regular televisions should use a ratio of 4:3 for the horizontal:vertical display resolution. If you have an HDTV or a wide display, check the specifications of your display to see what works best for it. Don't try something funky if it's not right for your display, because your graphics, text and UI will be skewed. Square intended for squares to be squares, no pun intended.

If you have a 16x9 display, try 640x360, 800x450, 1024x576, or 1280x720. Or, take the desired width, multiply by 9, and divide by 16 to get the height.

Unsupported Mode = Silent Exit
If an improper 3D height or width is set, FFXI will appear to enter full-screen mode briefly and quit back to PlayOnline without an error message.

1x1 Possible!
Yes, it is possible to have a 1x1 background resolution. Why you'd want to do this (or really, anything below 256x256) is beyond me, since you only get a solid block of color.

Graphics Enhancement via MIP Mapping
A lot of people really like the way FFXI looks when MIP mapping (key 0000) is set to 4. Give it a try. Distant textures will be lower resolution and blurred more, reducing the need for anisotropic texture filtering and thus allowing you to speed up your game by tweaking your graphics card's settings. It also (IMO) improves the appearance of distant textures, and eliminates the horrendous flickering. If you like the effect but think it's a bit too strong, downgrade to 3 or even 2. The flickering will be present at 2, and barely noticeable at 3.

Note: You may need more than 64MB of graphics memory to do this.

Bump Mapping: Good or Evil?
I prefer to leave bump mapping off, since I get a nice realistic afterglow after sunset and that nice look before sunrise, and the sunup/sundown lighting change isn't as abrupt and distracting. I haven't really noticed much of a difference otherwise. Your mileage may vary. This supposedly impacts performance somehow, but my system is a bit too fast to measure its impact reliably.

Performance Improvement
Set your background resolution (0003 and 0004) the same as your display resolution (0001 and 0002). The performance improvement might be noticeable.

Also, see the above point on MIP Mapping. Increase the level of MIP Mapping and lower your graphics card's texture filtering quality and amount to get better performance.

Turning off bump mapping may improve performance as well.

Fake Antialiasing
You can set a higher resolution for your background than the display mode. Doing this will force your graphics card to downsample the image, which will do a weighted average on nearby pixels thus blurring pixels whose neighbors are not the same color. In layman's terms: You'll get simple antialiasing by setting your background resolution (0003 and 0004) higher than your display resolution (0001 and 0002).

Differential Resolution
This is the technical term for having a different resolution on your menus and your background. For example, 400x300 background and 800x600 display mode. Don't do this. Your eyes and head will get really irritated.

============================

That's all for now, folks. Like it? Got suggestions? Good! This took a LOT of work to format and update for the forum, since it was all tabbed nicely with set stops and all that.
#2 Jul 13 2004 at 11:32 AM Rating: Decent
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631 posts
I think this should be stickied! Rating up for you my friend.
#3 Jul 14 2004 at 8:25 AM Rating: Good
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221 posts
Aw, thanks. I don't really think we need another sticky, though - what we have already is just fine.

Does anyone think this is legit enough to submit as a guide?
#4 Jul 14 2004 at 8:45 AM Rating: Good
20 posts
/cheer <djdanlib>
!!!Good Job!!!
Put it on Sticky!
#5 Jul 20 2004 at 3:28 AM Rating: Good
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221 posts
Sorry for the self-bump but I am trying to figure out the purpose of keys 0020, 0024, 0030, 0031, and bFirst. Also, what is the format of the Gamma key? The range I see doesn't make much sense.

Eventually I will reformat the "table" and it will look better...
#6 Jul 20 2004 at 7:36 AM Rating: Decent
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427 posts
Good post, I have been looking for a way to set BG resolution to the same as my display resolution.
#7 Jul 21 2004 at 9:17 AM Rating: Decent
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2,872 posts
Bumping from page 5...

Can I vote for this to be put in the Guide section?
____________________________
Samus taught us that a girl doesn't need brains to be successful. Brains are giant, evil and vulnerable to missiles.
#8 Jul 21 2004 at 5:05 PM Rating: Decent
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2,872 posts
Kinda funny I didn't notice until now, but I couldn't find where in your post this is located in the registry, so here it is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\PlayOnlineUS\SquareEnix\FinalFantasyXI
____________________________
Samus taught us that a girl doesn't need brains to be successful. Brains are giant, evil and vulnerable to missiles.
#9 Jul 21 2004 at 5:22 PM Rating: Default
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3,383 posts
djdanlib wrote:

0031  H    0x3bc49ba6
***FUNCTION UNKNOWN - does not appear to affect main menu screen


My gut tells me that this is a bitmask. In binary this is

111011110001001001101110100110


Try messing with different bits, converting back to hex, and see what happens.


