[Archived] Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas.

[Vanya]

Depending how the class promotion is handled that could be a very simple hack. The things to remember is the game counts on the lowered stats so you might also need to rebalance the enemy stats later in the game and check for the possibility of overflowing values.

That said, it would be a nice thing to see happen.

[FAST6191]

I never actually minded GB MM2 music, however we don't call me for music appreciation and SFX only works for me. I assume we are not lucky enough here to have it as a simple channel disable thing ( http://problemkaputt.de/pandocs.htm#soundcontroller )..

On Shining Force I actually quite liked the stat loss on promotion thing. Future growth vs immediate usefulness was a nice tradeoff.

[TheCape]

These two already exist as fan games for PC. Look for "Rockman 7 FC" and "Rockman 8 FC".

Thanks, I will check this out.

Still would like to emulate it on my console if possible, but this might be a good start.

[Vanya]

I'd love to see a massive hacking project that tries to port the Rockman FC games to NES.
It would definitely be a lot of work and concessions would have to be made.

[NES Boy]

I'd like to bring this back from earlier in this topic:

I can't believe no tried this project yet: replacing Luigi's, Peach's, Toad's, and Wario's voices in Mario Kart Super Circuit with their US MK64 voices. Even the "Congratulations!" voice should be replaced with the US MK64 version.

Here is a video comparing the voices of both versions of Mario Kart 64 to hear what I am talking about.

The Cutting Room Floor has a comparison for the "Congratulations!"

The hack should only apply to the US and European versions.

[TheCape]

I'd love to see a massive hacking project that tries to port the Rockman FC games to NES.
It would definitely be a lot of work and concessions would have to be made.

If that could be done (as well as MM9 and MM10) I would love to see a homebrew mash up of all the games into some manner of a marathon. Possibly use the Anniversary Collections for a base since they already have most of them?

[CM30]

Personally, I'd like to see a hack, game or something else use the item mechanics from Wario Land 4.  Where you could buy an item before a boss fight and blast the boss enough to knock out most of its health before the battle even begins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHWEBYSJOdk

God that was cool in the olden days.  Way better than today's super guides or cheats or what not.

[tabmok99]

I'd like to see a SNES hack that allows the use of the Super Scope weapon in the following games:
- Revolution X (which uses the mouse)
- Lethal Enforcers (which uses the Justifier)

I can't begin to imagine the difficulty in such a task (it could be relatively simple, for all I know).  For me, this would be a much improved way to play these games!

[Cryomancer]

How impossible would it be to make games display in new resolutions?  I'm thinking like say, Shantae for GBC with more visible screen area.  Or Metroid II.  Is this the kind of thing that can happen with LUA trickery or is it well into "remake the whole game" territory?

I suppose in the case of Shantae, most of the first game's enemies and whatnot now do have higher resolution assets in the second and third games.

[FAST6191]

Depends upon the game and the system it is running on.

For 3d games on actual 3d hardware the most common start would be 16:9 rendering if the game started life as 4:3. Such things have even been done on hardware (the wii and the gamecube for instance). Terms like viewport rendering then want to come in and make a good jumping off point for a search.

Resolution wise it has long been done with emulators, there is even a DS emulator doing it for its 3d with spectacular results.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/hi-resolution-ds-emulation.364549/

Textures look a bit iffy when you try upscaling, though such things are also not trivial for some systems as they can use odd ways of texturing,  but high resolution texture replacement (or even texture addition if raw model colours are used) is also a thing emulators do, shader fiddling is also possible but not so many have engaged in this as far as hacking goes, for PC games it is quite common.

Couple the three together and you can change the camera location, increase the apparent resolution/rendering resolution of models (maybe even subsurf it once or twice more) and change the textures.

Systems built around 2d, including UI elements of the 3d stuff above, find all this considerably harder if the game in question is not an interpreted one (SCUMM, ZZT... something you can edit really). Background layers can be higher resolution than the screen itself (1024x1024 backgrounds are seen in some modes on the DS which has a 256x192 screen, well two of them stacked up) and even beyond that many systems/games will tend to have one extra tile at least in VRAM. However animations, enemy logic, scripted events, game logic, pop in..... is often defined by this, indeed the viewport rendering stuff in 3d can have similar problems even it is far easier to attempt to solve (not the most obvious flaws compared to some games but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI1gHmgKmKo showcases a few).

To that end unless the 2d  game has some kind of zoom function you can abuse it is likely to be a crazy involved hack. Theoretically you could do some kind of enhanced border where you take a snapshot/savestate, move the camera/oam over by some, snapshot, repeat for the other directions and then staple that onto the original game that you have restored the savestate of. For some games it might work but you also might be triggering scripted events, enemies, something else entirely and then end up with some very odd looking. If you were playing a horror/psychological game then that would probably be a great effect actually (call it peripheral vision in an unsettled mind) but for most purposes it would be more of an enhanced border.

Edit. Forgot to mention that with higher resolution, or even in general, and 3d you can then sometimes also force the camera out further. Most camera forcing tends to be things like first person hacks or god view but the principle is the same. This sort of thing is probably obvious but I should mention it anyway.

