1

Personal Projects / Re: Mario Gaiden: an SMB1 Hack intended to be EPIC. Assistance needed!

« on: March 19, 2014, 10:26:12 pm »

This is the makings of an awesome hack - seriously, very impressive stuff! Keep it up!

2

Personal Projects / Re: Megaman 1 and 2 for PC-Engine upgrade/hack

« on: February 20, 2014, 09:47:36 pm »

Tomaitheous I am always in awe of your work. This is really frickin' cool, I can't wait to play with your updates! As if porting all of these nes games wasn't enough!

I always thought the turbo should've had a 16 bit megaman...and waddya know, it's happening! 

3

Newcomer's Board / Re: Need help with a custom NES rom

« on: August 07, 2013, 12:10:00 pm »

My take on it that shouldn't be too hard to do would be changing a toad house dialog (early on and hard to miss) and maybe find a way to change the boxes to all give the same item, a wedding ring (change an obscure or later power up's graphic to it)

The dialog should be easily found through relative searching or an smb3 utility I would think.
The graphics should be able to be found/edited with Tile Layer Pro, YY-CHR, Tile Molester or similar.

Good luck!

4

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Hacking nes roms to remove color emphasis, looking for help

« on: February 02, 2013, 10:50:44 am »

I'd be interested in such patches, the palette/emphasis bit changes were some of my concerns in doing an rgb mod. What game did you fix?

edit: nm, found the thread on nesdev. Great info!
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=9769

5

Personal Projects / Re: Castlevania II (Simon's Quest) - Finnish & English re-translations

« on: January 19, 2013, 01:54:26 pm »

I'd love to make a repro with saving support and all these additional tweaks/features...what mapper cartridge should I be looking at? This is an excellent project! 

6

Personal Projects / Re: Bomberman 5 Menu Translation

« on: July 06, 2012, 01:21:46 pm »

I would look to see if the game uses any uncompressed tiles in its code...perhaps you could insert your own uncompressed font?

Space might be a problem (it's always a problem...)

7

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: 'scuse me

« on: June 26, 2012, 03:15:30 pm »

Is there an english font in the game?

Look through the rom in YY-CHR or Tile Layer Pro and find your tiles for different text characters, including japanese characters. Choose a couple bpp modes and just take a look for them. Note the order that they go in. From there you can make a table with many tools (even notepad) once you find your hex values. 'A = 42' could be an example entry. Do this for each letter of the japanese font and the english font if there is one.

Once you have a table you can load it alongside your rom in a hex editor like Windhex. You should be able to see the japanese text on the right side and edit it, if it's in a straightforward format. Try changing a recognizable line early in the game to something in english. Mess around with it.
If there isn't an english font you will have to insert one with one of the aforementioned graphic editors, probably replacing the japanese font.

These are just some tips to get started. This is assuming the font is uncompressed. You should look at some Gameboy pointer docs as well.
Learn how to relative search too. That should help you find a lot of your text.

8

Personal Projects / Re: Final Fantasy VII NES Project

« on: May 17, 2012, 12:54:42 pm »

Man, I would love to have a reproduction of this when Lugia's excellent updates are finished
(but as with any project like this...nothing is 'final' )

From searching for the flash chip, it appears to be present in Ambit 200 modems and can be flashed with a homemade 'blackcat' jtag cable for them. I wonder if you could take one of these modems and use it to write our rom data to it...unless there's a simpler way?

9

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Zelda II - Adventure of Link (Italian)

« on: March 30, 2012, 09:15:49 am »

What snarfblam noted was that the game uses one big pointer to a block of text as opposed to a bunch of individual pointers.
The good news is that if it's just reading in the next string in sequence, theoretically it shouldn't care about how long they are.

You can't write a longer string in the current spot without screwing up the byte code of the game - it expects everything to be in a certain spot.
What you'll need to do is find enough empty space in the rom and copy the entire text block there (incorporating your changes) and point to that new block.

Just make sure that for the '21 ED 03' the 03 becomes 04 to accommodate an extra letter.

10

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Zelda II - Adventure of Link (Italian)

« on: March 28, 2012, 01:25:44 pm »

You'll have to investigate the pointers for this game - there's some great documents here for that.

Basically you will need to figure out the pointer format so you can either

a.) Increase the length of the string it reads (is there any room after 'END' ? or does it run right into other strings?) by modifying the pointer

or

b.) Use the pointer to point to some empty (usually filled with FF) space with your 'FINE' string.

or even
c.) Switch around pointers with a string that you don't need the full space of - ie, if there's a 4 character string that you -personally- replaced with a 3 character one, you could instead switch the pointers around. For example let's say BOMB and END are right beside each other. If you wanted BOMB to become BOM, you could write it in place of 'END'. And now we have enough letters from where 'BOMB' is to now say 'FINE'.

