[bogaabogaa]

DemoHack IPS patch of the first stage available here: https://tinyurl.com/y5blh7kw
(You need to patch the USA verion of the game)

Spoiler:

About the team. Who works on the hack:

The First man and the head of the project is Garindann. He had the idea to make this Hack. He is working as a Artist, level-editor, writer and coordinator. He consulted me with some questions and I toke his whole hand and said I wanna be with on board for this project. As far as I know we share a lot of Ideas how we imagine a Castlevania game to be and so far we work very well together. I work as a Artist, level- and ASM-editor.

Hack Status:
The hack is in the very beginning. A lot of work went into finishing up the first stage. There been a lot of concepts and level Art made that we keep secret. It was impotent to me to have a Demo since it is a large project I would like to grow the team a bit. May be some custom music would be awesome. Or people with coding experience. So people that are interested can contact me.

What is this blog about?
We will share the progress and educate about possibility/tutorials. We will try to find some feedback and new ideas/inspiration here. Also Inspire people to hack SC4 or help with the project!


I will update this Post sometimes when we get some milestone. It will be the only Demo till the hack is done. I donno how long it will take but I can tell it will take more then two years to finish this with the current team.

[DavidtheIdeaMan]

Oh ho ho,now this looks interesting,also I think it would be awesome to have custom music in this romhack also custom enemies & bosses,just a suggestion.

[Morinis]

Awesome!  Going to be keeping an eye on this one 

[IcePenguin]

Wow!  This is really exciting, and I can't wait to see more.    Great job to the both of you!

[nanashi89]

No very often you see SNES ROM Hacks! Noice!

[Vanya]

Interesting! Nice work on the graphics so far.

[Garindann]

Thanks for the comments guys. At the moment the project goes little by little but without stopping.

[DavidtheIdeaMan]

Anytime & I hope you guys keep up the great work with this mod.

[CM30]

Well, it's looking good so far. As people have said, it's not often you see a ROM hack of Super Castlevania IV, especially not one that changes the graphics, levels, etc.

Here's hoping the final project will be great.

[bogaabogaa]

The first thing that went into rework was the intro text. I will post tutorial and resources I made on the SC4 maker blog and quote me here for the people interested in hacking resources.
 

Here you will find a TBL file you can load with winhex. It has some bookmarks on it that will make text-editing easy for SC4.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ha49v75j9qitgnd/TEXTonSC4.tbl?dl=0

[DavidtheIdeaMan]

Nice,keep it up.

[Q]

Sounds promising. I'll give the demo a shot later.

May be some custom music would be awesome.

You might already be aware of this, but there's an MSU-1 hack for Castlevania IV. If you can't find anyone capable of inserting music into the game, you could always just use the MSU-1 hack but replace the pcm files with new ones made from whatever songs you want to use.

[the_E_y_Es]

I'm playing the demo,

Spoiler:

the boss is kicking my ass

But I like what I see so far. Ofc the best part is I get to be a crusader against the forces of evil.

The text intro has a few problems (grammar, mostly). I'm sure the community will be happy to help in that regard. Here's my take:

Spoiler:

IN THE YEAR 1191

AFTER THE END OF THETHIRD
CRUSADE A DARK POWER
 HAS AWAKENED
IN THE CARPATHIANS.


THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR
HAVE BEEN SENT
TO PUT AN END TO

THE HERETICAL FORCES
THAT RAVAGE THE REGION.
BERNARD BELMONT IS SENT
ON A SECRET MISSION
BECAUSE THERE ARE
RUMORS THAT THE LEADER

OF THE DARK FORCES
USES THE POWER OF BLOOD
AND HAS IN HIS HAND
A HOLY RELIC.

I hope I didn't add mistakes of my own in there.

I'm trying to think of a way to improve that first block of text. Not the word choice (it's great), but the formatting/placement of the words on the screen. Maybe something like...

Spoiler:

AFTER THE END OF THE
THIRD CRUSADE,
A DARK POWER HAS AWAKENED
IN THE CARPATHIANS.

I really don't know, though. Does the game's font even have a comma character? Anyway, I hope this helps in some way. Keep up the great work!

[bogaabogaa]

.. the boss is kicking my ass..

The text intro has a few problems (grammar, mostly)..

.. Does the game's font even have a comma character? ..

- The bosses have double the health as in the Original but should not be a problem if the player is properly equip with Subweapons. Subweapons are buffed and
  stronger then the whip so they are all usefull now. (Beside of the stopwatch)

- The difficulty should match the original more or less. With some buff to some enemy to make them a bit more of a thread.

- This is not the character-set of the original Game and we can add and remove character as we please. I am very bad at grammar and typing or even wording things
  right so I am glad for input/help on the text. Here the new storyline.

Spoiler:

We are in the year
1192 of our Lord. The
great call that has been
the Third Crusade is over,
but a new  shadow grows
stalking humanity. 

At the top of the
Carpathian mountains
a mysterious castle has
appeared and dark  beings
are ravaging the region. 

On his return from the holy land, a
company of Knights
Templar has been called
to succor and face  the
heretical forces.
The villagers told
the knights that the master
of the castle uses the
power of blood with
an ancient relic.

