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

[Psyklax]

Is it possible to do a port (of sorts) of Golden Axe to the SNES?
How troublesome would it be?

Um, you'd have to make it. Just like any other game. Doesn't really matter if it's a port or a totally original game (though you could import the graphics of course). The SNES has a totally different system to either the Genesis or the arcade original, so you'd need a few programmers to do it practically from scratch.

If systems share CPUs then it's a lot easier - not EASY but easier. Porting NES to TG16, porting MSX to Master System... but the SNES is a different beast.

[rocklite]

Mega Man X 1,2 & 3 = Change dash button default to R button.
Mega Man VII = Add vs mode option to menu

[Tsukiyomaru0]

Idea for a SMB2 hack: Jack Bros Mementos Adventure.
Basically a SMT twist to Super Mario Bros 2, characters gets replaced, the veggies becomes projectiles instead of being your weapon, high jump replaced by double jump, maps redesigned to not need digging, blocks that would require bomb will instead be destroyed by the characters' ability. The order, replacement and abilities are:

• Mario replaced by Jack Frost - Bufu - Shoots an icicle in a straight line, damages and freezes an enemy on death, locking them in place to be used as a platform for a moment before shattering into nothingness. Only shoots up to 8 tiles far and only one icicle can be on screen at a time.
• Luigi replaced by Pyro Jack - Agi - Tosses a fireball in SMB1/SMB3 style, which ignites and sits in place after an impact, working similar to Holy Water from Castlevania at this point. Up to three fireballs or flames can be on screen at any moment.
• Toad replaced by Demonee-ho - Machine Gun and Demonee-ho Suit - Shoots fast projectiles (think Contra) from his gun. Starts of with extra hitpoints and doesn't get knocked back.
• Peach replaced by Frost Ace - Explosive Fist and Ice Vest - A 4 tiles range punch that causes a comic book-styled "BAM!" or "BIFF!" explosion (maybe a "HEE-HO!"), deals the heaviest damage of all four, said punch can be charged to result in a 8 tiles dash punch. The Ice Vest grants him two "armor points", after which he becomes a normal Jack Frost until he dies.

Enemies and bosses from the Sub-Con/Mementos are turned into various SMT Demons, and as you can guess the Sub-con turns into a world similar to the Palaces of Persona 5. The story could be that four Jack Bros united to confront the "Great" King Frost, who has been making everyone's life a living hell for some reason. And said reason showed when they tried to overthrow him: Black Frost managed to turn into King Black Frost, imprisoning King Frost himself in a huge bottle behind the throne room. Afterwards, they are thrown into the depths of Mementos, from which they will need to escape and ascend if they hope to face off King Black Frost, bring their fair King Frost back to ruling their Palace and return Mementos to its "peaceful" state.

[DaGuiJun]

Artistic skill and vision is more important. The programmers would then receive ideas and realise them with programming skill and of course they shall be allotted programming credit after initiator credit.

I have been reading the site and I am very disappointed with the ideas that are being born and/or actualised. Up until now when I thought some ideas would evolve and become reality, they actually don't, so I take it upon myself to give them to the commune.

1) Rockman/Megaman 5/7/8 mega buster activated for Rockman/Megaman 1/2/3 (nes). 6 sucks, and I thought fan-devolve 7 and 8 looked nice other than 5. 6 is too small. 
2) Hyper Fighting version SFIIHF Chun Li available in SFIIWW (snes). I would like her fireball to be qcf (it is easy for keyboard but less annoying).
3) Street Fighter Alpha 2 Chun Li costume available for Street Fighter Alpha.
4) Phantom Fighter damage hack for Quanqi/Kenchi so that I can play the game like a true Chinese ghostbuster don't have to collect ancient Chinese scrolls and go into a sub-standard kalate room to "learn" better moves.
4)a)Phantom Fighter text translations from "Kenchi", "Kyonshies", "touten" into Chinese hanyu pinyin names. I don't like these Japanese derivatives. Change the kalate questions (even though by then entrance is not even necessary) from #1 Samurais come from Japan #2 No. of stars in US frag #3 Confucianism is student of Confucius to random or silly questions 'n answers about Us/Jp. The Japs put themselves first, their Gringo maksters second, and despite the Chinese theme, put us at third.
5) Warriors of Fate should have "Kuanti", "Portos", "Abaka" etc changed to Hanyu Pinyin "Zhuge Liang" "Guan Yu" "Wei Yan" respectively. It is about the Han Dynasty, not the Yuan Dynasty. It is also good to remove the round clear Jap voices after the wins. 

[DaGuiJun]

I would prefer Final Fight for the Sega Mega Drive. Super Double Dragon? Bleh.

