Hack Ideas and Requests: We still can't hack it in 2023

[jakestanley23]

How about a Spy Hunter hack?

Spy Hunter was one of the best arcade games of the 80's (better than Pac-Man, Galaga, Centipede and other cabinets that are still being made, IMHO.) The NES port was the best one. I'm not a hacker, so Spy Hunter NES is at the top of my wish list. The graphics could use a lot of improvement, and perhaps more music besides just Peter Gunn. I wish the big blue cars were easier to knock off the road, like in the original. Giving the game an actual ending would also be cool, perhaps by letting the spy fly a helicopter, shooting missiles into enemy headquarters at the end of the highway. (Even better, how about a hack of the MAME version?)

[Red Soul]

Okay, about Front Mission DS, I'm still doing some investigating, but I don't yet know enough for this to merit its own topic. I'm looking at the game through No$'s debugger and noticed a few things:

- The CPU usage spikes a lot when loading battle scenes, and stays at maximum usage for a long time until the scene is rendered.

- In FM2089 - The Border of Madness this happens too, but CPU stays at max usage for much less time (it loads faster).

- In FM1DS, during the UCS's campaign in the first scenario, once the game switches to night vision mode (shades of green), battle load time becomes nearly instantaneous. Could it be that it is the loading of the battle scene's palettes that creates the delay?

- The second UCS map has a much lower baseline CPU usage than the first and second OCU maps, battles load very fast. I'm more and more convinced specific maps cause CPU bottlenecking on the DS.

- It seems most of the work is done by the ARM 9 the ARM 7 has little to no load during the gameplay. I'm trying to set a breakpoint to the battle loading routine but I confess that I find strange the debugger doesn't seem to scroll down along as new instructions are read, so I'm not sure what to look for.
Edit: If moderators would rather I edit my previous post, I'll delete this one

[Shadowman621]

I have tested and verified the patches. Thank you for producing them so quickly!

Do you know if it also unlocks the museum games for play in Gallery 4?

[lightbulbsun]

Do you know if it also unlocks the museum games for play in Gallery 4?

It didn't before, but now it should: https://github.com/lightbulb-sun/gawg4-unlock/releases/tag/v1.1

[Tsukiyomaru0]

I wonder if someone could do a "bug & qol" patch set for the 3 GBA castlevanias. There are some bugs like Tiny Devil Soul's failed tracking that could be fixed, or the lack of music and abusively high difficulty in the Arena of Circle of the moon that could be addressed.

[and_manf]

I think this does what you want: https://github.com/lightbulb-sun/sfa2-colors

Thanks

[Sylv3onYT]

I'm wondering if adding in Exp. all from Gen 6+ games would be possible for Pokemon platinum and Heartgold/Soulsilver.

[lightbulbsun]

I have one more fix request for the ColecoVision DK (both 16K and 24K): could you please look into the bonus scoring for Pauline's items? In the arcade release, these items were worth...
a. 300 points on round 1
b. 500 points on round 2
c. 800 points on round 3 and up.

These should do it:
https://github.com/lightbulb-sun/dkong16k-items
https://github.com/lightbulb-sun/dkong24k-items

[RealGaea]

I think this does what you want: https://github.com/lightbulb-sun/sfa2-colors

Sweet! Can you apply it for the missing regions(EUR/JAP)?

[lightbulbsun]

Sweet! Can you apply it for the missing regions(EUR/JAP)?

This should do it: https://github.com/lightbulb-sun/sfa2-colors/releases/tag/v1.1

[Nightshift Nurse]

Honestly, while it would be cool, the fact is that the ultimate version of Final Fight already exists, and it's a hack of the arcade version. With emulation how it is today, pretty much any device that can run an SNES Emulator can also run MAME. So why go through the months/years of porting something to the SNES that already exists in an easily-playable format?

I can only speak for myself, but I generally prefer the home ports of arcade titles when it comes to day-to-day play. For starters, there tend to be limitations in place on things like lives and especially continues, which simply don't exist in their arcade counterparts. And when you can just credit feed your way to the end of a game...well...it gets boring. Fast. Consequently, the arcade collections released over the generations by companies like Capcom rarely hold much interest for me. Home ports simply feel more dynamic in the regard, even with the technological constraints imposed on them.

Talking specifically in the case of Final Fight, enemy layouts in the home ports are simply better than the arcade release. Final Fight was, to a great extent, Capcom flexing nuts in terms of how many sprites their then new CPS-1 hardware was capable of displaying at once. Large sprites, at that. And, in the regard, it's incredibly impressive. But actually playing the game becomes increasingly a drag past the cage match in stage 3. I mean, it's cool that a dozen Hollywood-class enemies can be on screen at once with zero slowdown, but actually dealing with that? Ugh.

