Utilities News
- For Windows computers: https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1752/
- For ARM-based Macs (Apple silicon): https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1753/
- For Intel-based Macs: https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1755/
Ever wanted to play MOTHER 3 without so much noise? Love hearing its soundtrack crystal clear on YouTube? Now you can experience the game with much cleaner audio! This hack mixes every individual channel at 16-bit audio before downsampling everything to 8-bit audio as opposed to the default m4a mixer which mixes every channel at 8-bit audio (blame the GBA’s DAC!)
- This greatly reduces the number of quantization/rounding errors that pop up during the mixing process, making the classic GBA “background hiss” much quieter while making Shogo Sakai’s music sound crispier than ever! Results seem even better when played back on actual hardware. Enjoy!!
DISCLAIMERS
FOR EVERYONE:
- You may hear occasional popping in-game after patching your ROM, for example while saving your game. Throughout 100+ hours of testing, these same pops were heard while playing the original Japanese release, making the hack authors fairly confident this hack isn’t the cause. It’s possible these audio glitches were covered up by the original mixer’s background noise and are now easier to hear with clearer audio. Please don’t hesitate to report any bugs, but just keep in mind there’s only so much you can do with the GBA’s limitations!
FOR SPEEDRUNNERS:
- If your ROM is a Fan Translation, this patch does modify the RNG used by MOTHER 3 and will most likely give you unexpected results! Because of that, any TAS recordings of MOTHER 3 will be broken by this hack. You have been warned!!
PATCHER FEATURES
- 100% compatibility with ALL Fan Translations! [versions 1.2 and below will cause occasional slowdowns with this hack, regardless of the language]
- Compatible with the original Japanese release of MOTHER 3
- Compatible with other ROM hacks, such as Claus’ Journey [this is an EXPERIMENTAL feature; be aware of potential bugs!!]
- Customize your game’s sample rate for higher-quality sound effects, including Lucas’ clean electric guitar during battles
- Save backup copies of your game before patching
- Easily undo/remove the HQ sound patch from your game
- Read the source code behind this patch
- Windows and macOS support (64-bit only)
HOW TO PATCH YOUR GAME:
Download the patcher and either load your ROM with the “Open” button or drag-and-drop your ROM into the patcher. After you indicate whether your copy of MOTHER 3 is an original Japanese release or a Fan Translation, you’ll be able to apply the hack to your game. Simple as!
FUTURE GOALS
- Having the patcher translated to languages other than English (Currently available in French and Brazilian Portuguese)
- Support for Linux distros
CREDITS
- Mixer preparation, ROM hacking, and patcher written by Summer Dragonfly (xkas format by Near/byuu: https://wiki.superfamicom.org/xkas)
- HQ sound mixer ingeniously programmed by ipatix (https://github.com/ipatix), inspired by “Golden Sun”: https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=324673
- Original HQ sound mixing code written by Haruki “Bon” Kodera for Camelot Software Planning: https://www.camelot.co.jp/gimon/gimon21.html
- Mother 3 decompilation and technical support: Kurausukun and theo3 (https://github.com/Kurausukun/mother3)
- Extra technical support: phoenixbound, Lorenzooone, and Yosuke
- French translations and Intel-based Mac version packaged by JumpmanFR
- Brazilian Portuguese translations by Somewhat Viable
- Special thanks to the Mother 1+2 Fan Translation/Sound Restoration project and the PRET Discord community!
[ COMMENTS ] Relevant Link - RHDN Project Page
Utilities News
The Haroohie Translation Club is very excited to announce the first release (v0.1 beta) of Serial Loops, a full editing suite for Suzumiya Haruhi no Chokuretsu (The Series of Haruhi Suzumiya)!
Chokuretsu is a 2009 Nintendo DS visual novel/puzzle game based on the Haruhi Suzumiya light novels. In late 2021, the Haroohie Translation Club was formed around a project to translate this game. While initially just focused on writing tooling to support the translation effort, the team’s lead ROM hacker, Jonko, eventually managed to crack the game’s custom compression algorithm, archive format, script files & custom scripting language, custom animation formats, and more. Armed with that knowledge, he and lead designer William278 set out to create a full editor for the game.