After destroying
the evil beings who
assaulted the villagers
the knights managed to
besiege the fortress that
protects the access to
the castle. There was one
knight called RAYMOND
BELMONT. Equipped with
the family whip, it gathers all
its courage to face
an old threat.

.. just use the MSU-1 hack but replace the pcm files with new ones made from whatever songs you want to use.

It is a goal for me to get to the point, I could write a tutorial on how to insert BRR samples and SPC (track) files into the ROM. I will continue to consult people for help when I get to work on sound again. MSU-1 RAW PCM files are also not as easy to work with. In order to make them loop and be found by the game you have to use wav2msu command-line to set loops on the sample count or what not. So far I failed at it as I tried last time. I also think MSU-1 is painful for users since it is depended on file naming, folder structure and uses a lot of space.. I really would like to avoid it. But I am aware of it as a option.

I also think patching with IPS/xdelta is painful. I don't understand why a program like this can't check for common ROM type and have a option to remove the first $200 byte or else for other ROM type if needed. Sure it is a simple to use tool and great for hacking. But it is not consumer friendly for patching a ROM. Also there are programs like NSRT and XNESMapperprogram that do detection of some ROM and give information. I just wonder who had no need to explain the same thing over and over again to people? I am sure many did give up on it..

Progress:
So far I did find TMapEditor to edit not supported tilemaping in SC4ed. This tool is a bit if a pain to work with but does the job. I also did a cheep youtube tutorial on it.. But will write a better one with the needed resources to make editing for new SC4 hackers easier. The Mode7 Castlemap is still a problem. TMapEditor does understand mode7 tiles but not the tile-mapping for it! So both 32x32 maps are a hexedit job what is very painfull to work on.

[DavidtheIdeaMan]

That actually makes sense,I mean a great majority of the bosses of SCIV are super easy to beat so redoing the gameplay as close to the original games is a good move I mean that's what Castlevania is all about fun & hardcore gameplay & fun challenge,I hope you guys keep up the great work.

[TheLV]

Hi, are you working with original graphics? (stage/BG)

[bogaabogaa]

Hi, are you working with original graphics? (stage/BG)

This is a funny questions for a hack that does focus on asset changes. If you wonder how to edit graphics that are compressed. SC4ed has the option to expand the ROM and this will decompress GFX,tilemap,event,entrences,sound and other things to the expanded section. The tables are extended too and give you a lot of freedom when creating hacks. If you like to edit tiles I would recommend using Tile molester. I did create and share a resource file for it that is 1600 lines long with bookmarks of tiles/tile-map and palettes. The resource file  is getting updated as I work on things since I improve and add things as I go.

I also made notes of enemy health/damage tables and other things I found and added them to the Rom map folder I shared on SC4maker blog. The project does have no coder. I work on ASM as good I can but I did never write any "usable "code in my life.

[DavidtheIdeaMan]

Quick question,have you guys decided to add custom music or not,also what about custom enemies or bosses?

[bogaabogaa]

Quick question,have you guys decided to add custom music or not,also what about custom enemies or bosses?

Adding this kind of resource is not something I can just decide and do. We have very big interest to make it possible. As you can see the bosses are tweaked, re-skinned and moved to a other location. So are enemy. The main goal is to finish a great hack and do what we can. The blog should educate about what is possible. For example the original game does reuse a lot of tiles. I managed to allocate new space to the level for more artistic freedom. I was never able to tell if I would be able to do that and I don't understand that particular pointer very well as I show here.


  <sub>Here a example for lvl 1 pointer that will initiate DMA transfer.

  Table offset start PC ROM File $30924
  aaaaaabbccddeeffgghhiijjkkkk
  000000203dd7a900301d86a8ffff

  aaaaaa=??
  bb=??
  cc=??
  dd=??
  ee=??
  ff=??
  gg=??
  hh=??
  ii=dst size??
  jj=??
  kkkk=terminator,compressed flag??</sub>

As you see I had to do a lot of guess work but it was enough to edit it for more space and fix a bug with overlapping space in SC4ed.

The audio pointer been looked at by Redguy and Darksamus a view years ago and been way better understood.

ROM PC 0x3dcf3d


  _{Format: aa bb cccc dd:dddd
  $aa = Song audio data flag?
  $bb = ??
  $cccc = ARAM destination
  $dd:dddd = compressed data ROM location[/i]}

Moving this pointer will let you have a different Music for that stage.
I know that I will need to learn the SPC program a bit better to understand the location of BRR (compressed samples format of the SNES) and the tracker format/locations.

I am also on it to figure out NSF and I am further there since I understand the concept a bit better.. but still don't know how to set up a NSF to work in a CV1 or CV3 NSF programm what to port exactly. I also had like to make a central resource page for CV1 CV3 and SCV4 to share my information. Also with hope people who have better technical understanding will submit resources/tutorials for hacking. Also give artist a portal to share work to be used in a hack. I don't know of anybody that moved NSF tracker files to a CV1 or CV3 ROM beside of Optomon. There is a need for more active members badly. If you go to actual hacking pages like Metroid or SMW you will see it is all about resources that help people to build new hacks. So far the CV hacking community is to small to start building such a thing.

[DavidtheIdeaMan]

Hmmm I see.