Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Quickman - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

(I apologise if this is the wrong forum - it seems inappropriate in e.g. General Gaming, but it's only tangentially about the Sonic hacking community.)

On my recent extended absence from Sonic Retro (I keep coming back, it's like a curse) I went on a fact-finding expedition to the Pokémon hacking community. What I discovered was to this community like taking a trip back in time to the year 2004 - ASM hacking is something attempted only by relatively few because of the relative inaccessibility of it, and the art remains focused on rearranging things in the ROM and finding existing empty space to put new things. I propose showing these poor savages the glory that is the split disassembly, and since the best-documented game is Fire Red that seems a good place to start. (Red and Gold Crystal both have active disassembly projects, and at any rate Gen I and Gen II are less like hacking and more like archeology - the engine is hairy, having been in continuous development since the early '90s.)

Socially, Pokémon hacking doesn't really have the animosity the Sonic hacking community used to have. The largest concentration of activity (and hence the area of greatest expression of Sturgeon's Law) is a cluster of subforums on the website Pokécommunity. A newer website, Pokémon Hackers Online, offers a dedicated source of information, though it lacks in parrticipation. Perhaps surprisingly, there's also a fair amount of interest (and hence contribution) from the Nuzlocke forum - their members are ever-hungry for new challenges, and the creator of the English-language reimplementation of the influential hack Touhou Puppet Play 1.8 can be found there.

On the technical side, the Game Boy Advance hardware is well understood, ARM7 has IDA Pro support out of the box, and there isn't the fragmentation of assemblers that we had a decade ago as ARM is a better-documented architecture than 680x0. The Pokémon community have produced a (partial) ROM map of Fire Red, and a (partial, somewhat messy) disassembly by Pokécommunity user knizz which should provide some assistance. Unfortunately, the Pokémon games were written in C, so the assembly is rather messy compared to Yuji Naka's handiwork on the Sonic games.

Unfortunately, while I'm the one most eager to see this happen, I lack the facility with IDA Pro to actually produce it. My hope is that I can appeal to other more capable people and provide what assistance I can. There's quite a few structures I haven't mentioned which are already documented, and I can liaise with the PHO IRC channel #hacking if need be.

I want to get the models for the Megadrive, MegaCD and 32X from the final boss sequence in Segagaga for the Dreamcast. (Also, if the combined forms - Megadrive+MegaCD and Megadrive+MegaCD+32X - are separate models then I want those too.) However, I know very little about this stuff, and I don't have a tremendous amount of will to find out, so I'm posting in the hope that someone can tell me more and possibly provide something I can give to someone who does know how to work with 3D stuff.

We all know that it's a big help to know that your hack runs correctly on real hardware - it rules out the possibility of accidentally relying on an emulator quirk like leniency when it comes to data on odd address boundaries.

However, being able to test on hardware requires a non-trivial degree of expense - you not only have to buy the Megadrive (and possibly peripherals) but also you need to buy the flashcart and possibly additional hardware to use it with, which is a fairly considerable expense (the cheapest one available is Tototek's MD-PRO 32M, which is $60; it costs more for convenient features like programming via USB or SD card). As such, only some of us are able to do this, and it can be difficult to find us.

My intent is that people who are able to test on hardware can post here with what they can test and anything to bear in mind when contacting them. This is not a topic to request testing on hardware; that's better done via PM.

HARDWARE

• Sega Mega Drive - model 1 VA6
• Sega MegaCD - model 1
• Sega Mega Drive 32X

THINGS TO BEAR IN MIND

• All of my hardware is hardwired to 50Hz/English; I haven't modified any of my hardware for 50Hz/60Hz or English/Japanese and don't intend to - I like my system pristine, not bristling with switches - so if your code is region-locked, then you'll have to either modify your code or ask someone else.
• The 32X was a piece of shit on release day and is a piece of shit now - you don't realise because emulators are very good at making it seem oh-so-simple. Mine is extremely temperamental and a massive pain in the arse to set up and get working, so chances are if you're trying to code for the 32X I'll be very grumpy from wrestling with this thing. I don't normally keep it connected, though I'll try and change that when I modify the cable for stereo sound.
• I'm using a composite cable connected to a high-quality Dazzle DVC100 capture card so I can use the console with my computer rather than the television, so I can take screenshots of the whole screen including overscan for you if you want. This is what you'll be getting if you do.
  

Way back in the mists of time Nemesis dissected the Simon Wai prototype and found leftover Chemical Plant Zone art and mappings which indicated a significantly different layout.

More recently drx graced us all with the early prototype which was used on the Nick Arcade television show where we got to see just how bad Sarah Michelle-Geller is at Sonic 2.

What I'm wondering is how the art from the pre-Wai build which we have thanks to lazy overwriting of a development flashcart compares with the art in the Nick Arcade prototype.

I'm trying to add a seventh emerald to Sonic 1. I've moved the ring object to $39 so the emeralds are from $3A to $40 rather than $3B to $40 (since the code relies on the emeralds being consecutive in the list of objects for the special stage). I've changed all the "do you have all the emeralds" checks to 7 instead of 6, I altered the mappings for special stage objects and changed the special stage layouts. I haven't changed the mappings for the emeralds on the results screen (so the seventh emerald is blank at this point) or the counters and mappings for the emeralds on the TRY AGAIN and ending screens.

However, when I enter the special stage I'm met by completely stationary rings which act as blocks. This makes no sense, since I changed the code in Obj09_ChkObjects so the ring behaviour ought to occur for $39. I thought maybe there might be something to do with SS_AniWallsRings, but that code is completely impenetrable.

At this point I feel like I'm completely lost and missing something stupidly obvious, so I'm hoping someone else can help.