In this first beta release, Serial Loops is capable of completely rewriting the game from the ground up to tell any story with the Haruhi characters that you want. Some specific features are:
- Creating, saving, opening, building and running projects from within the editor
- Tools for searching items, including text within items (dialogue lines)
- Editing game banner data, including its icon and name
- Editing game scripts (including dialogue, character layouts on maps, top-screen data & more), with a live preview
- Editing the game scenario flow (i.e. which scripts get executed in which order)
- Replacing backgrounds, with automatic resizing
- Replacing and leveling audio, modifying BGM loop parameters, updating BGM track names as they appear in the bonus room
- Replacing voiced lines
- Viewing (but not editing) maps, puzzles, topics, place name graphics, chibis (and animations), character portraits (and animations), and a number of other miscellaneous items!
Progress is already underway on allowing editing those other items, and eventually Serial Loops will be capable of creating an entirely original visual novel with the Chokuretsu engine.
[ COMMENTS ] Relevant Link - RHDN Project Page
Utilities News
Advanced SNES ROM Utility finally gets a 1.0 release!
Some long-awaited features like ROM mirroring on expanding and removing most known SRAM checks have finally been added. Also the game code is now displayed and can be changed the easy way!
You now can decide wheater a ROM gets instantly scanned on loading or not. This options might improve loading times on slow PCs.
What else to say? Just go and check it out!
[ COMMENTS ] Relevant Link - RHDN Project Page
Utilities News
NAW is a new graphics creation tool targeted specifically for developing NES assets. The GUI should be familiar to artists. Currently available for Windows only.
In NAW the screen area is an emulation of the NES image. It contains all of the basic building blocks: the CHR data, nametable, palette and sprites. What you see is the real thing!
It allows editing the nametables, the CHR pages and OAM data, all using a very visual workflow. Some interesting features include:
- paste any type of image you copied from an outside program directly onto the CHR area. Color will be automatically reduced if need be. Optionally reduce the image to selection keeping proportions.
- load a tbl file to assign tiles to keys or assign them visually inside NAW so you can write to the nametable with the write tool.
- manipulate sprites. simulate scanline sprite limit, order sprites in OAM, simulate flicker.
- draw on the sprites layer directly and sprites will be created automatically. ideal for creating static screens (title screens, cutscenes, etc).
- export NROM with the static image (for proof of concept, etc)
- intuitive image editing tools (brush size, paint bucket, line, rectangle, color swap, selection).
It is in constant development and is also available at itch for free. Donations are welcomed to keep the project alive. https://nesrocks.itch.io/naw
It should be important to mention that it doesn’t open a ROM directly yet. Such a feature is planned for editing tiles, much like how yy-chr works, in the future.
As a NES graphics tool though it is useful for creating new sprites, backgrounds and tilesets for then to be manually inserted into the game with other ROM hacking tools.
It can also quickly import a PPU dump taken from Fceux or Mesen for you to edit uncompressed (a.k.a in NES PPU format) existing game’s graphics. You may need to fiddle with the registers inside NAW to completely recreate the game’s screen after importing the dump.
You can also import the OAM dump from Mesen to view sprites already assembled, making it easier to edit the CHR tiles.
For both of these features you go inside the emulator, open the ROM and play until you reach the section with the sprites you want to edit the tiles for. Dump the OAM and PPU memory and open those inside NAW.
Forum post: https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=36749.0
[ COMMENTS ] Relevant Link - RHDN Project Page
Utilities News
Custom Robo for the GameCube now has a model swapper! It allows users to change in-game characters into different ones from the game, letting you change the player into an NPC’s model, and NPCs into other NPCs. You can see the results for yourselves in the FeMC Main Character mod made by the same person.
[ COMMENTS ] Relevant Link - RHDN Project Page
Utilities News
Solomon’s Keychain is a level and metadata editor for Solomon’s Key (NES), which supports both the US, JP and EU versions of the ROM.
