Hello all! I've not really posted here before as Im a primarily a Tecmo Super Bowl rom hacker and as such use TecmoBowl.org for my project and notes. But I have been hacking roms since the late 90s including Tecmo Super Bowl (NES), Mega Man 3 (NES), Super Mario Bros (NES), & Final Fantasy IV (SNES).
One game I have always been interested in hacking is Wall Street Kid (NES). I find though that there is very little documentation regarding this game. So I have been playing around with the ROM and discovered some cool things that I think would help future rom hackers if they also want to hack Wall Street Kid.
I have several project ideas:
-Real Wall Street Kid: Updated with real Stock Names (replacing all fake stock names with their real world counterparts).
-Wall Street Kid 1989 DX: Update stock names, prices, information, etc. Basically a quality of life improvement of the original (which was released in 1990 but was based on the 1989 calendar).
-Crypto Kid 2020: Changing stocks to crypto, updating graphics to make things more 2020. This would be a major overhaul of graphics and data.
I also want to document all my findings as there just isnt that much info on this game and its a shame as this was one of my favs growing up.
Special thanks to Uncle Bling for his "Hacking Wall Street Kid (NES) Live!" YouTube video from Jan 2021 (
https://youtu.be/4K5VxoLDfok) along with Foone for his Wall Street Kid twitter thread from April 2020 (
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1254631357789036551). Both of these helped light this fire for me to push this project forward.
Thank you and I hope you find the information I post here useful. Thanks!!!
September 13, 2021, 01:10:37 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
HEX TABLE:
Wall Street Kid uses a unique table system to try and condense text length. To do this it basically has 2 different tables: one that is for standard characters, and one that adds a space after each character. Its kinda ingenious as this game has a LOAD of text and this lets us save some space in the ROM.
Here is the table I use with notes to indicate "unique" characters:
##00-49 are normal characters and just have 1 byte that it enters (the character it shows). I made the text characters lower case for these to show the difference between them and the ones that have spaces.##
00=0
01=1
02=2
03=3
04=4
05=5
06=6
07=7
08=8
09=9
0A=a
0B=b
0C=c
0D=d
0E=e
0F=f
10=g
11=h
12=i
13=j
14=k
15=l
16=m
17=n
18=o
19=p
1A=q
1B=r
1C=s
1D=t
1E=u
1F=v
20=w
21=x
22=y
23=z
24=(
25=)
26='
27="
29=,
2A=$
2B=!
2C=?
2D=-
2E=:
2F=_
30=.
31=/
32=}
33=<
34=>
35=%
36=&
49= {ONE SPACE}
##8A-FF use the same characters as above, but then places a SPACE after. So one hex adds 2 characters (the character shown and the space). I made the text characters CAP LETTERS so they can co-exist in the table with the Non-Spaced characters. For the symbols I have them as + just so I know its a special character with a space.##
8A=A {WITH SPACE AFTER}
8B=B {WITH SPACE AFTER}
8C=C {WITH SPACE AFTER}
8D=D {WITH SPACE AFTER}
8E=E {WITH SPACE AFTER}
8F=F {WITH SPACE AFTER}
90=G {WITH SPACE AFTER}
91=H {WITH SPACE AFTER}
92=I {WITH SPACE AFTER}
93=J {WITH SPACE AFTER}
94=K {WITH SPACE AFTER}
95=L {WITH SPACE AFTER}
96=M {WITH SPACE AFTER}
97=N {WITH SPACE AFTER}
98=O {WITH SPACE AFTER}
99=P {WITH SPACE AFTER}
9A=Q {WITH SPACE AFTER}
9B=R {WITH SPACE AFTER}
9C=S {WITH SPACE AFTER}
9D=T {WITH SPACE AFTER}
9E=U {WITH SPACE AFTER}
9F=V {WITH SPACE AFTER}
A0=W {WITH SPACE AFTER}
A1=X {WITH SPACE AFTER}
A2=Y {WITH SPACE AFTER}
A3=Z {WITH SPACE AFTER}
A9=+ {, WITH SPACE AFTER}
AA=+ {$ WITH SPACE AFTER}
AB=+ {! WITH SPACE AFTER}
AC=+ {? WITH SPACE AFTER}
AD=+ {- WITH SPACE AFTER}
AE=+ {: WITH SPACE AFTER}
AF=+ {_ WITH SPACE AFTER}
B0=+ {. WITH SPACE AFTER}
B1=+ {/ WITH SPACE AFTER}
B3=+ {< WITH SPACE AFTER}
B4=+ {> WITH SPACE AFTER}
B5=+ {% WITH SPACE AFTER}
B6=+ {& WITH SPACE AFTER}
FE=+ {LINE BREAK}
FF=+ {DOUBLE BLANK SPACE}
So text may look like this IN HEX EDITOR:
"atnt'SjusTdevelopeDaneWcommunicatioNnetworksysteMfoRcomputers+thatshoulDgeTthEstocksringing+ha+ha+ha!"
But the Text will look like this IN GAME:
"ATNT'S JUST DEVELOPED ANEW COMMUNICATION NETWORKSYSTEM FOR COMPUTERS.
THAT SHOULD GET THE STOCKSRINGING. HA! HA! HA!"
Topic: Wall Street Kid (NES) - Hacking Project & Notes (Read 998 times)