fuzziqersoftware / newserv

newserv newserv is a game server, proxy, and reverse-engineering tool for Phantasy Star Online (PSO). **To quickly get started using newserv, just read the server setup and how to connect sections.** This project includes code that was reverse-engineered by the community in ages long past, and has been included in many projects since then. It also includes some game data from Phantasy Star Online itself, which was originally created by Sega. Feel free to submit GitHub issues if you find bugs or have feature requests. I'd like to make the server as stable and complete as possible, but I can't promise that I'll respond to issues in a timely manner, because this is a personal project undertaken primarily for the fun of reverse-engineering. If you want to contribute to newserv yourself, pull requests are welcome as well. See TODO.md for a list of known issues and future work I've curated, or go to the GitHub issue tracker for issues and requests submitted by the community. **Table of contents** • Background • History • Other server projects • Using newserv in other projects • Contributing to newserv • Compatibility • Setup • Server setup • Client patch directories for PC and BB • How to connect • Features and configuration • User accounts • Installing quests • Item tables and drop modes • Cross-version play • Server-side saves • Episode 3 features • Memory patches, client functions, and DOL files • Using newserv as a proxy • Chat commands • REST API • Non-server features History The history of this project essentially mirrors my development as a software engineer from the beginning of my hobby until now. If you don't care about the story, skip to the "Compatibility" or "Setup" sections below. I originally purchased PSO GC when I heard about PSUL, and wanted to play around with running homebrew on my GameCube. This pathway eventually led to GCARS-CS, but that's another story. After playing PSO for a while, both offline and online, I wrote a proxy called Khyps sometime in 2003. This was back in the days of the official Sega servers, where vulnerabilities weren't addressed in a timely manner or at all. It was common for malicious players using their own proxies or Action Replay codes (a story for another time) to send invalid commands that the servers would blindly forward, and cause the receiving clients to crash. These crashes were more than simply inconvenient; they could also corrupt your save data, destroying the hours of work you may have put into hunting items and leveling up your character. For a while it was essentially necessary to use a proxy to go online at all, so the proxy could block these invalid commands. Khyps was designed primarily with this function in mind, though it also implemented some convenient cheats, like the ability to give yourself or other players infinite HP and allow you to teleport to different places without using an in-game teleporter. After Khyps I took on the larger challenge of writing a server, which resulted in Khyller sometime in 2005. This was the first server of any type I had ever written. This project eventually evolved into a full-featured environment supporting all versions of the game that I had access to - at the time, PC, GC, and BB. (However, I suspect from reading the ancient source files that Khyller's BB support was very buggy.) As Khyller evolved, the code became increasingly cumbersome, littered with debugging filth that I never cleaned up and odd coding patterns I had picked up over the years. My understanding of the C++ language was woefully incomplete as well (as opposed to now, when it is still incomplete but not woefully so), which resulted in Khyller being essentially a C project that had a couple of classes in it. Sometime in 2006 or 2007, I abandoned Khyller and rebuilt the entire thing from scratch, resulting in Aeon. Aeon was substantially cleaner in code than Khyller but still fairly hard to work with, and it lacked a few of the more arcane features I had originally written (for example, the ability to convert any quest into a download quest). In addition, the code still had some stability problems... it turns out that Aeon's concurrency primitives were simply incorrect. I had derived the concept of a mutex myself, before taking any real computer engineering classes, but had implemented it incorrectly. I made the race window as small as possible, but Aeon would still randomly crash after running seemingly fine for a few days. At the time of its inception, Aeon was also called newserv, and you may find some beta releases floating around the Internet with filenames like . I had released betas 1, 2, and 3 before I released the entire source of beta 5 and stopped working on the project when I went to college. This was around the time when I switched from writing software primarily on Windows to primarily on macOS and Linux, so Aeon beta 5 was the last server I wrote that specifically targeted Windows. (newserv, which you're looking at now, is difficult to compile on Windows but does work.) After a long hiatus from PSO and much professional and personal development in my technical abilities, I was reminiscing sometime in October 2018 by reading my old code archives. Somehow inspired when I came across Aeon, I spent a weekend and a couple more evenings rewriting the entire project again, cleaning up ancient patterns I had used eleven years ago, replacing entire modules with simple STL containers, and eliminating even more support files in favor of configuration autodetection. The code is now suitably modern and stable, and I'm not embarrassed by its existence, as I am by Aeon beta 5's source code and my archive of Khyller (which, thankfully, no one else ever saw). Other server projects Independently of this project, there are many other PSO servers out there. Those that I know of that are (or were) public are listed here in approximate chronological order: • (Early 2000s) **Schtserv**: The first public-access PSO…