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I wanna know how to hack Sonic Advance's trilogy

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by Jay Cartney, Dec 13, 2017.

  1. Hi there. I wanna hack Sonic Advance's trilogy by one simple reason: DIMPS's level design. I like the first Advance, but the Egg Rocket and the act 2 of this zone (that i don't remember the name) i hate so much. The Advance 2 i hate, and even the Music Plant, that i like, doesn't has the best level design in the world. And the third Advance, i love this game, but the reasons are nostalgia and the good ideas of this game (Combinations of two characters that change the moveset? This can generate a very high replay factor!), because the level design of this game sucks too. So, how you can percebed, i wanna hack these games for make them better than the original games. If exists some way to hack then, please, tell me.
     
  2. SuperSnoopy

    SuperSnoopy

    I like Sonic Advance Member
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    The wiki is the best place for this kind of stuff.
    Though I don't think the Advance trilogy is very hackable, unfortunately
     
  3. InvisibleUp

    InvisibleUp

    friendly internet ghost Member
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    Specifically the Community Hacking Guide. Advance 1 seems to be the only documented game, and even then it's not much.

    It seems that (from quickly skimming the guide, anyways) in theory hacking it won't be hard, as nothing's compressed. But you'd have to reverse engineer the level layout (specifically the object data, which will be hard to find) and write your own level editor, which will be quite difficult. Not impossible, but this won't be a walk in the park like the Genesis games. It'll be fun if you're up to the challenge.

    If you're trying to find data in the ROM, my favorite tool to use is TiledGGD, as it lets you view the ROM as a bitmap. Just scroll until you see something like a level layout, and then open that offset in a hex editor and play around with stuff.

    Hopefully that'll get you started, if you want to go down that path. If you don't, the Genesis games can also be hacked to add extra characters with custom moves, although that will require ASM editing.

    (Also, I'm really surprised nobody's hacked any of the Nintendo handheld games yet.)
     
  4. Aquaslash

    Aquaslash

    <The Has-been Legend> Moderator
    There seems to be a general lack of interest in the DIMPS titles, so anyone attempting to mod them will have to pioneer the field themselves. It's sure to be a domino effect once it actually does happen though. Ideally my project would have been a mod of Sonic Advance 1 or 2 (probably 2) but I'm nowhere near mechanically inclined enough for the task
     
  5. Lanzer

    Lanzer

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    Yeah I never knew why their was never a bigger push to hack the advance games, they were the last 2D sonic games before Mania made a return to 2D sonic. you'd think by now 10+ years later we'd have 100s of mods just like the Genesis games but no, barely any.

    Is it the emulators? the internal code? what is the wall that stops people from R&D the Advance series?
     
  6. Fred

    Fred

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    I think people just don't like them that much
     
  7. SuperSnoopy

    SuperSnoopy

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    Advance 3 maybe, but I'm pretty are Advance 1 and 2 are liked by the community, right ?
     
  8. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    I imagine not many people in this community know ARM assembly.
     
  9. Overlord

    Overlord

    Now playable in Smash Bros Ultimate Moderator
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    2 is an awful game, and while 3's more interesting in terms of the team mechanic it's not as well liked as 1 I guess? Certainly 1 is my favourite game of the three (though 3 DOES have the best special stages).
     
  10. JaxTH

    JaxTH

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    Jack shit.
    Advance 2 has a big enough fanbase to say it's well-liked. Everyone loves Advance 1 and some even said it was Sonic 4 back in the day.

    No one really likes Advance 3 though.
     
  11. Ravenfreak

    Ravenfreak

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    I love Advance 3, it's my favorite out of the advance series. :v: Anyways someone did make a hack of advance 3 in the past, and there is a hacking guide on the wiki. I don't think anyone has actually ever made a hack of advance, but if you teach yourself ARM assembly and make some tools you can hack the advance games. GBA temp might be a good place to learn more on how the gba works.
     
  12. Lanzer

    Lanzer

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    So its just lack of knowledge then? well then all we can hope for is a group of people that have a passion for the advance era and are studying ARM assembly to make the tools to simplify the advance hacking scene for the rest of us.
     
  13. SpaceyBat

    SpaceyBat

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    It might be a stretch, but perhaps some folks from the Pokemon hacking community could help out? There's a rather extensive collection of hacks out there for the GBA Pokemon games and tools for modifying pretty much any aspect including sprites, maps, Pokemon stats, dialog, events, etc.
     
  14. Jeffery Mewtamer

    Jeffery Mewtamer

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    I know essentially nothing about hacking on either platform, but I would think knowledge from the Pokemon hacking community would at most be about as useful to Advance Trilogy hacking as Sonic Megadrive Hacking is to Phantasy Star hacking. Probably less since while we're talking the same difference in genre, if I'm not mistaken, Phantasy Star is at least another Sonic Team title if not the work of the same people who gave us the Genesis Trilogy while Pokemon was developed by a completely separate company.

    Granted, I could be talking out of my ass and hacking knowledge really is closer to being universal for a given platform rather than specific to individual games.

    Also, is it weird that Advance 2 is my favorite handheld Sonic period and Advance 1 is my least favorite of the trilogy?
     
  15. Hukos

    Hukos

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    I mean, the Sega Genesis Sonic disassemblies apparently were a big help in the creation of the Sega Genesis Phantasy Star disassemblies, so there's that :v:
     
  16. I'm certain someone made a level editor for Advance 1, but it couldn't edit objects yet before it was abandoned.
     
  17. VentusDark

    VentusDark

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    If there was modding for the advance games I'd be on those in a heartbeat considering the amount of sprite work I do with the advance sprites but I don't see hacking/modding for the Advance games happening for a long time in terms of like stages or character mods unless me saying that just made someone want to prove me wrong.
     
  18. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    I sort of made a sprite editor once. It tends to crash though, because I don't fully understand the format and am probably parsing it entirely wrong.
     
  19. bookman the stinky

    bookman the stinky

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    Are we talkin EXTREEM MANSECKZ here?
     
  20. VentusDark

    VentusDark

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    Not too long after posting here I came across this https://gamebanana.com/games/6046
    I never new modding Battle was a thing but if modding battle is possible then I bet modding the Advance games could be done too