I wish I knew how to hack roms. Something I probably will never be able to do. But I wish I did just so I could modify one game. And that game is Quiz & Dragons. I bought this board years ago. I love the concept of the game. I just hate the trivia questions that they choose to use. I was hoping they were going to be 2nd Edition D&D questions since that's the Edition that was out at the time the game was made. To my disappointment, the questions were typical trivia questions. I have to wonder if it is possible to hack the roms and change the questions in the game. Has this been tried by anyone?
Two main approaches.
One. Classic text adventure/vtech toy style where you have to type the exact answer, or hope the spellong erreur handler of the time could manage things. If it is a simple matching algorithm then OK, if it is not then it starts going outside of beginner hacks.
Two. Multi guess test. If you are willing to have the same amount of questions and the same answer key (if this question is answer b then whatever the new one is will still be answer b sort of thing) then this could be as simple as basic text hacking.
Start wanting to add lots of questions or change answer keys and it gets far more tedious (though still usually within the realm of possibility as you are still doing exactly what the original game did).
Basic text hacking.
http://www.romhacking.net/start/ is there for a reason. Still it mostly amounts to did you ever make a secret code as a kid like a=1 b=2 c=3... because computers do mostly the same thing except with hexadecimal (0-9 then A-F to cover the 16 states of 4 binary numbers, though they will use two hex digits to give 256 characters which is more than enough for English). Said encoding scheme varies from game to game where most normal computers will use
http://www.asciitable.com/ (or unicode these days).
Computers also don't know how long text is most of the time as checking is tedious but having a number (think contents page of a book) not exactly how long it is saves effort for the program, even if it frustrates hackers (it is not like people change the game after it is shipped -- Read Only Memory and all that). The methods by which they note such things vary but still are basic enough. Alternatively for something like this you might even have fixed length sections, in which case don't go over the limit.
About the only other things to get in the way are compression, and graphics as text. Graphics as text is unlikely here (it tending to be reserved for small puzzle games or fancy graphics effects) and compression I have no idea about for arcade games of the time.
I have not played with arcade emulation in a while so no idea about them hashing ROMs first and only working with what they know (though from what I have seen from that world I can well believe it), however you can probably persuade a build somewhere to ignore that in some way or load it anyway.
I am mainly saying this because it sounds like one of those "teach a man to fish" moments. Where I might be tempted to just do something like a word replacement for someone (say to match the Japanese term, or a film it was based on or something) as it would be a one shot thing then here you would probably still get bored of the new ones after a while as you and your friends memorised the answer keys -- or at least that is what happened for every trivia game I have ever played.
Topic: Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas. (Read 1376978 times)