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

[MartyX]

Can someone make a rom hack of the original Zelda 1 on Nes to have all the items and features like the open secrets from Zelda SP Living the Life of Luxury  so it can be played on an original NES?

[Q]

The Buck Rogers prototype seems to be missing some sound effects, almost all the music – aside from this song, which plays on every level – and might even be missing a level or two.  I'm sure there's far more differences, but I'm not really sure what those might be, since I haven't played through any version of Jim Power.

Ah, if that's the case, hopefully someone will fix Jim Power up eventually. I've never gotten that far into it, but the gameplay style and Chris Hulsbeck music make it a nice companion to the Super Turrican games.

[John Enigma]

Hey guys. I want you to be real with me, because I don't want to write a topic post in here.

If you were to romhack Resident Evil 2 for the Nintendo 64, what exactly would you change? Like if you have a nitpick, or something that incredibly bothers you from the N64 port, what would you change that would make it almost like the original PSX version?*

*As long as it works under 64's hardware.

[KingMike]

Anyway, a little trace logging has revealed one key difference already: in the US version, when you lose health from an enemy attack, there are two extra instructions: one adds $20 to the amount you lose, and the other adds, er, nothing. Not sure why they needed two ADCs in a row when the latter adds zero, but there you have it. A simple way to increase difficulty: add $20 to any health decrease, while keeping your health the same. I'm sure I'll find more complicated changes.

16-bit addition maybe?
As the NES can only do 8 bits at a time, you need to do an add on the low byte and then ADC 0 to the high byte (so it effectively adds the carry bit).

Well, the two things mechanics negatively added to NES Zelda II are WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS USE FIRE and GAME OVER RETURN OF GANNON.

[treos]

MMX boss music replacement... Dragon Ball Super - Ultimate Battle (Mega Man X Remix)(Free Download): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTtYIWc0Qhg

[Recca]

Another Streets of Rage 2 idea that might be worth adding to the list: A Star Wars hack which features Luke, Han Solo, Leia and Chewbacca (or Obi-Wan) as the four playable characters. Mr. X could be replaced with Emperor Palpatine and Shiva could be Darth Vader. The rest of the bosses could be replaced with other various antagonists. Ordinary enemies could then be replaced by stormtroopers and droids. It would be interesting to change the backgrounds and music as well to match the series tone, but that would probably be too much work. Either way, it would still be an interesting idea for a Star Wars romhack.

[Psyklax]

That already exists. https://www.romhacking.net/translations/1554/

Hot damn, you registered just to tell me that. Thanks, I suppose I should've checked the Translations section instead of just the Hacks section. It's a little different to what I have planned though: I was more focused on modifying the US version to make it fair like the Japanese version, rather than just translating the Japanese version (though that has merit, too). I still think it'd be worthwhile.

[SCD]

Luigi's Mansion (GameCube): A hack that will add Mirror Mode from the European version to the American version.

Mega Bomberman (Sega Genesis): A color hack that will make it look more like its PC-Engine counterpart.

Metroid (NES): A hack that will restore Samus's unused left/right sprites for both suit & suitless versions of her: https://tcrf.net/Metroid#Unique_Left.2FRight_Sprites

Nightmare Creatures (Sony PlayStation): A hack that will turn off the adrenaline meter.

Sonic Adventure DX (GameCube): A hack that will do all this to it:

Edit all the textures to make everything not plastic looking.
Restore the missing Dreamcast textures.
Restore the Cowgirl billboard from the original Japanese Dreamcast port.
Fix most of the bugs & glitches.

Splatterhouse 3 (Sega Genesis): A hack that will restore the original button layout for the special moves from the Japanese version.

[PresidentLeever]

Mega Bomberman (Sega Genesis): A color hack that will make it look more like its PC-Engine counterpart.

An improvement is doable there, just not sure how much since the PCE is more flexible with its sub palettes. I did this quick mockup based on the PCE version, reducing the colors from 64 to 52 without much of a loss.


PCE / MD - There's a slight unintended difference in some tones due to emulator differences, they should have the same default palette. 

MD original:

[KingMike]

Mega Bomberman (Sega Genesis): A color hack that will make it look more like its PC-Engine counterpart.

Not sure how much that is doable considering Genesis has a 9-bit palette (512 colors) and PCE has 15-bit (32768).

