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Topic: PC Engine CD Hacking ? (Read 804 times)
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Kagemusha
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« on: January 25, 2007, 11:09:15 pm » |
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One of these days I'm gonna learn how to do some romhacking and my system of interest is the PC Engine. From what I've read I believe the fundamentals of romhacking stay the same and there are only a few differences. Does anyone know any differences between let's say hacking a SNES game compared to hacking a PC Engine CD game?
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« Last Edit: January 26, 2007, 12:28:39 am by Kagemusha »
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RedComet
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« Reply #1 on: January 26, 2007, 02:23:03 am » |
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First off, love the avatar. Django's the man.
Second, yeah, they're fundamentally the same. The only real difference is the fact that you're dealing with a CD instead of a cart.
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Nightcrawler
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« Reply #2 on: January 26, 2007, 09:37:43 am » |
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Yeah, that and the hardware is different.
If you want to do any kind of more in depth hacking, you'll need to know a bit of the hardware. Also, the tools for PCE-CD hacking are not too great/not too many of them. It's more difficult to do things without seasoned tools. Anything that would require ASM hacks comes to mind.
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tomaitheous
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« Reply #3 on: January 26, 2007, 06:53:02 pm » |
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PCE CD hacking is a little different in that you can't just expand the ram the way you can a rom. You can convert CD to SCD and SCD to ACD, but there are no tools to do this. I've don't it by hand, but you need to understand the CD/system architecture. If you have any questions - check out #utopiasoft on irc. It's a hang out for PCE coders (Charles MacDonald, Chris Covell, Dave Shadoff, etc).
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Piotyr
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« Reply #4 on: January 26, 2007, 08:15:27 pm » |
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Do the downtown nekketsu mongarti if you get into it!  . |
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Kagemusha
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« Reply #5 on: January 26, 2007, 10:03:37 pm » |
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Well I looked at a game in a tile viewer and I found 4 different places with kanji(or whatever it's called). Anyway one place has about 100+ kanji and would that be a list of all the kanji the game uses? I'm not really sure. Plus in the tile viewer I found a complete english alphabet so does that mean I wouldn't have to put in an english font. Also while viewing another game in a tile viewer I wasn't able to find anything. So that means the game uses some type of compression, right? Please pardon my ignorance, but I don't really know what irc is. I think that it's some type of communication system, but that where it loses me. Thanks for the info and as for downtown nekketsu, I don't think I'll be touching it because I have a lot of PC Engine rpg's collecting dust and DN ain't one of them.
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tomaitheous
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« Reply #6 on: January 27, 2007, 12:58:24 am » |
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Are you looking at a rom or CD game (iso file) or savestate? Some games(hucards) store the font in 1bpp, 2bpp, 3bpp(2bbp composite + 1bpp) modes and some do RLE on each bit plane - stored in regular planar mode then converted to composite planar. For IRC (efnet), checkout mIRC program or chatzilla if you have Firefox.
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Kagemusha
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« Reply #7 on: January 27, 2007, 01:35:52 am » |
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I'm looking at an iso.
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RedComet
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« Reply #8 on: January 27, 2007, 01:43:31 am » |
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You'd have better luck if you use something like CDMage and extract the files and search the data tracks (there'll also be some audio tracks too, but you can ignore those).
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creaothceann
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« Reply #9 on: January 27, 2007, 04:12:26 pm » |
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Kagemusha
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« Reply #10 on: January 28, 2007, 05:53:06 pm » |
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Well I decided to learn the hacking fundamentals by hacking and retranslating an NES RPG. Well anyway I finally was able to find some text through my incomplete english table. I do have a question about WindHex. When I try to make a japanese table the kanji doesn't come out right. It's kind of like gibberish. Does anyone know what the problem may be?
Also there are a few values I am unsure of. How would I go about entering page breaks, line breaks, and one other break type thing? I don't really know
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« Last Edit: January 28, 2007, 10:02:20 pm by Kagemusha »
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JCE3000GT
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« Reply #11 on: January 28, 2007, 10:16:22 pm » |
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Also there are a few values I am unsure of. How would I go about entering page breaks, line breaks, and one other break type thing? I don't really know Trial and error. Just enter various byte values in the middle of your text until you find the byte that does what you need. Nothing like good old fashioned trial and error.  Don't give up, it may or may not take a while to get the hang of ROM hacking. If you give up you'll regret it.  |
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Kagemusha
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« Reply #12 on: January 28, 2007, 10:44:57 pm » |
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Whoops! I worded it wrong. The values I mentioned I wasn't sure of, I am sure of. However they are for page and line breaks plus one more break(not sure of it's name) which I am unsure of which key to press for them. That's for the english script. Plus for some reason the table maker in WindHex will not display the Kana ASCII. For Example this 30=ぁ displays as 30=,Y(it looks similar to a y). That continues on to the hex editor as well. Why is that? I thought maybe it had something to do with language display options(or whatever it's called), but that is not the case because when I switch the language to Japanese it does the same thing.
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« Last Edit: January 29, 2007, 12:28:28 am by Kagemusha »
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Nightcrawler
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« Reply #13 on: January 29, 2007, 12:53:56 pm » |
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Under Options, click 'View text as Unicode'. That should enable you to view the Japanese text if your system has East Asian language support.
A table file is just a text file. You can edit it manually if you can't figure out how to add special values through Windhex. I have never used Windhex to create a table, so I can't help there. Just open up the text file and add whatever you need. Windhex will display it in the hex listing. Open up the table file in notepad and add:
F3=<kp>
F4=<END>
Something like that for whatever values your game uses.
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Kagemusha
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« Reply #14 on: January 29, 2007, 01:14:12 pm » |
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Thanks NC that did the trick.
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