[zjunior]

Hi brothers! I'm a NES and Volleyball fan... I really like play 'Kings of the beach Volleyball' game, and others. But, Volleyball rules had a lot of change since 1998, so, all nes games is played with the old rules. Is it possible to hack some NES games and change some rules?

For example:
Now, teams scored a point on every rally (Rally Point System), regardless of which team served. Formerly, a team could only win a point if it served the ball. Winning the serve back from the opposition was known as a side-out.

Since 1998 the sets are played to 25 points, with the final set (fifth, when needed) being played to 15 points. A team must win a set by two points. There is no ceiling, so a set continues until one of the teams gains a two-point advantage. Previously, all sets were to 15 points, with the first four sets having a ceiling of 17 and the final set requiring at least a two-point winning advantage.

Is it possible? Is it too hard? If you could help, I appreciate it!

Sorry about my English.

Thank you brothers!

[#]

Welcome!

Yes, it is possible and it probably won't be too hard if you have some experience with hacking and assembly.

Do you want to learn how to do it yourself or are you looking for someone to do (most of) the hacking for you?

[Psyklax]

This is a really interesting topic: sports do change their rules, and it's been a long time since the 80s. If we take football/soccer as an example, in the early 90s a big rule change was that if you passed back to your own goalkeeper, he could no longer pick up the ball. There have been numerous changes to the offside rule, too. Of course, most football games were so far removed from normal football rules anyway that changing them would be futile.

I see the point with volleyball, though. For an experienced ROM hacker, it shouldn't be too big of a task. I might consider taking a look myself. I'm very busy though, so I'm not promising anything.

[FAST6191]

As was mentioned most of this should be plausible -- we have seen various hacks aim to make games happen in real time, able to score endlessly (think free play mode) and this should not be too far from such things.

My only concern is
"teams scored a point on every rally (Rally Point System), regardless of which team served. Formerly, a team could only win a point if it served the ball."
Easy enough to explain in words and from a game theory perspective. From a coding perspective I would fear that such a thing is a fundamentally different loop -- if I was going to code old school rules then that is almost a series of single games with opposing/"alternating" attack and defence which would I would probably code differently to one where serving is almost incidental or arbitrary. On the flip side as it is still an event that registers in the game then it should be easy enough to get it to add a point to the relevant team in the event of said side-out. Biggest problem in that case would be making sure the game checks the opposition scoring within a reasonable amount of time so you don't end up with them potentially getting all the points and the game not registering them as having won because they would not traditionally have scored, though again any checks on scores should be able to be doubled up easily enough. Indeed I would probably expect more trouble in changing any text or graphics to represent the new terms involved.
Of course this is just the way I would code things based upon what I know of coding and having a bit of a thing for optimising code. What a given NES programmer would have done however many decades ago could be a different matter.

[Cyneprepou4uk]

This task should be pretty easy to do. First of all you need to search in ram for addresses with points and winned sets for both teams, also a general sets counter and some indicator of who is currently serving. You can find those in fceux's hex editor. Do this and we will think about what to do next.

[peixemacaco]

On Super Monaco GP (Mega Drive/Sega Genesis) a simple hex search 09 06 04 03 02 01, and you find the older 80's F1 points rule.  So you can simply put 0A instead of 09 to be 10 as in old 90/2000 F1 points rule.   

But now that the 10th place get 1 point, we can't change this , of course, but if you want to change only 1st to 6th is ok...

Nelson