Code Escape

About
With school now out of the way, I suppose it’s time for me to get my ass in gear and start finishing up the various side-projects I seemed to have accumulated throughout the years. Starting with the one most recently adopted, I present you a semi-finalized version of Forza Studio. Forza Studio 4.0 should now render all previous versions of my Forza-related utilities obsolete.  Any questions can be directed to the comments section of this post and I’ll happily reply to them as soon as I can.

Features
Forza Studio 4.0 now officially supports the viewing and extraction of most cars (.carbin), wheels, brakes, rotors, calipers, tracks (.rmb.bin), and textures (.xds, .bix) from both versions of Forza 3 and Forza 4.

Controls
Its use is fairly straightforward in my opinion. Right-clicking various sections will bring up a context menu specific to that control. When viewing a model in the viewport, use the WASD keys on your keyboard to move the camera position and IJKL to look around. I’ve also included zip extraction functionality that can be found under the utilities menu for those who wish to use it instead of the usual QuickBMS script.

Requirements
.NET Framework 2.0 (or greater)
XNA Framework 3.1 (4.0 is different)

Downloads
Forza Studio 4.0 Application (40758 downloads )
Forza Studio 4.0 Source (28145 downloads )
Forza Studio 4.1 Application (Horizon Support) (45771 downloads ) UPDATE!

It’s been a while since my last post because work and school have both kept me pretty busy lately, so I figure I’ll take the time to post a link to one of my more recent projects (conveniently hosted on Google Code) here for any who might be interested in learning a bit more about basic x86 assembly instructions, cpu architecture, or the concept of emulation in general.

Because for some strange reason I’m still rather fond of writing code in assembler every now and then, I wanted to create a small x86 assembly interpreter written in C# for an independent study course I took over the summer, and this application was the result. I also had a lot of fun digging through my Intel reference manuals brushing up on some of the things I’ve forgotten, as the manuals (architecture, developers, and optimization manuals in particular) are a surprisingly good read in some parts.

This application is more or less a proof of concept, and not to be confused with bullet proof code (which it’s definitely not :P), as it’s still well in its infancy. However, I feel that I’ve implemented enough functionality to still have plenty of fun with it. I figure it may be of use to somebody, and at the very least, is rather amusing plugging in various instructions and observing the results of the execution in realtime.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to ask, otherwise enjoy :)

Main Project
Compiled Binaries

Lately I’ve had a bit of time to start back up on some Forza-related research, and thought this might be useful to a few of you, so I figure I’ll go ahead and share early. Eventually I plan on integrating texture rendering/extraction support into Forza Studio, but for now, I’ve decided to release a standalone tool just for texture extraction. It’s use is fairly simple and straightforward, just open up any of the supported file formats (.zip, .xds, .bix), and right click the rendering window of the selected texture to save. As usual, I’m releasing the source code for anyone else interested in using any of it in their own projects.  Any questions, feel free to ask, otherwise enjoy… :)

Downloads
Forza Texture Extractor (18576 downloads )
Forza Texture Extractor Source (16194 downloads )