As for the other ones, try changing all of them at once. Play the game for 30 minutes or so, see if you notice anything. Also see if any of them are related to Alt-Tabbing out of the game or pressing the Start Menu button on the keyboard.
#10 Jul 21 2004 at 5:25 PM Rating: Default
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3,383 posts
djdanlib wrote:

0031  H    0x3bc49ba6
***FUNCTION UNKNOWN - does not appear to affect main menu screen


Interestingly, I just googled the string 3bc49ba6 and came up with two hits, both of which appear to be entries into a Microsoft Outlook Spam Filter. It's probably a coincidence, but holy crap that's a big coincidence. There are 4,294,967,295 possibilities of 8 digit hext numbers.
#11 Jul 21 2004 at 5:37 PM Rating: Decent
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646 posts
wow pretty cool :)
#12 Jun 12 2005 at 12:26 PM Rating: Decent
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111 posts
where do you input the codes?
#13 Jun 13 2005 at 9:30 AM Rating: Default
I Don't know anything about this.

As a matter a fact, I can't even get past the first line w/o getting a headache. but I'm gonna bump it b/c everyone else seems to think it's golden.

So here you go..

BUMP. and a rate up for good measure.

(I'll do anything to get over on SE.)
#14 Aug 19 2005 at 7:40 AM Rating: Decent
how do i find my ffx1 cdkey in the registry .. i lost my book
#15 Aug 19 2005 at 9:33 AM Rating: Decent
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498 posts
Very good post

There is one graphical performance aspect i've always wondered about tho.

Texture compression?

Whats the best setting for quality on this?
I've played with all 3 settings and i cant tell a difference in speed or quality.
#16 Aug 19 2005 at 10:12 AM Rating: Decent
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85 posts
Very interesting thread!

It prompted me to try a different experiment. In the same registry area, there's a section for the PlayOnline Viewer. I have been trying to figure out how to play the .pms file that contains the POL Openng Movie. So, I found two keys in the registry:

One is in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\PlayOnlineUS\SquareEnix\PlayOnlineViewer\Settings
And it's called PlayOpeningMovie

The second one is in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\PlayOnlineUS\SquareEnix\PlayOnlineViewer
And it's called FirstBootPlayMovie

Both had a value of 0x00000000 (0). Using the Binary thought as 0=No, and 1=Yes, I changed both to 1. No video played when I started POL. I then tried removing the keys and again, no video played. Oh well, it was worth a try. If anyone else has any luck with these and they can get the video to play(without uninstalling/reinstalling POL), I'd love to hear how!

Edit: I forgot to add that after not getting the video to play after removing the registry keys, I put the keys back in. (Since they were only two, I didn't have to backup the registry first.)

Remember when you go into the registry, make sure you make a backup of it!

Edited, Fri Aug 19 12:08:42 2005 by cjacksonii
#17 Aug 23 2005 at 3:03 AM Rating: Decent
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98 posts
Thank you so much!!!

I have been having crashing problems with the game. It runs great for anywhere from 30 seconds (lol) to ~45 minutes maximum, and then the game just dies, completely. Next thing I see is my desktop with a "send error report" from Windows XP. I have been on the phone on and off constantly with tech support since Friday and they have not been able to help remedy the problem. I am even using old junky 5.3 ATI drivers because of their silly tech support (I'll fix that shortly).

Today I saw this post and set the first setting to 4 as suggested, turned off Bump Mapping, set background to 1600x1200, and set forground to 1280x1024. Not only does the game look a lot better (less pixelated & busy at distances, kinda made me sick to look at it before), but at the times when the game looks like it is going to crash as it normally would, it just hiccups a time or two and carries on like normal. I knew it was not my PC because I tried this game on my other PC that has 100% completely different hardware and got the same results.

Anyway, I have been agonizing over these mysterious crashes and this post's tips seems to have eliminated the problems as well as make the game look considerably better.

THANKS SO MUCH!!!

Edited, Tue Aug 23 04:46:11 2005 by Nazantia
#18 Aug 23 2005 at 3:05 AM Rating: Decent
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98 posts
Double post on accident somehow... the Allakhazam boards are being super laggy for me for some reason. Sorry.