[KingMike]

How impossible would it be to make games display in new resolutions?  I'm thinking like say, Shantae for GBC with more visible screen area.  Or Metroid II.  Is this the kind of thing that can happen with LUA trickery or is it well into "remake the whole game" territory?

I suppose in the case of Shantae, most of the first game's enemies and whatnot now do have higher resolution assets in the second and third games.

It would depend on the game, but usually they expect you to only be able to see part of the screen at a time.
So there could be glitched stuff on the offscreen area (like for example, Game Gear games technically use the Master System resolution but they expect only the center area of the screen will ever be see so they don't update the rest. Kind of a problem when people hack GG games to run on MS. Heck there were even NES games that EXPECTED overscan to hide parts of the screen that (in the days they were made, only in theory) COULD be seen), or games could only display sprites when they are within the expected boundaries (someone one posted an example when someone asked on another forum: Pokemon RSE. If you were to display the whole GBA tilemap at once, you'd see NPCs just suddenly appear and disappear as you walked)

[psp_revival]

No easy task this but would be cool to see the PC Engine Splatterhouse  Chrome hack applied to the mame rom.

[Recca]

I'm not sure if anyone here has mentioned this before, but it would be great to see a hack for the first Final Fight/Guy that adds a 2 player mode for the SNES. I know that the arcade version already supports two players, but it would be nice to see it for the SNES as well. Speaking of which, would it also be hard to combine the two games in one so that all three characters are playable (Haggar, Cody and Guy) like in the arcade version? And while we're at it, also take away the censorship from the US version as well (such as the edited enemy sprites)?

[KingMike]

Making all three characters playable, possibly.
Two-player mode? Perhaps less so, possibly memory or sprite limitations (I play ocassionally but I'm not a huge fan, so I don't know for sure but I hear the SNES already had fewer enemies on screen than the arcade which does suggest the sprite issue).

[Thanatos-Zero]

Here now a humourous idea for Zelda II: Link's adventure.
-How about to make Error glitch and flicker like he is some kind of flawed hologram?

[TRIFORCE89]

"The Legend of Link" is pretty damn impressive, adding in all those new items and mechanics.

Way beyond my skill set, but I think it would be nice if something similar could be done for Super Mario Bros.

Like adding in the items and enemies from Super Mario Bros. Special. http://www.mariowiki.com/Super_Mario_Bros._Special#New_Enemies


There are a couple of NES-style SMBS hacks floating about already that replicate the level layouts, but it would be nice to have the extra features too

[Vanya]

I'm not sure if anyone here has mentioned this before, but it would be great to see a hack for the first Final Fight/Guy that adds a 2 player mode for the SNES. I know that the arcade version already supports two players, but it would be nice to see it for the SNES as well. Speaking of which, would it also be hard to combine the two games in one so that all three characters are playable (Haggar, Cody and Guy) like in the arcade version? And while we're at it, also take away the censorship from the US version as well (such as the edited enemy sprites)?

One possibility with regards to having 2 players, since it might not be possible on the original as KingMike said, it could be worth while to hack Final Fight 3 instead.
It already has Haggar and Guy in it.
Dean could be a good base for recreating Cody and Lucia could be turned into a new Bonus character.
Plus, Final Fight 3 has a lot of interesting features none of the other games have.
I'm not sure if there are many comparable enemies in FF3 to the ones in FF1, but at the very least you do have reasonably similar bosses to work with.

[RRThielNC]

I've had tons of ideas for a Mega Man 2 hack. I would get a programmer to help me with it, but I don't know who I'd ask.

[Bahamut ZERO]

It'd be great to see a hack of Secret of Evermore that turned it into Back to the Future. Picture it: Marty McFly and Einstein are wondering around different time periods in the Delorean looking for Emmett Brown.  Fighting dinosaurs and Roman gladiators, Eventually finding doc and going to the future to beat the shit out of Biff.

The main character kind of already looks like Marty and could be recolored, and the evil scientist guy could be edited into Doc Brown. The music could stay the same, minus maybe the BttF theme thrown into the mix during some impotant bits.

The different time periods linked together they way they are in SoE could be the result of Biff fucking up things in the future, causing scattered timelines to merge together.

[MrSeguin]

Hello folks,

First sorry if there are some mistakes but English is not my mother tongue.
Second I would like to thanks all the guys that spend so much time for our future pleasure:)
Some patch-hack simply sometimes make a game so much better  to play,so much enjoyable....
Anyway I come to my request.
I'm playing NES games(and also msx1,gb,master system...) on...my GameBoyAdvance.Yes.Not the best way I know but so practical due to the real compact size:)So far ,even the screen is a bit "compressed" it doesn't bother me for most of the games but I have to say I have a big problem playing Contra(the translated Japanese version of course that is so much better !).
The basic bullet shoot are too small to be really seen on the GBA screen and of course you die even more than usually(maybe a good challenge for contra pro players
!)So my request is:
Can somebody make a hack (of the Japanese translated version)of the basic bullets to be a bit bigger or/and more easy to see on a GBA screen?
Thanks in advance for your futures answer:)