[PresidentLeever]

They both used a 9-bit palette.

[#]

-

[PresidentLeever]

Cool. Comparing them on youtube, the MD game is actually brighter than in that screenshot, but various colors and shading detail is lost, plus animation here and there as well, such as for the rivers and waterfalls.

December 29, 2018, 05:18:38 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Batman & Robin (MD & MCD)
-A Batman Returns style mashup of these two, that is a mix of driving and run 'n gun/platformer levels, with a rebalanced difficulty and quicker pacing would be awesome. Icing on the cake would be a redbook remaster of the MD techno soundtrack by Kyd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5ebpKFC0hI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR0MWpOK1RU

I suppose you'd have to cut out the fmv to make it more coherent though.

[Poppler]

- A patch to have the Streets of Rage 3 title screen fron the western reelase, applied to the japanese rom. There's already a great translation of the game but, unfortunately, it has the japanese title screen. It's maybe not a very important thing but it of doesn't feel right at all.

- A patch for to convert Super Ghouls'n Ghosts PAL to 60hz (also, uncensored an with less slowdown, like that patch for the US rom). I read somewhere that the PAL release, has less slowdown, and also a more fair difficulty level.

[Foffy]

This idea/request is probably very technical, and I imagine for a game probably known most through Super Smash Bros, it's probably niche in general.

I was curious if a hack could be done to the game Slide Adventure MAGKID for the Nintendo DS. The hack would be more to actually make it playable. What do I mean by that?

For those unaware, Slide Adventure MAGKID was a Nintendo DS game that required the use of the DS's second cart slot, as you were required to put in a peripheral for an optical mouse in order to play the game. This device allowed the system to act as an actual mouse like the one you use on PCs, and this was used to navigate the magnetic character around the screen. For an example of how the game works, here's a video.

Now, in the current environment, this produces a few problems. First, if you ever wanted to play this game, you're stuck on pre-DSi hardware, so we're talking decade old machines are the only way to play this. Second, as this peripheral was used for one game - this one - there's been little to no interest in actually emulating this device for any DS emulator, which means this has also closed off the window of even being fan translated; after all, if the game won't even boot without the device, how can you put it into another language.

So, my question was more an inquiry into something perhaps a bit deep and complicated. First, how difficult would it be to bypass the peripheral check? Starting the game without the optical mouse doesn't even let you see a title screen. Second, how difficult would it be to remap the input from the optical device to something like the d-pad or touch screen? There have been a few DS games that got hacks to remove the touch screen controls to other means, and I would imagine if the games check could be circumvented, and something like this introduced, you can essentially get a game that's unplayable today for most people and have it be playable, and potentially have that be a start for potential fan translations down the road. It seems a lot of these Japan-only games that have winks and nods in Smash seem to be of interest to people, enough so that they eventually get hacked and translated by fans, and I would imagine the fact the game checks for a peripheral and only works on 10+-year-old handhelds is enough to stop any momentum or interest dead in the water.

[FormulaFanboy]

Does anyone know if a Mario editor for the NES would be possible? Not like SMButil or anything, but native to the rom, like Nuts & Milk or Wrecking Crew. Even if it only has a few blocks and enemies, and no scrolling. I think it'd be awesome to have a 'Mario Maker' on the NES.

[KingMike]

The ROM itself has almost no free space.
I suppose maybe with a mapper hack and SRAM it might be possible to store a level to SRAM.

[denshousha]

Dumb idea, but has anyone thought to do an MSU audio version of Hong Kong 97 with the full song instead of that one annoying loop?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is_Z2K7guKs

[FAST6191]

This idea/request is probably very technical, and I imagine for a game probably known most through Super Smash Bros, it's probably niche in general.

I was curious if a hack could be done to the game Slide Adventure MAGKID for the Nintendo DS. The hack would be more to actually make it playable. What do I mean by that?

For those unaware, Slide Adventure MAGKID was a Nintendo DS game that required the use of the DS's second cart slot, as you were required to put in a peripheral for an optical mouse in order to play the game. This device allowed the system to act as an actual mouse like the one you use on PCs, and this was used to navigate the magnetic character around the screen. For an example of how the game works, here's a video.