At any rate, as nice as an "ultimate" edition of Final Fight on the SNES would be, I'd be quite happy with the no more than having all three player characters selectable in either version. Which doesn't seem like it should be that hard to enable. It certainly didn't seem to be what tripped up Rotwang on his now abandoned hack.

Then again, if Final Fight MD is ever completed, perhaps some of the work done there can be used to add stage four back into the SNES release. Who knows?

[TCgamerboy2002]

I don't know if this can be hacked or not, but I'll go ahead and throw my two cents:

In MediEvil 2, the Fountains of Rejuvenation run out after a while, but unlike the first game, they never refill when you re-enter the stage. This is one of the factors that made the game unfairly hard. If anyone ever decides to hack the game, this is the one thing that needs to be tweaked.

[RealGaea]

This should do it: https://github.com/lightbulb-sun/sfa2-colors/releases/tag/v1.1

Thanks, this will get closer to a SFA2GOLD romhack.

[FAST6191]

I don't know if this can be hacked or not, but I'll go ahead and throw my two cents:

In MediEvil 2, the Fountains of Rejuvenation run out after a while, but unlike the first game, they never refill when you re-enter the stage. This is one of the factors that made the game unfairly hard. If anyone ever decides to hack the game, this is the one thing that needs to be tweaked.

It is very much within the purview of hackers but it is also something a cheat engine might tackle. Indeed if you can make a cheat then even if getting down with PS1 assembly is not on the cards for you then one that can will be able to do it far more easily.

This is probably going to be a harder cheat. Afraid I never did the second game (first was a notable point in the PS1 for me, going to do the recent remake if I can find a copy for a sensible price as the demo brought it all back) so going to have to be context.

Sounds like it might be unique per stage stats (possibly along with any pickups) which means two main approaches.
1) Hope the standard cheat search works in time, possibly with savestates to boost apparent numbers (if you only get a few kicks at the cat reverting the savestate can get a few more if you go in for changed or possibly increased values). If you can do one damage and it drops the healer by amount of damage then great.
2) If it is considered a stage variable by the game then along with whatever common one time pickups there are (find a run without any enemies around and go one by one) will probably be very close to it. Poke around those areas and you might find what you want (same idea as finding a luck stat for a game that barely ever changes by instead doing strength that changes every level and moving sideways). Depending upon how the game works you might be doing this anyway if all levels are different.


If making a quasi infinite healer is not your thing then PS1 cheat engines are usually fairly advanced and allow you to do things like if greater than then. Find some timer in the game (the game itself might keep track of play time) and key off that, maybe having to adjust it for your cheat if it is a continuous timer (goes past 500 seconds say is fine but will always be that after a while, or will only be that once, do something like a AND to blank out the rest of the timer and when it cycles round whatever seconds count you give it and it refills you have something that won't necessarily drop the difficulty but still keep something. If not a timer then the pickups mentioned earlier might do -- once you pick up a few hundred then refill is also an option, as would a kill counter if there is one.

[MichalGrodal]

Personal idea, but what about a color adjustment hack for DKC 2's port on the GBA?

[FAST6191]

There have been a few people actually taking a real look at the Donkey Kong games on the GBA. The main trouble is it is not a normal SNES conversion but they actually rerendered (or at least downscaled) the sprites as well as doing the brighten the colours because original GBA screen. Most GBA palette restorations then taking advantage of the formats being the same so as long as you can find the GBA version (which can be as easy as dump it in an emulator and search the ROM for it) then it is easy enough. Here you would have more artistic considerations in addition to some trickier hacking.

One of the threads
https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=30958.msg396796#msg396796

[MichalGrodal]

Thanks.

[IvyZombie04]

I don´t know if this has been requested before, but i would like to play an english translated Pokemon Green (with the old 1996 sprites including the very ugly mew sprite, the 30% freeze rate and the epilectic animations for flashing moves)

THERE´S ALREADY A TRANSLATION, but the game is basically just a re-skin of american blue

So basically my request would be to have translated pokemon green BUT with the pool of wild mons, casino rewards and more importantly in-game trades from JAPANESE BLUE

This way a translated pokemon green would feel like it´s own thing instead of just "blue with ugly sprites"

[SegaMan89]

What about a rom hack of Punch-Out!! that replaces Little Mac with Strong Bad from Homestar Runner?

[julayla]

What about a rom hack of Punch-Out!! that replaces Little Mac with Strong Bad from Homestar Runner?

That would be quite an interesting idea. I wouldn't mind it if the Homestar cast would be put in as boxing opponents. Oh, and there should be a special "The Cheat" mode where Strong Bad would obviously resort to cheating during the matches like he would in the shorts.