Is it wrong to disassemble an emulator and manipulate it's code for your own purposes if the emulator itself is not an open source project? What is the community's take on this for possibility to gain further knowledge and insight from closed source engineering from fellow reverse engineers who withhold code which could be valuable to others?
This is entirely a moral ethics and law, but most importantly an ethics question. The answer for me is obvious: If the emulator is old or the author doesn't give a crap about it anymore, I say go for it.
If all you're doing is gaining insight and knowledge, go ahead and disassemble every program ever made; I don't see there being any problem (at least as far as morals/ethics go; some countries do restrict it legally, though). It's only really an issue when you're taking the code and using it in your own projects, because then it's theft.
Do you intend on ever sharing your modification with other people? If not, go ahead. Contact the author. If they're okay with your modification, go ahead. If the author is unreachable and the project is dead, go ahead. Otherwise, you're pissing on someone whose work you clearly value enough to start yours from, so respect their wishes.
I do not intend to release the modified version. I have been trying to contact the author for at least 10 years. The project is always in limbo because the author comes and goes for whatever reason. I just want to learn more about a game which has huge hidden potential, but the format is mostly unexplored.
I'd at least try hitting up the emulator author, maybe explain your intentions. People can be surprisingly open in the name of education. Edit: Eh, in that case, given the nature of this entire hacking scene, I think it'd be pretty hypocritical for anyone to throw shade on you for not having permission, especially since you actually tried to contact the author.
So, small question. Since I've been out of the scene for a while, (read: life), I'm just wondering if there are any rom hacks out there that add Tails into vanilla Sonic 1 and Sonic 2, with all of his abilities from S3K. I'm not so keen on changes to the vanilla experience, except this addition would allow for some much wanted co op. I'm sure there are, but from my quick search I'm unable to find anything. Help is much appreciated.
Yes. I'm getting my little sister into Sonic (spending money out the booty buying all the 360 games for her), and we've picked up S3K, and I fly her past parts she can't do. I'd like to get her to play Sonic 1 and 2, but they're not forgivable, and I really would like to play with her :u
Sonic Classic Heroes might be what you want, I think most/all of the extras can be turned off, allowing you to play just S1 or just S2 with Sonic & Tails.
Care to elaborate? I looked at SCH, and I'll probably have to go with that if I can't find anything resembling what I'm looking for. (The top speed adjustment is a compromise I'm not a fan of) If I had time, I would just go and make it myself :v:
I would like to know some really good optimization tricks I could use when it comes to MegaDrive tile manipulation. I'm making some rather basic code that allows you to scroll art via animated tiles, which is generated by code, and have a static image overlaying it, to allow for artificial layering without taking up a ton of ROM space. Currently, it pretty much does it similarly to how Marble Zone handles scrolling its lava, in which the original data is like a bitmap that gets scrolled and then converted to tiles. Difference being is that it allows for custom sizes and an overlay image. Currently it doesn't make the game lag, but it does take a lot of CPU usage.
I was going to ask (and I didn't know just where to ask) how to open uncompressed PRS files. .pvm files are normally what comes out, and I can't seem to figure out how to open them, and some I don't even think are images. I can upload a few for testing in case anyone wants to know, and yes, I did use the prsdec tool, more specifically, prsdec auto.
The prsdec tool is unreliable, I wouldn't use it. Puyo Tools has support for PRS compression/decompression. The data inside a PRS file can be anything. The Sonic Adventure games on Dreamcast use PRS compression for textures, models, and even code. Sonic Adventure DX uses PRS compression for the Game Gear ROM files.
Having some trouble here. http://info.sonicretro.org/SCHG:Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(2006_game)#.LUB_Decompilation This talks about the decompilation with chunkspy. However, it appears I need to recompile, since the game won't accept anything that hasn't been turned back into an .lub file. However my attempts at recompiling using chunkbake have been unfruitful. Can anyone assist?
Hey guys, I have a question before I do something stupid. I got a Lupe standing sprite that I am sitting on. I am thinking about developing her moves and putting her in a hack for some stupid reason, but I got a problem. She's too big (63x43 w/ hair and tail, 16 colors that are close to 9bit, 36 tiles). I probably will have to add at most 24 tiles to the limit of the player object in order to make this Lupe swap work. I think that I probably am going to do a bunch of byte shifting, memory address shifting or at the very worst, omit an object, but that's okay at this stage. I just want to see if it's possible hopefully without any deletion. Otherwise I'll go another way and thanks in advance! Never mind, I got it.
So I've gone into working on my hack after a long time of not doing so, and I want to add a counter to the HUD, not too unlike the Ring counter. Basically as shown years prior I added a Boost, allocated this ability to a particular shield, and now I want to make this ability pull from its own resource rather than drain Rings, as I feel that's a bit harsh for a Shield power up but being able to do it constantly would be too much. I know of course how to add and take from a value from other bits of code, and to stop it exceeding a particular amount. The thing I can't seem to remember is how I'd go about adding this thing in the first place. Like obviously it'd need some kind of free address to store this value and something to tell it to update which I have a rough idea of how the Rings, lives, etc do this but I've drawn a blank as to how to actually have this show as an onscreen figure. I'm not asking this to be handed to me of course, but a point/prod in the right direction would be appreciated.
How to load Special Stages from S3&K in Blue Balls program? (that one to edit Special Stages) I need this knowledge to make progress in my Sonic 3 And Windows hack that features custom art, SMPS and levels of course.
Basically, you add to the HUD mappings what you want, and what you add to those mappings should point to an area in VRAM that will hold the art of what you want. In HudUpdate or whatever it's called, you can update the art in that VRAM space. Of course, that means you will need to find out where to find said VRAM space. In Blue Balls, in the navigator on the top right, navigate to your disassembly, and go to General/Special Stage/Layout and then pick a layout file. Note that it will only edit S3's special stages, unless you do some fuckery with decompression and extraction with SK's layout files (I'm not too sure on how S3K handles them. All I know is that SK's layout data are in SK Set 1.bin and SK Set 2.bin).
