41

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Wonderswan - Klonoa: Moonlight Museum (WIP English hack)

« on: July 10, 2018, 09:58:24 pm »

Awesome, I'll have to throw this one on my 3DS.

IIRC, the WS emulator there runs decently.

42

Personal Projects / Re: Donkey Kong Country (GBA) Palette restoration

« on: July 03, 2018, 06:05:29 am »

That sounds pretty handy, if you could get it polished up.

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Personal Projects / Re: Donkey Kong Country (GBA) Palette restoration

« on: June 30, 2018, 05:11:54 pm »

After Rare reduced all sprites and tilesets, none of the palettes matched so I had to repalette it manually using Photoshop and a custom tool made exclusively for this.

Could you tell me more about this custom tool?

44

Personal Projects / Re: Super Mario Land 2 DX [Updated to v1.7]

« on: June 01, 2018, 12:24:51 am »

Have the dev docs been released for this yet?

45

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 =)

46

Personal Projects / Re: Dragon Warrior 1-3 DX

« on: April 07, 2018, 02:51:12 am »

I haven't played the GBC ports so I can't speak to those.

I'm extremely biased, but I think Nob's translations are great. ¬_¬

47

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Wolfenstein3D - SNES Uncut hack

« on: April 01, 2018, 01:15:19 am »

Here is the revised version: Download

Looks much better now =)

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Wolfenstein3D - SNES Uncut hack

« on: March 31, 2018, 01:46:27 am »

Actually, I think this hack does need some minor color changes added to it, because I discovered that three other enemies have different colors:

Mutant (Different Colored Uniform) Han Grosse (Greenish Hair) Trans Grosse (Different Colored Armored Suit) Ubermutant (Different Colored Uniform)

This was probably intentional. In the PC version, episode 2 has a lot of green walls and hanging vines, so they probably wanted the Mutants to stand out a little better.

My guess is that they just didnt care if its mirrored or not.
The original SNES textures also in the beta roms are without symbols. There was no direction required anyway.
I don't think this is about memory or other shortages of the system.
My theory is to open the map and just switch or force the tile into the correct direction and make it permanent.
There are propably control bits available.

I think you'll find that any faces that are pointed towards a certain axis will have mirrored textures on them. I know in Quake, it's -X and +Y.
March 31, 2018, 02:09:02 am - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)

I made a special version of Visual SAK for you, with extra buttons so you can check all Sprites (around 170):

I think your program needs a slight tweak, since extra pixels are getting drawn at the very bottom of each sprite. You can even see it in your screenshot, where some of his coat and skin are getting drawn at the bottom of his shadow.

Edit: I'm looking at the armor, comparing it to the original PC version, and it looks like at each run of compressed blank space, at the very beginning of the blank space, it's also duplicating the color that should be at the end of the space. And then that extra row at the bottom shouldn't even be there, it's saving the graphic as 64x65.

Funny that even one single pixel of blank space gets compressed =) Whoops.

49

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Wolfenstein3D - SNES Uncut hack

« on: March 24, 2018, 07:23:38 am »

There is however one problem with the Wall Tiles I saw already.
In the snes game the wall sprites are often mirrored for some reasons I dont know.

It was something that id changed in their engines. I know the Quake engine works that way, pretty sure the DOOM engine has it also, and the SNES/Mac/Jag/3DO Wolf3D is said to use a different BSP format that is closer to the DOOM engine.

The only purpose it serves, that I know of, is that it makes doors automatically mirrored on both sides. Perhaps its true purpose has something to do with speed optimizations, I have no idea.

Hmm, the Jaguar version doesn't have mirrored textures, though.

50

Personal Projects / Re: Harvest Moon: FoMT - Fixed Translation Project

« on: February 26, 2018, 08:20:25 am »

One worry I have is that I do not know much regarding More Friends of Mineral Town, the updated version for female players. Maybe the translation was fixed in that version.

I would be very surprised if that were the case. I have never played a Harvest Moon that didn't have a wacko translation, I just always expect it to be there.

I think my favorite is still the midwife from the first game (SNES), when she says "Congratulations! It's a girl! Please name him."

