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News Submissions / Re: ROM Hacks: Super Mario Land 2 DX released!

« on: March 07, 2018, 12:58:55 pm »

I'm a little late to the party, but I also would like to know how exactly this was achieved.

I would like to know as well. I might be wrong but I think the following has been done :
Rom has been expanded and 8x8 tiles have been relocated somewhere else to allow to have more space and add palette information (in order to display them in color). Shouldn't be to hard for level tiles because there is a 8x8 tiles pointer in level header that can be easily updated. Now this is only in theory, in practice there is probably lots of ASM hacks to make this work.

Now all that's left to colorize is Super Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3.

Totally agree. This was one of my favorite game when I was a child. I would like to see it in color as well. I like it so much that I made an level editor for it (go to my profile for more info).

I am dreaming of an emulator that would allow to colorize GB games in a simple way. Something like this : you pause the emulation, you see BG map / 8x8 tiles / sprites and you can put color directly on it (eg : flood fill or by replacing any 4 gray color by RGB color). Then you resume emulation and the tiles are automatically put in color based on the rules you selected (like to colorize tile only if surrounded by some other tiles). In the end everything can be saved to a single file that you can distribute easily on the forums or romhacking.net.

Sure, it wouln't work on real hardware like GBC. But at least you could play it on PC. And later someone could make a real rom hack and reuse your colors    

Actually this already exists (it's called GB Enhanced). But I find it cumbersome to use.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Super Mario Maker in the future

« on: January 28, 2017, 01:21:40 pm »

All we need now is a good debugger in CEMU, in order to understand Mario Maker level format and secrets

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Super Mario Maker in the future

« on: January 28, 2017, 10:35:01 am »

Now that we have a almost fully working WiiU emulator  (called CEMU) I took some time to take a look and understand how levels in Super Mario Maker are stored.

It turns out it a lot simpler than what I thought. A level is simply a list of objects, each having a list of common properties (type, size, position, ...)
This is somehow similar to how SMB3/SMW levels are stored.
Create a level, save it. Make a slight change (eg : add a tile) save it again. Compare each file with a hex editor and you will see what I mean.

I guess this might be a relatively easy task for someone to create a level editor fully compatible with Mario maker levels.
but why ? someone may ask (since Mario maker can already be emulated on PC) ? Well this might be fun, also it mean that you have full control over the thing, possibility to add new features, port it to other platforms etc...

Writing a simulator (that would also allow to play those levels) is something much more complex (near impossible?),  as it would require to emulate very accurately the game physics. Think about "press forward" or "don't move" levels.

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Personal Projects / Alone in the dark 1 - extracting room data - help needed!

« on: December 31, 2015, 12:53:26 pm »

PLEASE DELETE ME

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Super Mario Maker in the future

« on: October 13, 2015, 09:35:35 am »

@ Da_GPer. I didn't know that. This is great news, thanks for the info.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Super Mario Land 2 (GB) level format

« on: October 13, 2015, 03:08:14 am »

I'm also 99% sure its level data is stored in SRAM while playing the game, so that's a decent place to poke around in with a debugger.

Good idea. All blocks are dumped around C000-DFFF, as stated here : http://datacrystal.romhacking.net/wiki/Wario_Land:_Super_Mario_Land_3:RAM_map (that table was written by me some years ago btw  )

I took a look at moojelly code, and it is really a mess (although some interesting stuff can be found)

I was expecting someone to give a copy of the german document, but maybe it is forever lost.

EDIT : Found something interesting on this topic. I wish i would have found this before starting hacking WL / SML3.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Super Mario Land 2 (GB) level format

« on: October 11, 2015, 10:10:01 am »

Does anyone have information about internal level format used in this game (which is similar to SML3)

I remember there was some information on that page  (in german) but unfortunately it seems to be gone :
http://magicstone.de/rhwiki/article/Super_Mario_Land_2

I checked with wayback machine but no luck.

All I found is this :
http://raccoonsam.byethost8.com/?ckattempt=1

(which we should probably put on data crystal until it's gone forever as well)

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Super Mario Maker in the future

« on: October 11, 2015, 09:53:31 am »

As i suggested in some other topic, all we can hope is Wii U being hacked soon.

This would allow to understand how this game work (internal level format), and to dump some levels from Nintendo Servers.

In the future, the game could probably be played on a Wii U emulator (although this is not an easy task, I would not expect such an emulator before the next 5 - 10 years)

Or, if no Wii U emulator, writing a PC/MAC SMM simulator would allow to play those levels on modern hardware. Then we could enjoy these game levels forever.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas.

« on: October 03, 2015, 06:26:53 am »

One idea came to my mind regarding Super Mario Maker on WiiU :

This game is probably "nothing new" for most people in the rom hacking community, because we already have level editors for mario games since long time ago. However, it become quite popular and TONS of really good levels have been released so far.

I was wondering if it would be possible to extract/dump some of these levels (which are exchanged over the network between the WiiU and Nintendo servers). It is probably not easy because it is certainly encrypted/compressed. Once decrypted and level format is well know (like what have been done for NSMBW and reggie) writing a simulator/editor for the modern OSes would be then the next step (it should not be that difficult) so we could play that levels on a regular computer. Something similar might be done using a (future) WiiU emulator but my guess is we wont see one in a near future.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Looking for a PSX emulator that allow to "free look" around any 3D scene

« on: March 11, 2013, 06:28:40 pm »

@henke37 : moving in game camera (good for explorating level) will produce totally different result than changing emulator camera setup (good to see how culling/some effects are implemented).

