My experience with Rom hacking is limited -- I'd never actually heard of it until just a few months ago actually. I've been amazed at some of the projects that people have been able to accomplish by rom hacking, like the excellent "Super Mario Adventure" Mario 3 hack or the frustrating "Luigi's Chronicles" Mario 1 hack -- projects like this went beyond simple text or sprite editing and managed to make entirely new games out of the originals.

My own dream would be to create an FPS game to run on an NES emulator. I have no idea whether or not its possible, but I do have a few things to suggest that it might be. First though I'd need to find a base game to hack.

The game Battle Tank on the NES for example:



While not exactly an FPS, the player was able to move and shoot at enemy sprites that changed size depending on distance -- the basis of the FPS.



A great example of how such a game would be possible is the never-published, but finished, game -- Tyrannosaurus Tex for the GBC.




Thats what my ideal NES FPS would probably look like when finished. As far as I can tell the game was near perfect, just never published due to some weird screw-up at the company level.

Unfortunately I'm just a novice -- I have no idea to create an editor for the Battle Tank rom, and have very limited programming knowledge in general. I am a decent artist though and could probably knock together some sprites and textures.

What does everyone think? Is the game idea possible, or am I a fool?

It probably will be pretty difficult initially to figure out how to properly make things work, but once the basics are figured out then it might not be so bad. FPS games basically just consist of "run through a maze, kill stuff, get the key, open the door,Next level: repeat until Boss battle", so the layout of the game shouldn't be incredibly taxing.

Also, I thought the DOOM 2600 port was a hoax? I know there was a Doom port for the Commodore 64 though.

retrosmashfan, what you're talking about it is straight up dev. No rom hacking there. One of the large obstacles is that the NES doesn't have a scanline bitmap display, not to mention all blitting would have to be done by the CPU. You could load VRAM/VROM with a set of tiles as patterns and just upload the tilemap for the display, though it cuts down the resolution tremendously like that C64 pic.

Depends on the extent and definition of FPS.  I think it'd be kinda cool to turn some of the first-person RPGs into  a shooter kinda thing.  Not really as action-oriented, but you could try to emulate different gun choices, bullets, and the like.  But if you're wanting more action, it's more of trying to find a base you can work with.  And if you can't, get acquainted with dev as others have said~

And who could forget The Lone Ranger? You had to move around with a pad but the scenery was PURE FPS (you could even turn around to face enemies to your side or even behind you!)

Everyone can smile now! I've find something :

Stuck in Castle Nessenstein. (40kB NROM PAL)

http://jiggawatt.org/badc0de/console.htm

I did not test this, I am using rapidshare right now...

Really, use that engine to make a game like Sonic robo blast 2 would be awesome :'(.
Could put the Nes on its limits :beer: 
Stupid incredible challenge!!!

 Like I said....

 
 Totally doable, just limiting.