Now, in the current environment, this produces a few problems. First, if you ever wanted to play this game, you're stuck on pre-DSi hardware, so we're talking decade old machines are the only way to play this. Second, as this peripheral was used for one game - this one - there's been little to no interest in actually emulating this device for any DS emulator, which means this has also closed off the window of even being fan translated; after all, if the game won't even boot without the device, how can you put it into another language.

So, my question was more an inquiry into something perhaps a bit deep and complicated. First, how difficult would it be to bypass the peripheral check? Starting the game without the optical mouse doesn't even let you see a title screen. Second, how difficult would it be to remap the input from the optical device to something like the d-pad or touch screen? There have been a few DS games that got hacks to remove the touch screen controls to other means, and I would imagine if the games check could be circumvented, and something like this introduced, you can essentially get a game that's unplayable today for most people and have it be playable, and potentially have that be a start for potential fan translations down the road. It seems a lot of these Japan-only games that have winks and nods in Smash seem to be of interest to people, enough so that they eventually get hacked and translated by fans, and I would imagine the fact the game checks for a peripheral and only works on 10+-year-old handhelds is enough to stop any momentum or interest dead in the water.

Hmm, despite weird and wonderful things DS very much being a thing I do I had no idea about that one. Also don't be so doom and gloom -- the DS had a massive hacking scene when it was active and it has continued on to this day.


Anyway two main approaches.

1) Like the pokemon typing game, here the keyboard was emulated via a network connection (simple netcat raw port affair).
https://gbatemp.net/threads/release-game-hacking-for-learn-with-pokemon-typing-adventure.480825/
Latency might be an issue here though.

2) Similar to the guitar hero hacks, though these were buttons more than a mouse.

Coming the other way the taito paddle was hacked to support mario kart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml5ssGtASwY

The general idea, and most logical approach for the devs, is that the GBA save bus is a fairly basic when all is said and done http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbacartioportgpio

Bypassing the check should be nothing major -- it will just try to tickle whatever hardware it uses and if it does not get a response it will error out, just right at the start (so not even like some anti piracy that would trip in a late game minigame or something, and be obfuscated at that).

Redirecting to a touch screen or away from it is much the same affair. https://web.archive.org/web/20110604163902/http://crackerscrap.com:80/docs/sfchacktut.html being a choice link in that case.

[#]

This idea/request is probably very technical, and I imagine for a game probably known most through Super Smash Bros, it's probably niche in general.

I was curious if a hack could be done to the game Slide Adventure MAGKID for the Nintendo DS. The hack would be more to actually make it playable. What do I mean by that?

For those unaware, Slide Adventure MAGKID was a Nintendo DS game that required the use of the DS's second cart slot, as you were required to put in a peripheral for an optical mouse in order to play the game. This device allowed the system to act as an actual mouse like the one you use on PCs, and this was used to navigate the magnetic character around the screen. For an example of how the game works, here's a video.

Now, in the current environment, this produces a few problems. First, if you ever wanted to play this game, you're stuck on pre-DSi hardware, so we're talking decade old machines are the only way to play this. Second, as this peripheral was used for one game - this one - there's been little to no interest in actually emulating this device for any DS emulator, which means this has also closed off the window of even being fan translated; after all, if the game won't even boot without the device, how can you put it into another language.

So, my question was more an inquiry into something perhaps a bit deep and complicated. First, how difficult would it be to bypass the peripheral check? Starting the game without the optical mouse doesn't even let you see a title screen. Second, how difficult would it be to remap the input from the optical device to something like the d-pad or touch screen? There have been a few DS games that got hacks to remove the touch screen controls to other means, and I would imagine if the games check could be circumvented, and something like this introduced, you can essentially get a game that's unplayable today for most people and have it be playable, and potentially have that be a start for potential fan translations down the road. It seems a lot of these Japan-only games that have winks and nods in Smash seem to be of interest to people, enough so that they eventually get hacked and translated by fans, and I would imagine the fact the game checks for a peripheral and only works on 10+-year-old handhelds is enough to stop any momentum or interest dead in the water.

I'd say it would be about as easy and as much work as just properly emulating the actual peripheral. It shouldn't be that complicated for anyone with some experience working on emulating peripherals.

This game and peripheral would work on a western DS too right? IIRC the system is region free. It might be worth importing. Then I could take a look at the emulation as well. If it's not too much work I might even consider translating it.