Edited, Tue Aug 23 04:27:46 2005 by Nazantia
#19 Aug 23 2005 at 11:33 AM Rating: Good
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231 posts
Have i missed something? these features are all freely available from the FFXI Config tool in the playonline folder on your start menu are they not? if not maybe its only the EU version, tho i can see there may be a few more options here as i am at work and am not sure on everything you can do from the config tool, but one thing for sure is you can definitely set the movie to play EVERY time you play (default) as my gf has left hers like that as she likes to watch it occasionally.
#20 Aug 23 2005 at 12:15 PM Rating: Decent
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749 posts
The config tool doesn't allow you to do alot of the things the OP listed. The config tool also doesn't let you set things as high as you could if you did it through the registry.
#21 Aug 23 2005 at 10:24 PM Rating: Decent
djdanlib wrote:
Sorry for the self-bump but I am trying to figure out the purpose of keys 0020, 0024, 0030, 0031, and bFirst. Also, what is the format of the Gamma key? The range I see doesn't make much sense.


The Gamma key is an IEEE 754 "float" data type. Bit 31 is the sign bit (s), Bits 23-30 are the exponent (x), and bits 0-22 are the mantissa (m).

The value encoded is equal to
(-1*s)*(1+m/8388608)*(2^(x-127))

unless x=0 or 255. If x=0, it's a so-called "denormalized" number and the value encoded is
(-1*s)*(m/8388608)*(2^-126)

If x=255 and m=0, the value encoded is (-1*s)*infinity.
If x=255 and m=/=0, the value encoded is NaN. (Not a number, floating-point math error)

Special encodings include:
00000000 zero
80000000 "negative" zero
#22 Aug 25 2005 at 3:36 AM Rating: Decent
Windows died, whats new, and I ended up having to reinstall it. All of my programs including FFXI were untouched. My problem is I don't have any of the registry entries for it so it won't run. I was wondering if someone could post or, link to, a list of all the entries or possibly a link to an exported reg file. I need everything from PlayOnlineUS down. I have filled in everything I could from whats in this thread but its not everything. I would really appriciate it because I dont want to spend the half hour reinstalling and 8 hours downloading the updates. And yes, I know reinstalling would probably be faster than waiting for a reply here but I'm away from home and don't have my FFXI cd's.

Any help would be greatly appriciated.
-Jacob
JacobBillybobXI@hotmail.com
#23 Aug 25 2005 at 8:59 PM Rating: Decent
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87 posts
now someone needs to fire up the ol' visual basic and make all this information into an easy to use program to change the settings while using playonline.
my biggest thing is windower will set my resolution to 800x600 and then later, i go to play full screen, and lo and behold, i forgot to change the resolution... so i have to log all the way out, change the resolution, and log back on

awesome thread btw, id rate it up, if it wasnt useless... 5.00 already!
#24 Aug 25 2005 at 9:15 PM Rating: Decent
Wow! That is so useful!! Thanks for taking the time to post this :)!! /cheer Smiley: yippee
#25 Aug 25 2005 at 10:06 PM Rating: Decent
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718 posts
strra wrote:
now someone needs to fire up the ol' visual basic and make all this information into an easy to use program to change the settings while using playonline.
my biggest thing is windower will set my resolution to 800x600 and then later, i go to play full screen, and lo and behold, i forgot to change the resolution... so i have to log all the way out, change the resolution, and log back on

awesome thread btw, id rate it up, if it wasnt useless... 5.00 already!


someone already did a LOOOONG time ago... i seen it here awhile ago... 6 months maybe?
#26 Aug 26 2005 at 2:16 AM Rating: Good
Thief's Knife
*****
15,054 posts
Ok, quick rundown on the important ones..

Mip Mapping: Leave it alone, anything higher that the default makes the textures go to mush.

3D Hight/width: Just set it to whatever your display mode is, or 2x your display resolution for ghetto FSAA. Don't just crank it up to max if you want FSAA, it looks better if it's 2x (I'm not going to go into the details here, if you use Photoshop you already understand why this is, otherwise just take my word for it and do it) Valid options are any number divisable by 2 up to a maximum of 2048

Compression: Bad, baaad. Do not enable this, it makes textures look worse and doesn't improve performance at all. this option is for video cards with less than 32 megabytes (i.e. nobody)

Don't
____________________________
Final Fantasy XI 12-14-11 Update wrote:
Adjust the resolution of menus.
The main screen resolution for "FINAL FANTASY XI" is dependent on the "Overlay Graphics Resolution" setting.
If the Overlay Graphics Resolution is set higher than the Menu Resolution, menus will be automatically resized.


I thought of it first:

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid=130073657654872218#20
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