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Author Topic: The New Romhacker's Bible (King Gideon Edition)  (Read 2 times)
Gideon Zhi
Guest
« on: March 02, 2007, 05:08:39 pm »
Finally finished Book 1. You can view it here. Comments and suggestions are welcome. The goal of this document is not to provide a coddling environment for budding romhackers; rather, it is to provide situational, hands-on examples for those who learn best that way, and to explain why things work instead of just how they work.

I'm trying to figure out how to arrange the remainder of the document. The topics I think I still need to cover are...
-Bitplane font storage
-Japanese table files
-Pointers
-Addressing modes
-Headers
-Text dumping
-Text insertion
-Assembly hacking (which will get its own book - examples will be 16bit->8bit text encoding, DTE, and 24-bit pointer expansion)

Most of this is going to use Monstania as our sample, 'cuz it's a wonderfully simple game to hack. I'll be producing v2.0 of the hack alongside the rest of the document, and I'll be providing sample tables, text dumps, insertable dumps, and assembly code. I have no idea how long it'll take, though (took nearly three years for me to get off my duff and finish 1-4.)
« Last Edit: March 07, 2007, 04:19:59 pm by Gideon Zhi »
Numonohi_Boi
Guest
« Reply #1 on: March 02, 2007, 05:14:19 pm »
sticky anyone Wink
Suzaku
Guest
« Reply #2 on: March 02, 2007, 05:18:01 pm »
This...this...  Shocked

Words cannot describe how much awesome and win this exudes.  Cheesy
Klarth
Guest
« Reply #3 on: March 02, 2007, 07:33:48 pm »
I haven't had time to review this in depth, but a quick scan over it says that it's good stuff!  Keep it up.

And hopefully there'll be a lot on Atlas so I won't have to redo the documentation because I really don't have enough free time to do that.  Nor the means right now, but that's another story.  *grumble*
Niahak
Guest
« Reply #4 on: March 02, 2007, 08:20:05 pm »
This looks great to me.  Once more's complete, I'm definitely going to have to use these techniques next time I try a hack.  Good job!  Grin
Gideon Zhi
Guest
« Reply #5 on: March 02, 2007, 10:24:39 pm »
Honestly, I appreciate the praise and everything, but I was kind of hoping for some suggestions as to how the remaining topics should be organized :/
RedComet
Guest
« Reply #6 on: March 02, 2007, 10:40:31 pm »
Are you wanting suggestions about the content for each topic or the order to cover them in or what?
Gideon Zhi
Guest
« Reply #7 on: March 02, 2007, 11:57:45 pm »
Well, I was thinking about organizing it into "books" where each book covers related topics. Assembly stuff gets its own book with multiple subsections, dumping and inserting will probably get lumped together. Other than that, I don't know.
Spikeman
Guest
« Reply #8 on: March 03, 2007, 02:03:31 am »
In the updates it says "March 2, 2009".. small typo. Wink
Suzaku
Guest
« Reply #9 on: March 03, 2007, 02:37:04 am »
I'd imagine there'd be a book on compression? What it is, what it does, and the various common types and how to decompress/recompress with them? And how to figure out what type you're dealing with, of course.

Maybe something like:

What it is
Overview of types (including any common uses for certain types, if a particular system is partial to one type, etc...)
How to figure out what type is what
In-depth of each common type
Gideon Zhi
Guest
« Reply #10 on: March 03, 2007, 02:46:51 am »
Honestly, I don't deal much with compression. I'm familiar with LZ and its derivatives on some level and Huffman to a lesser extent, but I generally speaking don't bother with recompression. Instead, I just break the damn stuff and implement my own routines to read uncompressed data from the rom :p
Spikeman
Guest
« Reply #11 on: March 03, 2007, 06:00:51 am »
Even so, a book on that would be useful, as well as reading the original compressed data in the first place. Wink
KaioShin
Guest
« Reply #12 on: March 03, 2007, 06:08:14 am »
Book 2 - Fonts and tables

-Bitplane font storage
-Japanese table files

Book 3 - The Door to Serious Hacking

-Headers
-Addressing modes
-Pointers

Book 4 - Handling scripts

-Text dumping
-Text insertion

Book 5 - Assembly

-Assembly
deespence2929
Guest
« Reply #13 on: March 03, 2007, 08:03:14 am »
Looks nice.
Maegra
Guest
« Reply #14 on: March 03, 2007, 10:46:11 am »
Quote from: Suzaku on March 02, 2007, 05:18:01 pm
This...this...  Shocked

Words cannot describe how much awesome and win this exudes.  Cheesy

/agree


Thank you Lord Gideon! I'm one of those who needs to know WHY it works, and i do that best when i get hands on examples >.>

! hehe maybe now i can finaly start hacking god knows im a loudmouth about games i want translated that i should shut up and start working on them.
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