nocaptony/manhunt360_directorfix

This project is a small patching tool that fixes a specific audio bug in the original Xbox game Manhunt when it is played on an Xbox 360 through backwards compatibility, on consoles that have been modified with JTAG or RGH hacks. Without the patch, the game's antagonist, Lionel Starkweather, who narrates and taunts the player throughout the game, is completely silent. His voice lines, both his in-mission taunts and his scripted story dialogue, never play, while every other sound in the game works normally. The patch restores his voice with no effect on anything else. The root cause explained in the README is that the game routes different sounds to different audio output channels, and Starkweather's voice happens to be assigned to a channel that was originally meant for a headset accessory on the real Xbox. The Xbox 360's compatibility layer for old games does not support that particular channel, so it silently drops anything sent through it rather than showing an error, which is why his voice simply never reaches the speakers. The tool identifies which sounds belong to the director specifically, using a hidden marker already present in the game's own audio data, and reroutes only those sounds to a working channel, leaving every other sound exactly as it was. Applying the fix is a three step process for the user. First, the game disc image has to be extracted using a separate tool called extract-xiso. Second, the game's executable file needs additional space added to it using another separate tool, XboxImageXploder, so the patch has somewhere to insert its code. Third, the included Python script is run against the extracted files, and it checks that everything is in the expected state before writing anything, refusing to proceed if the file does not match what it expects. It also makes a backup copy automatically unless told not to, and it can run in a preview mode that reports what it would change without changing anything. The README also documents, in detail, a separate loading crash the developer ran into and fixed while building this patch, along with the exact low level bytes the patch writes into the game's executable.