Is it possible to do a port (of sorts) of Golden Axe to the SNES?
How troublesome would it be?

[FAST6191]

I see it a fair bit around here but I really don't get the desire to port between similar era (or one generation either way) devices where none of the things in question are anything close to current.

Want to have a source level recreation of your favourite game, no matter how obscure? Say no more. I hope to one day see your work on http://osgameclones.com/ .
Want to port your favourite game from the previous go around to the current generation, especially handheld? I would prefer a source level one but carry on, if your device also necessitates low level development then so it goes.
Got a split generation game (or a split device game when such a thing actually mattered) and want to swap around features, bug fixes and progressions? Many things here can be done well within reason and provide a nice little boost to the world.

I want a 16 bit game ported to another 16 bit console despite all of them being emulated easily on devices, portable ones no less, which have been around for over a decade and it is not like we are in a universe where technology goes backwards in capabilities or price. Why? Do you really think it is a good use of resources?

[Psyklax]

I want a 16 bit game ported to another 16 bit console despite all of them being emulated easily on devices, portable ones no less, which have been around for over a decade and it is not like we are in a universe where technology goes backwards in capabilities or price. Why? Do you really think it is a good use of resources?

But that's what the Hack Ideas thread is all about: people with no clue about programming say "I want someone to do this incredibly niche thing for me that only I am interested in". I must say it's rare that someone mentions something that would actually be useful or interesting and would appeal to a wide audience.

[IAmCaptPlanet]

this would be a dream game of mine, if only i were smart enough to hack

put the Zelda Oracle games on one rom, call it Dual Oracles or something

make it a Advance rom, and somehow utilize the "L and R" buttons to add extra item slots

have it where you choose which game you want to start first and be able to do the password link thing at the end by just continuing

also, utilize the great tools already available for the games (GBA mode, GBC colors, and VWF) (well add a VWF for OoS, too)

i'd love to layout for Wii emulators where Y-Sword, B and X are items, and A-Lift/Talk

this would make replaying these SOOOO much better, i just replayed ALttP and the item changing didnt grate on me nearly as bad as the Oracles (the L and R item swapping patch helped though) dont get me wrong, a hack adding another item slot to ALttP would be cool, but it would be much more helpful for the Oracles

[DrDimension]

Here's a good idea -

In Super R-Type, make the player respawn at the start of the boss battle if they die while fighting said boss.

That alone should be enough to make R-Type fun rather than frustrating!

I wonder how hard it would be to do this?

[KingMike]

this would be a dream game of mine, if only i were smart enough to hack

put the Zelda Oracle games on one rom, call it Dual Oracles or something

make it a Advance rom, and somehow utilize the "L and R" buttons to add extra item slots

You can't just hack a GBC game to operate in GBA mode (allowing L and R to be used), you'd have to rewrite the entire game as a GBA game.
All the "GBA" bit does is tell the game it's running on a GBA, but it's still running within GBC hardware. (from what I've been told, GBA/GBASP/GBP all have two different CPUs for the two different GB systems and can't be swapped by software, and that only one CPU is activated, by a tiny switch physically pressed by the cartridge casing.)

[IAmCaptPlanet]

hey, i never said it would be easy. just would be awesome

[FAST6191]

I feel bad even spinning this up in my head but I reckon you could take a copy of goomba color (the GB/GBC emulator for the GBA), have it stick the button presses for it in memory (it is GBA code at this point after all). If your button presses are in memory then a basic addition to the vblank routine could tease it out. Said emulator has multirom support and I figure you could do some save sharing wizardry.


an emulator specific/custom emulator hack for a handheld... new low.

Slightly less cringeworthy. Rebind said things to select and start and then in an emulator on the GBA map so it is more useable. Obviously whatever is on select and start needs to be bound to a combo or something

[foiopaulo]

I would prefer Final Fight for the Sega Mega Drive. Super Double Dragon? Bleh.

That would be dope, too.
Also, on Final Fight for SNES: how hard would it be to do a hack where you can choose between Guy, Cody and Haggar (mashing together Final Fight and Final Fight Guy)?

[IAmCaptPlanet]

I feel bad even spinning this up in my head but I reckon you could take a copy of goomba color (the GB/GBC emulator for the GBA), have it stick the button presses for it in memory (it is GBA code at this point after all). If your button presses are in memory then a basic addition to the vblank routine could tease it out. Said emulator has multirom support and I figure you could do some save sharing wizardry.


an emulator specific/custom emulator hack for a handheld... new low.