The edited levels can be saved as patched NES-ROMs, IPS patch-files as well as an internal xml format. The xml format will make integration with source controls system easier, and simplify collaboration projects.
Much of the editor’s behavior depends on an external configuration xml, which can be modified by advanced users - but the default xml should be sufficient for most.
The initial version of the editor will only support “vanilla” hacks, in other words the modder has to work under the same constraints as the original developers. In the next release there will be an option to change the ROM mapper to fit more data into the output ROM - which will make the editor compatible with the existing editor, skedit.
The source code is available, and as it is written in standard C++20, it should be easy to compile it on different platforms. Precompiled binaries for win-x64 are available, however.
[ COMMENTS ] Relevant Link - RHDN Project Page
Utilities News
Support for editing world maps and the overworld (main island) has finally been added to the Wario Land 1 editor.
The following can now be edited directly:
- Map 8×8 tiles. Copy / paste is allowed for quick editing.
- Map events. These events are similar to those in Super Mario World on SNES.
They are used to reveal paths after beating a level, but also to change the map as you progress through the story.
- Map paths. This is what allows main character to move from one level to another. This feature was difficult to implement.
With these 3 new features, it is possible to modify the maps quite deeply and provide a quite different experience from the vanilla game (see screenshots for some examples). The focus has been on providing an easy to use, but still powerful interface.
If you want to try it out, be sure to check out the README file on the GitHub project page. Have fun!
[ COMMENTS ] Relevant Link - RHDN Project Page
Utilities News
Support has been added for editing warps and level headers.
Basically, this opens up a lot of new possibilities and should allow you to change any level as you wish. For example, the first level (rice beach) can now be changed to show a lava cave with thwomps and end the level with the first boss (something you will never see in a real game). It also allows you to create/modify doors and their target area (something used a lot in this game).
Among these changes, there is a new “selection tool” which is very powerful and allows many things:
- Move blocks from one place to another (including between levels)
- Fill an area with a single value (e.g. for quick delete)
- Fill an area with a pattern
- …
This should make level creation much easier.
[ COMMENTS ] Relevant Link - RHDN Project Page
Utilities News
This is an automated message generated by ROMhacking.net’s RHDNBot.
The following Utilities have been submitted and approved to the database (in submitted order oldest to newest):
Assembly Tools
- Rhombus (GEN)
Compression / Decompression
- SOR2 Compression Utility (GEN)
Data Extraction / Insertion
Game Specific
- Sonic Spinball ROM Editor (GEN)
- Virtua Racing Deluxe ROM Editor (32X)
- Final Fantasy Legend Randomizer (GB)
- Super Mario Bros. 3 Miscellaneous Editor (NES)
- SMB3 Music Inserter (NES)
- Road Rash 2 ROM Editor (GEN)
Graphics Editors
- Image - SNES+ (SNES)
Graphics Viewers
- PsxVram-DotNet (PSX)
- SimCity SNES map viewer (SNES)
Level Editors
- TeheMan 8 Editor (PSX)
- SMB3 Scribe – Overworld Editor - Windows (NES)
- SMB3 Scribe – Overworld Editor - Mac (NES)
- SMB3 Scribe – Overworld Editor - Linux (NES)
- LAMP (GB)
Miscellaneous
- ChecksumInator (Multiple)
- Advanced NES ROM Utility - Split / Expand / Patch / Fix Checksum (NES)
- Tile mixer (ARC)
[ COMMENTS ] Relevant Link
Utilities News
About one year after releasing Advanced SNES ROM Utility Dom-aka-Doke finally decided to create and release another utility for NES ROMs… the Advanced NES ROM Utility!
Following functions are included:
- Read iNES, NES2.0 and Nintendo header information
- Fix checksums in Nintendo header
- Split into single ROM files for burning (PlayChoice-10 support)
- Split into equal sized parts for burning (VS Unisystem support)
- Expand ROM (requires Nflate)
- Apply IPS, UPS, BPS, BDF and Xdelta patches
Have fun!