...needless to say, that baby got a unisex name ¬_¬

51

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

« on: February 01, 2018, 08:38:24 am »

I finally submitted this patch to the site. It's the same patch from above, but with SpiderDave's addendum from Reply #7 added in (and a proper readme file).

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3847/

52

Personal Projects / Re: Legend of Zelda - Blue-er Ring

« on: February 01, 2018, 08:33:39 am »

"Soon" ended up being over five months later, but I've finally got this up. It's the same as the version I released above, but I threw a readme file in with it, so there's no point in trying to update.

53

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Turning Super Castlevania IV Into An Interactive Music Video - Super Fresh CV

« on: January 30, 2018, 05:03:05 am »

Why do I not own this cassette tape?? This is the greatest music I have ever heard.

54

Personal Projects / Re: Castlevania AoS:Converse Castle

« on: January 03, 2018, 08:50:48 am »

I thought it was weird that HoD didn't have an inverted castle. There were plenty of rooms that had stairs on the ceiling and things like that.

55

Personal Projects / Re: Nemesis DX (Concept)

« on: December 31, 2017, 11:59:34 pm »

There's official colorizations on the European Konami GB Collections, but yours looks a bit cooler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j02VAy-_Gc

56

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Finding location of compressed data in Mario 64 Shindou Edition

« on: December 30, 2017, 11:45:11 pm »

Would it be easier to port the rumble feature over to the USA/EUR versions?

I guess it might not be so simple.

I finally got an Everdrive 64, and was playing this a bit, and it seems like there might be a few other additions as well. I'll have to double-check to be certain, but it seemed like the framerate was a lot smoother, and they refined the chasecam a bit.

57

Personal Projects / Re: Super Mario Land 2 DX (WIP)

« on: December 25, 2017, 03:32:31 am »

The countdown begins!

58

Personal Projects / Re: JRPGs: DoubleXP/DoubleGold

« on: December 24, 2017, 05:02:51 am »

I'll be doing the other FF SNES games before moving on (so FF5 and FF6, plus I suppose Final Fantasy Mystic Quest although I figure that's quite a different kind of game, and is supposed to be easier from what I've heard).

Yeah, Mystic Quest doesn't really have grinding, since there are no random encounters. Most monsters will be standing in your way on the map, so you have to decide if you want to fight them or not (whether they're guarding a treasure, or blocking your path forward). So once you kill them all, that's it, they never respawn.

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Personal Projects / Re: JRPGs: DoubleXP/DoubleGold

« on: December 17, 2017, 03:40:00 am »

I'm warming up to this idea, but I'm wondering if there aren't more games that already have patches or Game Genie codes for this type of thing.

EarthBound (NES) might be another good one, I know the GBA port has a patch that adds a "Double XP ring" that can be equipped.

What I would suggest? Besides your idea of doubling EXP/Gold, I would add an option menu, or button combination, to enable/disable random encounters. That way, you decide when grinding is worth it, and you can explore the world much faster with less interrumptions.

There are games like EarthBound (SNES) that did this well, where weaker monsters would run away from you and get defeated without even going to the battle screen, but I'm not sure if there's an easy solution for hacking pre-existing games.

I feel like being able to disable random encounters would be too much of a cheat. If you find yourself with only one party member left, you could just disable the encounters and run back to town, safe and sound. Or you could disable them and then start exploring areas that you shouldn't be high enough level to get to yet.


I think most people just deal with this type of situation by playing the games in an emulator that supports fast-forwarding.

60

Personal Projects / Re: Final Fantasy III English Translation for NES (FFIII: Refurbished)

« on: December 17, 2017, 02:45:30 am »

An excessively expensive option would be to use an Everdrive N8 cartridge, but even they only support up to 512KB for PRG (since no NES games used more than 512KB), so it is unlikely this is possible (anyone please correct me if I’m wrong; i.e. they’ve loaded the ROM onto their Everdrive N8 and tested it).

"Excessively expensive"? The EDN8 is actually one of the more affordable flash carts that Krikzz offers, especially when you consider the wealth of features it offers, and the huge library of titles. Compare that to what it would cost you to purchase some of those cartridges.

Unfortunately, MMC5 support on the EDN8 is rather poor, and few people have programmed alternate mappers, so that idea is out.