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Author Topic: ROM Hacking Documents: What's Missing?  (Read 2 times)
KaioShin
Guest
« Reply #30 on: March 27, 2008, 04:52:04 pm »

Quote from: FinalMinuet on March 27, 2008, 04:17:47 pm
We need hack and translation postmortems.

If it gets too technical no one will be able to really follow you, if you write it in a more casual, easy to understand way it loses it's usefulness in regard to teaching anything to hack. It's very very hard to find a balance there, I'd even say it's impossible.

I just went the 'reflection' route for my project and wrote a history of the project with some personal feelings and remarks thrown in for good measure. It's interesting for many fans to read such a text about the process of making a translation from start to finish - but as something to learn from for any tried and true romhacker it's useless.
McKnight
Guest
« Reply #31 on: March 27, 2008, 05:20:07 pm »

I'd like to know how to hack sound that's stored in ADPCM. 

In particular, I would like to do a voice dub for Makeruna! Makendou Z, which I've been asking about.  The furthest I know is to convert the bin/cue files into iso/wav, but even then, only two songs are immediately playable on Windows Media Player.  What program am I supposed to open up the files with?  How do I extract each byte manually?  How do I store the extracted sound bytes before converting them?  What else do I need to do before converting them into MP3 and/or placing them back in the game file?
Deathlike2
Guest
« Reply #32 on: March 27, 2008, 05:31:50 pm »

Quote from: Nightcrawler on March 27, 2008, 08:48:33 am
It also needs to be made perfectly clear that every game can be totally different and your non assembly techniques will likely fail on many other games. At least if you're aware of that, you'll know to try something different rather than think the method is supposed to work and ask why it doesn't.

Hell, even a full tutorial on hacking Game X from start to finish may not be all that useful. It may even generate even more forum requests because people saw method X was used in that tutorial, but it doesn't work in their game. You know my views. Conceptual documents are key. People get way too focused on specifics that don't work beyond a narrow range and don't understand why. They dismiss documents for platform X thinking they'll be no help. etc. etc. I've been there and explained that before.

The fundamental of romhacking is to understand the basic programming the game goes through. This is a skill that isn't really taught, but more of a way of thinking/dealing with the problem/task.

The issue is that some people won't ever quite get it. It is the equivalent of putting crappy singers on American Idol. They simply don't get it, and probably never will.

In any case, it is a mindset and you can try to explain to allow people to grasp such techniques.. and you would have to have developed at least a decent program in whatever language to at least grasp some concepts that is used in romhacking. Once that is understood, it's only a matter of learning CPU specific syntax, testing the game's behavior, and so on.

Romhacking is more of a "how to reprogram" a game mentality.. and should be treated like learning how to program. You don't need a degree to understand everything.. just enough to get by...
Spikeman
Guest
« Reply #33 on: March 28, 2008, 06:59:54 pm »

I may have said this earlier in the topic but what we could really use is a good doc on debugging to find pointers, text, graphics, etc. It should be written for beginners. Also I was thinking "case studies" might help a lot. Where a pro hacker documents everything he does while hacking a game. I've begun to do this with one of my projects, but I am not as skilled as some and I likely will not finish it for a LONG time.
McKnight
Guest
« Reply #34 on: March 29, 2008, 07:58:29 am »

I'd like to see one or both of the following

1) A complete list of assembly languages and consoles that each language applies to, or

2) How to find out which assembly language a given console's games are written.

This romhacking guide does have a partial list of consoles and their respective assembly languages, but it doesn't have certain ones such as the PC-FX.  However, I'm assuming that the assembly language for the PC-FX is "810" because its CPU is called the NEC V810; looking up other consoles on Wikipedia that were listed in the document, the assembly language name either matches or is part of the name for the respective CPU.  (There were exceptions, such as the Nintendo 64.)
Griff Morivan
Guest
« Reply #35 on: March 29, 2008, 04:16:50 pm »

AH! Necromancy!

I'd like to see some documentation on an older game, Metal Storm. I played through it once or twice, and I think it'd make a great hackable game, if it could be extended a touch, or in some way could be modified.
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