I've noticed lately with a few of my ROM hacking projects that it has become rather difficult to stay organized. Does anyone have any tips on keeping organized? I'm looking for tips both in your own workspace and also for keeping organized as a team.

One thing I've found very useful is setting up an SVN repository to host patches, the game's script, and other resources.

I find it pretty difficult to stay organized with my projects when they span several years time. As many notes and comments as possible help. I generally keep a note file for each project with discoveries including data locations, key routines, sometimes some analysis of a game process etc.

I also try to keep the entire project being able to be rebuilt fresh from one commented xkas file (only applicable to SNES projects right now) and script insertion from my inserter. That way, everything that goes into the project has some sort of notes or comments to go with it. I really need them when I am away from a project for awhile and need to pick it back up again.


As far as working with a team, some sort of online collaboration solution is ideal I think. I wrote a small online bug tracking system for the Wozz beta testing team which was the last time I worked with a significant amount of people where simple e-mail or chat collaboration wasn't enough. A central online spot allows everyone involved to see the latest developments from all members of the team at any given time. It worked pretty well for us I think.

I also think you learn some organization as you go. Every project I do is usually better organized than the one I did before it. I learn what stupid mistakes and headaches I caused for myself from being unorganized and make sure I don't repeat the mistake again. Taking those extra minutes to be organized ends up saving more in the long run for me.

So.. some central place that everyone can update and/or be informed promptly of the current status of the project and everybody's work sounds like a good idea to me.


*The above is simply my opinion. I am in no way an authority on project organization. I often deal with headaches caused by my neglect of properly organizing my projects.

Each of my projects has their own directory, and each directory is a wholly self-contained entity. They include copies of *all* of the programs I need for the project, as well as all of the individual project files. I have the directories sorted by file extension, so it's easy to find various things (text files, .asm files, tbl files, savestates, what-have-you.)

Other than that, my organizational system is fairly basic. Generally I make lots of backups ("copy of xxx" "copy (2) of xxx" and so on) to which I can easily roll back if something goes wrong. I keep notes in a notes.txt, text in a dlog.txt or insert.txt or in-dlog.txt or something similar. I periodically clean out the copy-of-xxx files, but if I really need to keep long-term backups for a file I'll sandwich an "old" into the extension, like metalmax.old.smc or metalmax.older.smc or metalmax.oldest.smc etc.

As far as progress goes? I just keep plugging away until everything that needs to be done IS done. Nothing really special about it.

That's not a bad idea, I've had good experiences with TiddlyWiki in the past.

 :huh:

I don't have any organization and when I get back on projects after quite a while I need a day just to find the latest files again >_<

Thank god for file timedate stamps, right?

I have one main directory which has all my tools (FCEUXD, YY-CHR, Windhex, yadda yadda), which also has the ROM and notes I generate for my current project (However, I keep a "Backup" folder with incremental ROM versions just in case something goes to hell, which has saved me more than once).

Once a project is finished, I dump the text files and ROM to its own sub folder just in case I ever need it again, then 7zip it.

Keep in mind, this can get *very* messy, like during the DXOII project.

Which brings me to team work: Thaddeus and myself were working on totally unrelated aspects of the game for the most part, so none of it overlapped. I would make an IPS of what I'd done against a clean FF ROM, get his most current version and then patch over it, then send it back to him.