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

[timeisup]

Wonder Boy III: Monster's Lair (either Mega Drive or PC-Engine or better yet both!) - eliminated auto-scrolling screen and enable special weapons to last until you get another rather than last only a finite amount of time. This would make it feel more like a run n' gun game such as Contra rather than some auto-scroll arcade game. Also, choice to be either Leo or Princess Purapril from the start (or better yet, both simultaneously.)

Bikkurai Man (PC-Engine) - re-skin to restore it to the original Wonderboy in Monster Land (AKA Super Wonder Boy: Super Monster World)

Saiyukki World (Famicom) - same as above

Dragon's Curse / Adventure Island (Turbo Grafx / PC-Engine) - reskin to restore it to Wonder Boy III: Dragon's Trap (AKA Monster World II: Dragon No Wana)

Dynastic Hero (PC-Engine) - re-skin to restore to Wonderboy in Monster World (AKA Wonder Boy V: Monster World III)

Castlevania: Dracula X (AKA Akumajo Dracula XX) - either attempt to make it much more like the PC-Engine game as it was unfortunately inaccurately promoted to be a port of or just make it a more interesting pseudo-sequel. Level design and (most) of the backgrounds are so bland and uninspired and most of the difficulty is just from cheap cliffs conveniently behind you from enemy blow back, enemy spamming or both. (Then there is the horrendous entire level and a half you must keep the key without dying just to not get the bad ending.) Also, restore Maria, if possible and maybe add Annette as playable too.

Castlevania (NES) - adapt into Vampire Killer for the MSX2 (keep scrolling screen)

Super Mario All-Stars (SNES) - boot straight to Super Mario Bros. 2 which will be re-skinned to restore it to Doki Doki Panic (Famicom Disk System).

Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth (WiiWare) - hack to become either Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge and/or Castlevania Legends. Preferably the later as it could have used the Rebirth treatment, one of the worst CV's IMO.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (GCN) - hack to make it into a WiiWare style Rebirth of the classic Konami TMNT era.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) - I don't really know what would be the best game to use as a base, but I'd love to see a TMNT game based on the Turtles in Space and Search for Splinter story arcs from the 2003 cartoon (in turn based on TMNT #4-7 of the original 1984 comics). All the Shredder and Foot stuff get all the love but this would be great stuff IMO. Maybe a multiplayer beat em up like Turtles in Time would be better, but i always liked the search and find aspects of this game and it needs polished from its many glitches. Instead of just the 4 turtles, there could be patches to plays as Casey Jones, Fugitoid, Usage Yojimbo, Zog the Triceraton and perhaps Leatherhead too. A few fights from TMNT: Tournament Fighter could stand in for the Triceraton Games if possible.

[FAST6191]

Heeello, I was wondering if a patch for Lord of the Rings Conquest for the DS exist that switches the camera to more of a 3rd Person View rather then top down. I'm asking because in the back of the box, that I have here, shows the game being played in like a 3rd person view.

If it is a 3d game then possibly. The camera angle is determined in hardware and you can force it to be other things -- some people quite notably once attempted a first person pokemon hack. Granted said hack is a bit more radical than tweaking the angle a bit but it faced several problems with regards to draw distance, bounds and such, some of which might well apply here too.
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#ds3dvideo

If you can find where the camera angle is handled in this then you might well be able to tickle it with a cheat even, no full bore hacks or anything.

[#]

If it is a 3d game then possibly. The camera angle is determined in hardware and you can force it to be other things -- some people quite notably once attempted a first person pokemon hack. Granted said hack is a bit more radical than tweaking the angle a bit but it faced several problems with regards to draw distance, bounds and such, some of which might well apply here too.
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#ds3dvideo

If you can find where the camera angle is handled in this then you might well be able to tickle it with a cheat even, no full bore hacks or anything.

If the 3rd person view was in the game originally it might be restored with the draw distance etc. intact, but they likely removed it because of framerate issues. An emulator might be able to overclock to improve the framerate, but it would likely be slow on the original hardware.

[RetroGameFan]

Super Mario All-Stars (SNES) - boot straight to Super Mario Bros. 2 which will be re-skinned to restore it to Doki Doki Panic (Famicom Disk System).

I don't think so. Why would you want this to be transformed back into a non-Mario game? The Japanese FDS SMB2 (The Lost Levels) doesn't deserve to be an SMB2 because it's way too similar to the original SMB. That may be the actual reason why it wasn't originally released with the SMB2 title in the West.

