Resiyoyoyo's Resident Evil 2 MOD MANUAL, full blown guide to edit EVERYTHING

Once again, much like my Resident Evil 3 Hex FAQ, here's another present for all of you: a guide to mod Resident Evil 2. Mainly written for the PC versions, it also covers the beta2 in parts and - the most important thing of all - it isn't done yet.
I've decided recently not to choose the style of my other FAQ again but do it in a more "user-friendly" way. To get especially people who are new to modding the classic Resident Evil games, I found The Mortician's RE1 MOD MANUAL quite appealing in terms of its layout and thus decided to pick up that style so that everyone new will find it easy to read this guide after he had gone through the one designed for RE1 and vice versa. Thanks, man!
So I started writing all over again; a first outline had 44 pages after I finally had a few hours of spare time again. Nothing much though, but anyway, this version (preview 0.7 with 75 pages) is mostly here so you can take a look at it and tell me what you think about the layout or if there's anything you would really not want to see in the final version of this manual.
Until it's finished there'll be a lot more information added to it crediting several community members and so on but for now it's only a preview so please be patient and don't take everything written there for granted.

Today (May 25th 2011) or tomorrow the file will finally be online, available under "Resident Evil 2 (PC/beta2)" Link#1 over at http://resiyoyoyo.bplaced.com/nonquake.php.
Have fun with it!
Greets, Resiyoyoyo

I hope the link gets fixed soon, otherwise, I hope you can reupload this somewhere.

Great, multimania aka lycos is still undergoing "maintenance" on their FTP servers. As if! Seems like the old "that could last for a week" problem. I'm as eager as probably some of you people to have that preview thing uploaded, but from my personal experience I only want to have it online at my own homepage, sorry.
I'll check the FTP status regularly and as soon as it works again, I'll report back. Nice to see someone like you already being interested, thanks!

EDIT: Nothing yet, still maintenance. This is starting to suck, as I've just finished some other stuff I want to upload for everyone's pleasure. 21/2/2011

The links are deads, so please re upload again..

That's because I've never got to upload it in the first place thanks to the staff suckers from multimania, my web host provider. I'm done waiting, I gathered enough information to start migrating to another web space host. Waiting for more than two months for such an important fix as a non-working FTP upload function is completely ridiculous, and if it wasn't for the loss of my counter with more than half a million visitors over the last few years, I would have moved somewhere else long ago.
Therefore, please hold on for another few days for me to upload the first preview version of my FAQ and also a massive RE/BH-related update on my website which has been prepared back like in February but couldn't be uploaded due to multimania's FTP "issue"; for god's sake NEVER EVER use this host!

In the meanwhile there are some things I'm not entirely sure about and where I need your help or confirmation:

1)
Has there ever been another version for the japanese dreamcast release of Biohazard 2 than the "Biohazard 2 Value Plus"? Also, that's the only version of BH/RE2 known to feature 3 discs one of which holding the CV trial and sound museum bonus?

2)
About the demo/trial versions of BH2:
There've been two releases for the Playstation: the japanese "trial" and the us-american "review". What about a seperate uk/pal release?
What about demos for PC?

3)
Anyone knows of a decent list comparing countries with NTSC to those with PAL format worldwide?

4)
Can anybody provide me with the executables of Leon/ClaireA? Ignore that question if that could be seen as piracy.

5)
Is it correct that you're taken back to the main menu in the japanese trial after 15 minutes as well as in the american preview or is it 10 (jap) opposed to 15 minutes (us)?

[EDIT: Reduced Question 4 thanks to residentevilartist, thanks man!]

I have sent you a PM! =)

Thanks a lot!
Regarding the web host change: about time: I finally got sick of multimania and migrated, l'll upload the RE2_MOD_MANUAL preview today or maybe tomorrow, everything else is already online, see the OP for the new URL.

[EDIT: added "Thanks [...] change" since my original post could have mistakingly been interpreted as rude.]

It's up!
Read the opening post (download link is there too) have a look at the file and tell me what you think!

In fact this is the most current version dating back only a few hours. An idea of what to make of freak saves (see the guide for more info) that ain't included yet: These can be used to create start saves for MODs (much like the "Claire B_00_Scenario 2.RESIDENT2" saves) which only allow for saving a certain amount of time (i.e. 10 times, and the 11th save will crash automatically once loaded) to make it a real challenge. Bwahahaha!

downloaded it but my acrobat reader can't read it. anyone else having a problem?

edit: never mind, my reader was out of date somehow

Yeah, I've encrypted the manual's content to prevent search engines directly reading it, so you'll need at least a program that is equivalent to Adobe's Acrobat Reader 7.0 (not necessarily newer since 8 and 9 are gathering way too much personal information and disk space although they're nothing more than freaking pdf readers! ).
At anyone having downloaded this file: Any comments or first impressions so far?

The first version of my RE2_MOD_MANUAL is about to be released. I've spent some days with Resident Evil 2, overdid it a bit, and have thus been able to add another 10 pages text-only with some new discoveries I haven't seen posted here yet (yeah, 15 hours staring at hex code and much more lets you achieve one or the other thing ).
But before I upload it, I need to clarify some things a.k.a. have some questions answered. Before that I don't feel like it's good enough for a release.

So here's what I need to know/confirmed:

1)
Has there ever been another version for the japanese dreamcast release of Biohazard 2 than the "Biohazard 2 Value Plus"? Also, that's the only version of BH/RE2 known to feature 3 discs one of which holding the CV trial and sound museum bonus?

2)
About the demo/trial versions of BH2:
There've been two releases for the Playstation as far as I know: the japanese "trial" and the us-american "review". What about a seperate uk/pal release? Also:
What about demos for PC? How many are there? Any european PC demos?

3)
Is there any site where the japanese PC demo is offered as a download?

4)
Anyone knows of a decent list comparing countries with NTSC to those with PAL format worldwide?

5)
Can anybody provide me with the executables of Leon/ClaireA? Ignore that question if that could be seen as piracy.

6)
Is it correct that you're taken back to the main menu in the japanese trial after 15 minutes as well as in the american preview or is it 10 (jap) opposed to 15 minutes (us)?

7)
Has the PSX version of Resident Evil 2 really been banned on April 30th 1998 in Germany? It's sure that it was banned, but I'm not sure about the date; April 30th 1998 is what I took from the BPjM homepage, the institution that is responsible for the ban. But I've seen other information on other sites, and BPjM isn't exactly known for the fact that they know their business, so who's to trust in this case?

i cannot wait for this

No answers to my questions. Found out some of them on my own by now, updated version (the first non-preview) is somewhat ready and will be uploaded soon.
By the way: updated the link, as I've changed to php sites.

not to pester, but will this have the complete damage/health tables? and how to change all the text in the game?

i am dying to have a guide for those things

Nope, I've had far too little time to get around finding all the other values or at least put the ones I've found into order. However, there will be a chapter teaching you the basics of the memory/fixed offsets topic that should enable you to find things like these on your own. What will be in there is a lot of notes that will be indispensable for using the offsets and values I've published on my website and to understand Resident Evil 2's game mechanics (better).
As for the text question: Here's a short ( ) summary of all the text that is contained inside the executables (German, English P and U, Spanish), for the RDT texts/messages refer to BIOFAT or Mark's RDTool, making a seperate list for the RDT files like I did with the EXEs would be plain stupid, far too much effort compared to the usefulness of the outcome. The program itself -DecodeMe- will be out soon, just needs to be translated first, then it'll be released.
The update will feature some nice stuff though, which I have come across in the last months and of course the enemy chapter including the data I've had on my website for now.