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Personal Projects / BS Zelda - Link Restoration

« on: August 01, 2020, 01:55:13 am »

Addendum patch for MottZilla's v0.95 patch.

• Adds official Link sprites back into the ROM as the default character option.
• Custom art cobbled together for Link's one-handed fanfare, stray pixels removed from Link's shield in one downward-facing frame.
• Link's palettes changed back to their original colors.
• Zelda's hair changed back to brown.
• Shopkeeper sprite/palette returned to original.
• Girl Mascot's hair changed to brown, and character select screen re-adjusted (both to account for palette change).
• Link and Zelda added to intro sequence.

v1.0 https://www.mediafire.com/file/s0ftdqc4plf698q/file
v1.1 https://www.mediafire.com/file/fuk19q676wu561l/file

I just submitted it for approval, but it says that addendum patches have to link to the original patch, and the original patch has to be hosted at RomHacking, and it is not...so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to fix that? Do I just include the original patch in with mine??

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Gigaleak Discussion

« on: July 29, 2020, 08:45:58 pm »

So I'm wondering what our stance is here on the current "Gigaleak"?

Obviously, sharing files is out of the question, but are we allowed to discuss discoveries? Are we allowed to use found assets to create and share new hacks with? etc. etc.?

I've been trying to find out which community is actually documenting this stuff, but I don't know where they're hiding. There's no point in trying to catalogue stuff myself if someone else has already done the hard work. I tried asking a few people on Twitter, but they wouldn't even give me the time of day.
July 29, 2020, 10:32:09 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)For example, these shots (from Nintendo Power Magazine) match the BS Zelda tiles in the leak, except it's the Boy Mascot instead of Link.



I'm playing around with putting them back into the ROM right now, but the palettes don't quite match up And the older(?) tiles have a few extra frames here and there that the "final" ROM is missing (including items like the Master Key which did't get used).

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Personal Projects / Pac-Man NES color hack

« on: April 28, 2018, 10:00:57 am »

I'm not sure why I bother, when there are better ways to play Pac-Man, but it's all a good learning experience, right??

Anyway, I thought the game was way too dark, so I brightened it up. I borrowed a lot of colors from Namco's Ms. Pac-Man NES port, and referenced the arcade game for other colors. The Pac-Man sprite got cleaned up, so his butt doesn't wiggle anymore. I also got my feet wet with a little ASM hacking, and got the extra lives indicator to use a different palette from the pellets (which required re-drawing the corner of the screen a bit!).


There's a nasty bug in the NTSC versions of the game that I tried fixing, but I'm not sure it's in my power. It seems like any data that is stored in RAM at 700-7FF automatically gets loaded into sprite RAM, so when the game boots up and zeros out that area, it looks there and loads a ton of sprite #0 at position 0,0, with palette #0 (so you see a yellow Pac wedge in the upper-left corner of the screen). The PAL version of the game seems to "fix" this by filling that block with EF instead of 00, which I assume just hides the sprites in the lower-right corner where you can't see them. I don't know how to copy the routine(s) over to the NTSC version without breaking the whole thing =)


So I gave up and made patches for both regions and I've been playing the PAL one. The music isn't sped up, but the gameplay is. I think I might prefer it that way.

The color I chose for the keys might be a bit dark, I'll look into it later.


I think there might be another bug on level 22 (the final looping one), because at the beginning of the stage, the ghosts stay in scatter mode for far too long. I'm not sure if I want to look into that or not, but one would think it would be easy to fix, once it was found.



Just for fun, I made a separate patch that just changes Clyde to green, like in Pac-Man VS.



Here's the patches, they're all for the Namco published versions from 1993 (not the Tengen ones). They might work on the VC ROMs, too. Tested in emulators and on real hardware.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/qazt8b4fpdcdaiv/pac-man_colorhack.zip

I also threw in my TXT file of messy notes, in case they're useful to anyone.



Apparently my next project is an "LCD Ghosting Removal Patch" for the Nintendo DS Game & Watch collections. I'm about 17% finished with the first game. I'm sure there's a much faster way to do it than how I'm doing it =)

[Spoiler:]

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Personal Projects / Legend of Zelda - Blue-er Ring

« on: August 06, 2017, 02:53:22 am »

I hacked this up the other day, trying to see if I could find a nicer shade of blue for Link's Blue Ring garb (and NPCs, etc.) I've only tested it a little bit, in emu and on real hardware + CRT, it should look fine in all dungeons, right?

Screens:

Spoiler:

Patches for NES (NTSC and PAL) and the four different Famicom releases:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/76mt5rd9im80i00/zelda_blue-er_ring.zip

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA, NES) small bugfix

« on: June 03, 2017, 11:53:34 pm »

I was so excited to find out from TCRF that there was a fix for the missing tile animation frame, that I fixed the POW block while I was at it. Then I found out that the SMB2 Improvement patch already fixed the animation, and more: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2600/

Well, it didn't fix the POW block (the letter "O" is misaligned in one frame), so I'm releasing it to whoever wants it. It's not a super important fix, but like the missing animation frames, it's just something that has bugged me since I was a kid.



Also, "just because", I graphically hacked Mario, Luigi, and Peach to have their eyes match how they look in the menu screens. I almost always play as Toad, so I never noticed how weird the whites of their eyes look, especially when they flicker. The "whites" are still being drawn, you just can't see them anymore, so if someone could ASM hack them out entirely (wink wink, nudge nudge), that might cut down on overall screen flicker a tiny bit.

Anyway, feel free to pick this apart and throw it into other hacks. If you just want the POW fix, I believe the two tiles are at 0x027410 and 0x027430. Here's the patch file, v0.99: https://www.mediafire.com/?xs650g7ze9zy1a3

Mix it with the Improvement patch linked above for best results.

Edit: Version 1.0 can be found here: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3847/

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Personal Projects / Playtesters wanted: Metroid 3, 4, Zero automap-less hack (SNES/GBA)

« on: April 22, 2011, 05:52:07 pm »

Hey guys. A friend and I were talking about the GBA Metroids last night, and I said that I wished someone would've hacked out the automap feature from them, to make them less easy.

Then I realized I could just do it myself. So I did. And I did Metroid 3 while I was at it.

I'd appreciate it if anyone could help me playtest these, as I'm not sure if I'm finished or not. Zero Mission seems fine, except as you can see in the fourth shot, it'll reveal garbage background when you use the map complete powerups. No big deal, really, unless someone more able minded than myself knows a way around it.

Fusion has a few tiles left that I'm not sure if they're map related or not. Other than that, it's working out much better than I thought it would.

Super Metroid has three sets of automap tiles (that I've found): one for during play, one for the fullscreen view, and another near the beginning of the ROM that I'm not sure when it comes up (there's some text tiles near it that say "PLANET ZEBES"). I guess I could just blank them out and leave it at that, but I'd like to see if they come up later or not. Also, there's one tile that I'm not sure about...looks like a sideways elevator shaft. I could've sworn it was used in Maridia somewhere, but I did a quick check and didn't see anything there.

I'll probably do the J ROM of Fusion also (since it has selectable difficulty levels), and probably also release a "lite" version that just erases the white dots that tell you if there's an item hidden in a room or not.

Super Metroid:



Metroid Fusion:



Metroid Zero Mission:



I'm in a hurry, so I just packed them all together:

EDIT: Same URL, updated files (fixed a bunch of tiles I missed in Zero Mission, removed the map scrolling arrows from the other two): http://asaki.webs.com/nomap.rar

Let me know if there's any problems, I'm not sure if my Fusion ROM was clean or not.