NES ROM hacking

[majinbuu]

Hiya

Anybody know any good sites for beginners with info on hacking NES Roms? I'm bored and would like to hack a game like mario or excite bike for example.

Thanks
Sam

[DogP]

I did some awesome hacks of Excitebike back in the day. I was able to hack in my own levels and race on them . Heh, anyway... I believe this: http://nesdev.parodius.com/ will be extremely useful, although that's got a lot of technical stuff... so maybe this: http://www.nesplayer.com/database/in...oc/romdoc.html will help if you're really a beginner. And zophar.net should have some hacks that you could download so you could compare those to the originals to see what was changed (learning by example), and they have tools and other stuff that might be useful.

DogP

[majinbuu]

Thanks man, I'll check them out

[DogP]

Heh... good luck... I was kidding about Excitebike BTW, but after rereading the post, my sarcasm wasn't very clear :P . I was just being stupid talking about the track editor in the game .

DogP

[majinbuu]

heh, i kind of figured that since it has a built in track editor. But then I thought you might like to do things the hard way, and who knows what kind of tracks you could build with a hack

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

I always wanted to have a site called Hacking Mario that was entirely dedicated to hacking Super Mario Bros 1 since it's such an incredible art form and I've never seen any real step-by-step guides on how to make a complete hack.

For the most part you don't even need a guide, though, just the right tools. Start with SMB Utility and Tile Layer Pro. Mess around with them for a while and you'll pretty quickly see how with just those tools, you can totally change SMB into a whole new game.

The only other thing a beginning hacker might want to do is change the color palettes. Since there's no tool that I know of for doing that, it does require a tutorial. I just checked aorund a bit and couldn't find the one I use online anywhere, so I uploaded it to Geocities here:

http://www.geocities.com/sweaterfish...mb_palette.txt

You might also consider making certain Game Genie codes permanent, which again needs to be done with a hex editor. Do a search for "Game Genie Decoder" and you should find a variety of programs and tutorials on how to do this.

Beyond those mothods, you get into true ASM level hacking, which is much more complicated.

I hope that's helpful. Have fun.


...word is bondage...