@all : i think i have found a way to do what i want : psx plugin emulator here : http://www.pbernert.com/html/dev.htm is open source so i just need to found were opengl matrices are set before rendering and hack around.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Marioland 2 Full Colour WIP Some fixes already applied

« on: March 06, 2013, 06:47:30 pm »

dont know if it will help you but have a look here : http://magicstone.de/rhwiki/article/Super_Mario_Land_2

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Looking for a PSX emulator that allow to "free look" around any 3D scene

« on: March 04, 2013, 02:20:34 pm »

Hello,

I'm looking for a PSX emulator (or a 3D plugin for it, or just a method) that would allow me to freely look around a 3D scene when a game is playing.
I know one emulator that allow to do that, Dolphin emulator (Wii) : you just need to enable an option in settings and then press keys to move around. sometimes the game just crashes but some games allow to do it and this is pretty nice cause you can easily see how some stuff are implemented.

In the case of Dolphin, I guess it works by multiplying projection matrix just before rendering the whole stuff. For PSX, I could maybe locate where game buffer swap is done and multiply matrices  by myself but it seems a lot of pain, my psx hacking skills are pretty limited, and it will be specific to one game. Any advice ?

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: NES glitches that i dont understand

« on: January 17, 2013, 12:48:38 pm »

The NES defines maps with 8x8 tiles and 16x16 colour blocks.

i didn't know that 

thanks for the answers and info, its clear now.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / NES glitches that i dont understand

« on: January 17, 2013, 05:34:55 am »

When playing SMB3 on FCEUX, i noticed that the tiles near right border of the screen have always wrong palette :



Is it a emulator glitch / error, something specific to that game, or due to how nes hardware (PPU) works ?

I remember not having this problem when playing on a real TV, maybe its because this region is not visible ? (has it something to do with HBLANK?)

Also, something strange : setting 0xCF (mario vertical velocity) to 0x80 (-128) and 0xBD (horizontal velocity) to 0x7F (128) will make player "fly" to the right full speed. It will also force game to scroll level horizontally at maximum possible speed (higher than what is possible when playing game normally) and  most tiles will have wrong palette :



What i think is that tiles palette is set at a precise moment and if level is scrolled too fast that moment is "missed". Anyway, no matter scroll speed, tile indexes are always set correctly, why would palette be set separately than tiles indexes (PPU limitation) ?

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Personal Projects / Re: Alex Kidd HD

« on: January 14, 2013, 03:40:49 pm »

really good job as usual, the red balls really looks like sweet and candy 

also : i'm always surprised to see how the sandwich at end of level looks... it's a white triangle with a black square on it while in my child memory i remember something more tasty. before posting this I tought it was a emulator bug / glitch but in the end it's not. after some searching i found some arts (flyers, etc) that shows it's actually... a pile of rice ! (maybe not new for most of you but not for me):

http://www.jap-sai.com/Games/Alex_Kidd_Miracle_World/Alex_Kidd_Complete_Album_CD_A.jpg

i was able to find a screen with a version that looks like what i remember : http://s3.vidimg.popscreen.com/original/0/eDk3OGl2MTI=_o_sega-master-system-1986-alex-kidd.jpg

question : on youtube video you posted, text is in english so i suppose this version is NTSC-U version am i right ?  if so why is meal shown as rice and not as sandwich like (i suppose) PAL (european) version ?

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Programming / Re: Playing sound in GBDK

« on: January 08, 2013, 05:36:25 pm »

What do you mean by playing a sound ?

if it is a square wave (aka "biiip, twip, ...", something that sounds like traditional gb games) have a look at sound.c from gbdk example : http://gbdk.sourceforge.net/examples.html

if it is a sample (like a wav) : have a look at PlaySample() function : http://gbdk.sourceforge.net/doc/html/sample.h.html 

hope this help

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Personal Projects / Re: Alex Kidd HD

« on: January 08, 2013, 04:07:26 pm »

I just discovered heigboy emulator which give possilibity of recolorizing gb titles easily (by modifying palette of tiles). I tried it and it works fairly good.

Also, since C source is provided (both emulator AND color it utility) and it is clean and easy to read, i guess it would be a good starting point for anyone who want to make a tool similar to HiSMS but for gameboy.

For such tools a good idea would be to generate a file containing only checksums of original 8x8 tiles and the data of their corresponding new, bigger tiles. This way files could be distributed legally, since it would not contain any data from orginal rom, only checksums (this is how ColorIt works, but for palettes).

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Personal Projects / Re: Alex Kidd HD

« on: January 07, 2013, 02:21:10 pm »

That's just awesome. I'm really impressed by the results. Can't wait to get a playable version 

Also : i'm surprised to discover there is almost no project that have been done with HiSMS so far (it have been around since almost 4 years)... I didn't even know the existence of this tool before seeing this thread.

Is it because SMS was not a so popular console ? or because there is nobody that bother doing HD version of old games (too much work, etc)

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Personal Projects / Re: Zelda Minish Cap Level Editor

« on: January 03, 2013, 06:51:01 pm »

Nice project. did you plan to release any doc/information about how zelda rom store map information ? I search on the web and found nothing about that.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Super Mario Land 3 (Wario Land) RAM map

« on: January 01, 2013, 08:57:01 am »

done