The hardest Sonic game to hack

I'm not sure myself, but I would think Sonic 3 because I haven't seen many hacks of it.

 

Sonic and the Secret Rings :v:

But seriously, I would think Sonic Spinball. There are no hacks of it.

 

Pretty much anything that hasn't been dumped. Though if we assumed everything was... I don't think that Tiger's LCD games would be very hackeable :P

 

What is Sonic Unleashed Director's Cut?
I think Sonic R, because nobody's even tried to hack that game.

 

So we are saying just simply swapping textures around is out?

 

Everyone with half a brain and a YouTube account can edit textures.

 

The main reason nobody hacks game X is either because game X doesn't provide a good base / isn't worth documenting, or is difficult to document (because nobody knows much or cares about the architecture of the game's target system, for example).


On a certain level "hacking" can simply refer to dicking around and fudging around with certain files or executables and seeing just what the hell happens. New information can often come about with this sort of testing; messing with value X in memory can make it possible to tell just what happens in that location, for example. Most of the early information for Sonic 2 and Sonic Adventure are based on just fiddling around with memory or ROM location values.

It's not at all clear what it is you want to do. You can easily open up a program editing utility like IDA Pro or Frhed and take the game you want to modify, open it up, modify a few values here and there, see what happens, and call it a day. Thus nothing is hard to "hack" in the basic sense of the term. Making meaningful changes, however, is a slightly different story. Even then, adding something into Sonic 2 is different from adding it into Sonic 1, which is different from adding it into Super Mario World. All have different music and graphics engines. (Now, the difference between Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 is kinda small compared to either with SMW, but you're probably going to use a set of external utilities to do most of your game modifications, so it won't matter to you anyway. In any case, music and level editors for all three games exist and are quite functional.)

I don't actually like the concept of hacking a single specific game for the sake of hacking that game, though, as it implies that most of that game's qualities are still going to shine through in the final product on top of whatever changes were made. Sometimes the end result can be pretty cool, though -- Robotnik's Revenge adds only the smallest amount of new data to Sonic 2 and is quite playable and fun. Of course, what follows from this is me asking why anyone would really care to know what game is the hardest to hack, as it would be easier and more fulfilling to use a game engine that more easily supports editing. As long as the experience I get out of it is at least somewhat novel, I don't care what the hell the original game was that was used, be it, say, Sonic 1, or Sonic 3. I'd like to not be able to tell immediately which one you've based it on.

I should note that one exception to this (that is, why I'd be interested in a complicated hack of Sonic 3) is that it would probably be based around the existence of a well-documented split Sonic 3 disassembly, which does not currently exist, in public form at least.

I'd personally rather just take a working engine for the most part and then create a bunch of mechanics, level layouts, and art around it, rather than trying to fit it within another game's existing architecture. This is most possible with split disassemblies, which I know exist publicly for Sonic 1 and 2. But again since I have no idea what you're trying to do beyond the vague "hack a game" I can't give you much more than that.



The hardest game to hack is the one that has an engine least suited to what you want to make of it, and has the least documentation of its engine, its resources, and how the two fit together. If you want to make a 3D Sonic game with a dynamic camera, waveform audio, and real transparencies, good luck doing that with Sonic 1's split disassembly running on the Genesis -- it's not going to happen, no matter how better documented Sonic 1 may be than SADX.

 

Yeah... this is based on absolutely nothing. Please simply denote which version you're referring to through platform in the future, please; made up terms have no place on this message board.

 

I have been meaning to get back to hacking Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine - I used to use a crappy webpage on Expage to keep my notes until it went down - and had no backups since my computer was continually see-sawing in regards to stability. .. not that it matters that much, savestate format seems to have changed a bit as none of my addresses match up to the hack-able data anyways... I used to be able to hack a savestate for that game and edit the actual beans in the chamber, score, etc. I actually figured out the combinations of values and which bean pairs they matched up to. Too bad the notes are long gone.... that was such a PiTA to find too.

 

[smartass]Sonic X-Treme, due to the fact that hacking it would require a build to hack[/smartass]

Seriously...

Probably SUPS3, because IIRC there's no way to play burnt PS3 games, and certainly no emulator- even if the hack worked, you couldn't find out.

 

Only partly. The system gets updated enough that it's hard to exploit holes in it.

 

Any of the next gen games, and Sonic 3. Sonic Spinball wouldn't make a good hack, maybe a pallete and music hack, but that's it, so I doubt it falls under this category.

 

Most likely because nobody likes to deal with games that have to load stuff every single time they change the game mode. Case in point: SuperSonic in SA1/SADX. In the PC version you can have its model permanently loaded but in the Dreamcast and GameCube versions you can't, so you can't play as him in normal levels unless you hack the crap out of every single level code - and even then, I don't know if there's enough memory (no idea about the memory usage, really :P).

 

I think it would be great if someone remade Sonic Spinball using Sonic 3 physics. Probably it would make the game more playable.

 

With the exception that Sonic Spinball has many tweaks in the physics to make it playable in a pin-ball enviroment. Sure, the physics of the normal Sonic games seem good, but I'm not sure how well would they fare. Remember, the pin-ball-like areas in Casino Night don't behave much like a pin-ball, much less one where you can have control easily :P (hint: in Sonic Spinball you can use the D-pad to alter Sonic's speed while he's in the air, both horizontally and vertically)

 

I would probably say Sonic Unleashed. I've never seen a hack of that.