Slightly less cringeworthy. Rebind said things to select and start and then in an emulator on the GBA map so it is more useable. Obviously whatever is on select and start needs to be bound to a combo or something

i don't know exactly what you mean by that? if it would improve the gamers playability it would be worth it. but i would like to have it on my VBAGX on my Wii with the same controls i used for ALttP, that would be DOPE AF

that second thing has me interested, but my thought (no idea about this btw) is that there were some gameboy games, that when plugged into a SuperGameBoy in a SNES, added the use of the whole SNES controller. now i know GBC games won't even play in a SuperGameBoy, but it might be worth looking into.

maybe add a dimension of gameplay, heretofore unseen!

[SleepyFist]

Dark Cloud, balance it,
also put in some texture work to make it easier on the eyes and fix the Flapping Duster and Shopkeeper bugs,
it's likely nowhere near pushing the PS2s actual limitations and is ripe for improvement across the board.

[FAST6191]

i don't know exactly what you mean by that? if it would improve the gamers playability it would be worth it. but i would like to have it on my VBAGX on my Wii with the same controls i used for ALttP, that would be DOPE AF

that second thing has me interested, but my thought (no idea about this btw) is that there were some gameboy games, that when plugged into a SuperGameBoy in a SNES, added the use of the whole SNES controller. now i know GBC games won't even play in a SuperGameBoy, but it might be worth looking into.

maybe add a dimension of gameplay, heretofore unseen!

Generally emulator specific hacks and hacks which require custom emulators to be made are frowned upon around here as you start making a maintenance nightmare, forcing people to use specific things and maybe not having it work on other systems (N64 emulator for your new device? Good luck playing all those texture hacks on it). If it is not even for a common platform like the PC then that is even worse, granted the GBA is emulated on just about everything and the resulting ROM/patch/contrivance would likely work on anything that plays GBA games.
Before messing with goomba color though it might be worth trying to make a lua script (here is the lua listings for the NES emulator fceux http://www.fceux.com/web/help/fceux.html?LuaScripting.html which is what most get measured against, or copy the) but I am not especially familiar with the GB/GBC offerings here.

I could see doing the SGB thing for normal GB games but with through and through GBC titles like these then not so much. A while back around here we saw a thread where some people went as far as making proof of concept versions of GBC games rendered as GB ones (nowhere near useable, lots of crashing and graphical glitches).

[IAmCaptPlanet]

well this request is a lot more feasable and if anyone knows any other titles that would benefit from this please add them

Shantae, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Secrets all have bonus content in the form of "GBA mode" well, the colors get pale and hideous when in this mode. and the great hackers on this very site have graced us with patches that alleviate all these problems

except for one. the game "Wendy Every Witch Way" also has bonus "GBA content" on it, but there is no patch to "force" "GBA mode" for it

as far as i can tell, the patch would be almost (almost) useless to anyone who emulates on their PC, as you can tell VBA to play in GBC or GBA mode (and unlike the other games, as far as i can tell, the palette is the same for both modes)

but i game mainly on my Wii and VBAGX just wants to see it as a GBC game and ONLY a GBC game.

i assume this patch would be appreciated (one MAY already exist somewhere in the great WWW jungle, but i haven't found it) and i assume, pretty easy to make,

it was also made by WayForward (very under-rated developer) and is a bit of a (if somewhat shallow) GBC "hidden gem"

well, that would be ALL the games (that i know of) that were released on GBC that had GBA "enhancements" patched and availiable.

anyways, anybody wanna do this and submit it? oh, and does anyone else know of any more GBC games that have a little bonus or anything when played on a GBA?

[Kallisto]

So there was a good point made about the English or Japanese voice acting in the Tales of Games, specifically when it comes to the Tales games of old like Eternia. I think specifically the Battle Shouts for basic attacks should be entirely removed except for Special Attacks.

I never really liked that old trend in Tales games, shouting out battle quotes of a attack like a hundred times is ridiculous (Namco Bandai really should have done away with that already).

or

Alternatively replace the Battle Shouts with just grunt sounds (if the characters have any) this way it is way more bearable. At least the battle shouts for special attack is more bearable since you can't execute those like a bunch of times.

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[Chronosplit]

Speaking of that thread, for Star Ocean 2 it would be neat to make voices occur less often in battle.  Everyone has something to say with everything every time and it all happens at once, from the very beginning of a skirmish on.  It can get grating at times, especially with the english VAs.

[NES Boy]

I got an idea for a Super Metroid hack. This music track plays only once in the game, when you're about to fight the first Torizo. I suggest that the game should be hacked to have it play during the following moments:

• In Dragon's introduction, while the Evirs are flying around before Draygon himself appears.
• During the Golden Torizo's initial appearance, ala the first Torizo.
• Ridley's introduction in Norfair.