But if someone does decide to do that request, good for you!

[timeisup]

Your sarcasm aside, I actually worked on a hack of the NES SMB2 to do just that with another person about 10 years ago. We didn't get too far, just swapped the spirtes and stopped Luigi/Mama's legs from kicking. The point is to give the enhancements from the NES and especially SNES adaptations to the FDS original, b/c there are others who do appreciate the original game. Besides, nothing is being transformed, it does nothing to the original SMB2 from All-Stars it will always be there.  There are quite a few hacks that did this, though like ours they are incomplete, so obviously the interest is there.  Thanks for your comments, I guess. 

[sil3nt_j]

Hack idea: Make a hack of NES Castlevania 2 with Ghost Rider

[TRIFORCE89]

Tecmo Super Bowl for SNES, but edited to use the teams and stats of its original NES release.

[Kallisto]

A Harder Mode for Final Fantasy 1 & 2 Anniversary Editions on PSP, the games have balance issues and the Bonus Dungeon difficulties don't exactly match up perfectly and especially the normal enemies which are significantly weaker than the bosses in those dungeons.

If possible it would be nice to a hack address that longstanding problem, so those games can be more definitive rather than being piss-poor easy (especially on normal mode).

[PRG]

Has there ever been a hack for Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga that adds in the quality of life additions from the Japanese version (heal blocks, coffee checklist, etc.)? Or maybe even put in the English script into the Japanese version?

[RetroGameFan]

Your sarcasm aside, I actually worked on a hack of the NES SMB2 to do just that with another person about 10 years ago. We didn't get too far, just swapped the spirtes and stopped Luigi/Mama's legs from kicking. The point is to give the enhancements from the NES and especially SNES adaptations to the FDS original, b/c there are others who do appreciate the original game. Besides, nothing is being transformed, it does nothing to the original SMB2 from All-Stars it will always be there.  There are quite a few hacks that did this, though like ours they are incomplete, so obviously the interest is there.  Thanks for your comments, I guess. 

I'm sorry I misjudged your first post. Other than that, OK, I suppose that will do.

Forgive me if my comments offended you, I didn't mean to do so. I'm just a novice when it comes to programming, especially hacking video games, so I don't understand much of the terminology associated with that.

[KingMike]

Has there ever been a hack for Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga that adds in the quality of life additions from the Japanese version (heal blocks, coffee checklist, etc.)? Or maybe even put in the English script into the Japanese version?

The article I read suggests that the US demo (aka Kiosk or NFR) version contains those.
I haven't looked at how exactly that version was limited compared to the retail version, but maybe a hack of that might be easier?

[timeisup]

I'm sorry I misjudged your first post. Other than that, OK, I suppose that will do.

Forgive me if my comments offended you, I didn't mean to do so. I'm just a novice when it comes to programming, especially hacking video games, so I don't understand much of the terminology associated with that.

All good.

[Anubis9596]

Hi, is anyone able to mod a timesplitters 2 or 3 gamecube iso and remove or greatly increase the map makers space limit plz, I've searched everywhere but nobody seems to have done this yet and i find this strange as im not the only person i know who hates to have a limit while creating maps on either game

[Xdegenerate]

Hey people.

I have a couple of ideas that i think might be a simple find, and 1 that might be challenging.

Double Dragon II - NES

1) Can someone maybe try to hack the annoying stages that have moving parts? If I play by controller I can pass these stages fine, but on a touchscreen, not so much (yes I know I can just use a Bluetooth controller, but I don't carry it wherever I am with my phone)

The levels like the moving train machine, just make it come out and stay there, not continually roll back and forth till you climb it.

The level with the two doors where you jump over the gap with the 4 convierbelt things.

Turn off the spinning bolts on that stage with the flying spike.

Turn off the bridge that's falling apart (maybe, it's not that hard to beat that bit lol)

Turn off those dropping 3 spiked things in that mission you go down the elevator.

======

Not so simple hack.

I suggested a few years ago if it was possible to give Billy/Jimmy the fireball/hadoken that the boss character clone uses. They said probably not. However I found a YouTube video where someone has accomplished it. It's titled "Double Dragon 2 hack" by  伊東美咲.

I contacted them and they said they only share it for $20us, per rom hack.

I think a better one can be made and shared for free. The nerve of selling rom hacks SMH

It's a glitchy hack, seems it tries to change the sprites to the boss character, but doesn't work too well, but the projectile does.

Be great if someone coukd attempt a hack of this and is willing to share their work with others not for profit.