So now the strings are 'FINE' and 'BOM' - you just flip the pointers around to literally 'point' to the correct one

11

Newcomer's Board / Hacking vertical text to display horizontally

« on: February 16, 2012, 12:01:53 am »

The console in question is PC-Engine (Turbografx-16 in the US).

I have a game that is displaying both horizontal and vertical text. I've figured out the control codes and most of the pointers for both - sadly, I don't think the horizontal vs. vertical printing is determined via control code.
I'm aware I might have to delve into asm (a new thing for me) to figure it out, but any beginner's tips for solving this kind of problem?

Ideally, I'd be replacing all instances/calls to creation of vertical text with the routine that prints horizontal text. The vertical text is stored in rom almost identically to the horizontal - I can point a vertical string to read a horizontal one and vice versa with minor formatting changes.

12

Newcomer's Board / Re: Script dumping/hex editing a table with a katakana switch?

« on: December 22, 2011, 01:05:06 am »

Okay, I seem to have made a little headway. Using two table files with switching seems to work with romjuice.

!5C
B1=ァ

Is in my kata.tbl

I put !5C in both of the tables and told romjuice to use hira.tbl and additionally use kata.tbl with -t. I still have a bunch of values unfinished (I tested with only one katakana for kicks) but

<$05>ァ<$B8><$BC><$AE><$DD><$3D><$B9><$DE><$B0><$D1>が<$3C><$CD><$C0>な<$3C>ひと<$00>こんにちは！

Is just what I expected.
Guess what was my first discovered relative string

Now I have to figure out how I could reinsert that switch. I know I might not need the katakana space but I'd like to know how to use it, maybe investigate if upper and lower case is possible here using that tile space.

13

Newcomer's Board / Script dumping/hex editing a table with a katakana switch?

« on: December 21, 2011, 11:41:48 pm »

Hi there, I'm almost done with a hiragana table for a game (through WindHex) and making steady progress.

I have a question before I start the katakana table.

My game uses control codes for special characters (dakuten and handakuten). For instance - B9= け while B9DE= げ
This is well and good and seems to work inside of a table.

The problem:
The control code '5C' seems to switch from hiragana to katakana, and then is used at the end of however many katakana again to switch it back.

Default behavior seems to start as hiragana. How can I teach my table to pick up on this control code? It uses (as far as I can tell) the same data values as hiragana, the switch just tells it to look at the katakana characters. For instance 44 44 44 will show up as 3 hiragana and 5C 44 44 5C 44 will show up as 2 katakana and a hiragana.

Or if I'm reaching a point where I should dump this portion of the script, how can I instruct the dumper to follow this switch? I don't want to split it into different files if it's not necessary. I hear Cartographer might be able to do this for me?

Thanks for any assistance!

14

News Submissions / Re: ROM Hacks: Final Fantasy V Sound Restoration

« on: October 30, 2011, 04:22:21 pm »

Is there any sort of color restoration project for this like there is for FFVI? Or does it need it?

15

Personal Projects / Re: Moon: Remix RPG Adventure PSX Translation

« on: October 22, 2011, 01:27:18 pm »

I could test it on my soft-mod ps2, I can load psx backups

This looks like an interesting project, looking forward to what comes of it!

16

Personal Projects / Re: Contra Hard Corps (U) & Probotector (E)

« on: August 23, 2011, 08:17:55 pm »

This is a great idea, I took to playing the japanese version solely because of the lifebar. Now I can have that and read the story segments!

Nice work.

17

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Brave Battle Saga - Legend of the Magic Warrior released!

« on: January 07, 2010, 04:05:02 pm »

I'm rather surprised with the quality of this for being a pirate...wow. The translation is great work as well

Just wanted to report that this works just fine on PSP using PicoDrive, v. 1.51.

18

Personal Projects / Re: Project: FF7 NES Upgrade

« on: March 19, 2009, 03:05:00 pm »

that is extremely impressive, I'm even more impressed with the documentation of it all. I'm sure the community will be able to help with the tunes because of this

great job.

I may have a go at working with this, if I get anything worthwhile I'll post it of course.

19

Personal Projects / Re: Hack Project: Mega Man Powered Down

« on: February 23, 2009, 01:15:00 am »

I'm sorry to say I don't think I can really help with the NSF side of things *yet* like I thought I could. (also with this confusion over what will work/what we know about MM5 music...just may be out of my scope sadly.) If you need any help with some midi/composition work though I'll be glad to help out

20

Personal Projects / Re: New Mega Man 5 hack: Mega Man Powered Down

« on: December 07, 2008, 03:00:38 am »

I have a lot of musical knowledge, love to remix (music major, done a lot of projects for people in Acid/ProTools) and I'm a huge fan of the megaman tunes. I'm quite familiar with the LittleSoundDJ tracker for gameboy, is there anything like that for famicom? I see a program falled FamiTracker - would you be able to use stuff made with that? Like, what would you need to insert in the Megaman 5 engine?

I'd love to try to help