That person has also worked out a way to play as the final boss.

Anyone think they might be able to hack these things?
May 22, 2019, 08:51:38 PM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Actually, I just found the rom titled "Double Dragon 2 - Shadow"

Pressing select throws the fireball, holding a direction and select does the thing where he turns invisable and enters you.

It also displays all the jump things that disappear in a pattern on THAT level.... also hardcoded with inf lives and mostly 1 hit kills.

Be great if someone could work out how to extract what's been done to maybe make them gameshark/genie codes or whatever.

Found some other cool hacks there too, one where you can play as Burnov, the muscle guy, the boxer, the final boss. All a bit glitchy, but cool. Plus a hack that makes select the rising knee, tapping kick after a flying spin kick keeps it going for a bit and a few combo-like moves!

[FAST6191]

Hi, is anyone able to mod a timesplitters 2 or 3 gamecube iso and remove or greatly increase the map makers space limit plz, I've searched everywhere but nobody seems to have done this yet and i find this strange as im not the only person i know who hates to have a limit while creating maps on either game

Most times such limits are in games it is not because the devs are opposed to fun but a lack of memory in a given system to use for it. The would be hacker would then have to introduce some kind of streaming or "teleport" type system to go between things, neither of which is easy. Sometimes it can be because of a lack of space to store it as well (why an on disc level might be bigger than user made) which might be easier to work around, though even then devs usually don't mind forcing people to get bigger/more memory cards.

You could possibly come the other way and do something like the old Delta force games and do some procedural generation around the edges to make them appear a bit bigger.

All this is a lot of effort so I would sooner remake a PC game and stuff timesplitters assets and gameplay into that.

[SunGodPortal]

The Calcium Kid... They should change it to beer and make hum DuffMan.

[Binarynova]

Would love to see the Quintet classics "Soul Blazer", "Illusion of Gaia", and "Terranigma" re-translated. By using the text font from Actraiser you'll free up screen real estate without having to mess with making a variable width font. Actraiser's font is half the height of the font used in the other three games.

These games are well known for being poorly translated the first time around. In Illusion of Gaia alone there are many issues with the speaker being misquoted, creatures being mis-named (like Leviathan is called "Riverson"), there are times when Will is thinking to himself but the dialogue suggests he's speaking out loud. And that's just one of the three games.

I believe there have been attempts to clean up the dialogue, but those have all started with the U.S. or Europe releases. Because of these issues, and the large following these games have, I think the "Quintet Trilogy" is an ideal set of candidates for re-translation from the original Japanese.

[ShadowOne333]

A completely "remastered" version of OoT which uses OoT Randomizer as its base for most of the ASM hacks.
https://github.com/TestRunnerSRL/OoT-Randomizer

In other words, an OoT Randomizer fork which disables the randomizing aspect of it, but keeps all of the ASM perks of it, which make OoT a much more enjoyable experience altogether.

What I'm mainly looking for, is that on top of the Randomizer ASM hacks, the only thing I think needs to be added or modified is:

• Restore all cutscenes back into the game, to enjoy the full OoT experience without their removal (which was done due to speedrunning nature of Randomizer)
• Remove all item/equipment randomization aspect from the project. Basically make it so that all items are located in the same places as in vanilla OoT, so that people that want to play a revamped/remastered version of vanilla OoT can do so, without having to worry about random items and such
• All settings/toggles should be the same as vanilla OoT
• No damage/power/price modifications when compared to vanilla OoT

I have attempted to make the changes myself, but I do not fully understand how to restore all of the cutscenes (I did manage to restore some, not all), nor how to remove the randomization from the project.

If anyone can help out, I'd be very grateful!

[WeebeeGeebee]

I know this is an obscure game, but I wonder what it would take for someone to do a romhack of NES Knight Rider where it replaces that drab boring "copyright free" music from the intro and replaces it with an 8bit rendition of the actual TV show theme... and also maybe clean up Michael Knight's sprite so that his face doesn't look like a big black and blue splotch like half his face is missing.

[Jorpho]

You know there's an entire thread for hack ideas, right?
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=3282.0

I wonder what it would take

The same thing it would take for any other game: you'd have to reverse-engineer whatever music engine the game uses and then find some way to mash in the data from a MIDI rendition of the theme (which is surely out there somewhere).  And you'd have to figure out how the game's sprites are stored – if they're just sitting there decompressed in the ROM, you'd just have to find a suitable replacement sprite and paste it in.