Sonic Advance Question

Sleep tyrant · May 28, 2008

hello,
im new to this.
but straight to the point,
I have been experimenting around with genesis sonic hacking for quiet a while (doing simple hacks, palletes, sprites, nothing worth showing).
I read all about asm coding and just don't understand (I understand a lot of it but not how it can be applied and how people know)
anyway that's slightly off topic,
with my failiure to understand asm coding I decided to start a fresh.
I have decided I want to hack sonic advance, however I do not know where to start, because I am not going to do a little pallete hack and a simple sprite change, I want to insert new characters and do other things, I just don't know where to start.

Ok I guess the real question I am asking is can somebody give me some pointers in where to start this because I cannot find a split dissassembly anywhere and I do not know how to split them myself.

all help would be appreciated and im sorry for my total turd post.

Skaarg · May 28, 2008

Welcome to the forums, Sonic Advanced hacking hasn't progressed very far yet, mainly due to lack of interest, so you won't find a dissassembly of it anywhere. To give you a bit of information there is a early level editor for Sonic Advance 1. You can even find it on this first page in the forums, but I'm in a good mood so here's a link.

http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=10365

As far as other hacking goes, you're gonna have to do some reading, because I haven't seen a whole lot for advance. If you check the hacking section on the wiki. http://info.sonicretro.org/Category:Hacking_Information You can find various different information, including how palettes work on the GBA. Although there is a tool called Sonic Advance Pal Tool that will let you edit this easily.

Even the SCHG has some information on Sonic Advance located here: http://info.sonicretro.org/SCHG:Sonic_Advance So that will give you some information on editing the art, which is even more simple since it's uncompressed.

Edit again: 1337 Post count. :P

Sleep tyrant · May 28, 2008

Thank you for the help skaarg
I have experimented around with them different tools and they seem quiet useful.
I am more interestin in hacking sonic advance 2 because there are many more features, however I looked on the wiki and that is the only advance game that has the least hacking info

I am just curious how I would add a new character.
I assume I would say copy the art of the character, modify it and put it into a blank space within the rom and then fix a specific pointer to go there
however im not sure how to go about doing that.

in personal opinion now, do you think I should just go on to doing hacks of the genesis games until the popularity of the advance games increases?

thanks for all your help

Skaarg · May 28, 2008

With the very limited knowledge you have now, if you want to add a new character to a sonic game, you'd best learn ASM and go back to working on Genesis games. The advanced games just haven't been dug into enough to really find all the information to do something like that yet. You can't just copy paste the art and code of a character and hope things will be sunshine and rainbows. You have to edit the games original code to add support for the added character which would be a lot of work. On the genesis games, especially Sonic 1/2, there is a lot of hacking information available including info on split disassemblies.

There are also many guides available on learning ASM if that's what you're struggling with.

Sleep tyrant · May 28, 2008

Thank you for all of your help Skaarg.
I have definately decided to go back to genesis hacking and to see how that goes.
But just one more question / enquirery.
I have read many ASM tutorials, I know the basic commands such as move, add and etc.
and I have read the porting spindash tutorial (it seems very copy and paste-ish with a few changes) and the creating the special ring in sonic 2.
The thing I really do not understand is I know the basic commands but how would I impliment that into a split disassembly to make my hack better.
I think what I really want to know is how to people know the exact locations of where everything is, is there a specific table available that says the addresses.
that's all that confuses me because most ASM tutorials teach the basic commands but do not teach how to impliment them.

Sorry for being such a burden and thank you for absolutely all of your help.

Irixion · May 28, 2008

The split disassembles can be found on its page in the wiki. Download SonED 2 and extract the disassembly data in there. If you need further help, PM me and I'll help you out.

Skaarg · May 28, 2008

Well I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to ASM stuff, I just know the basic stuff from reading. (Too be honest programming kind of gets boring to me. :P) So someone else may be able to help you out a lot more with that. There are a few articles though that can help you out I would hope.

http://info.sonicretro.org/SCHG:Equivalent_Subroutines
This article gives what labels have been given for specific actions in the S1 disassembly and then what the routine is called in the other games. (If they are known.)

Another thing that may be useful are some of Nemesis's guides which give you various information on locations in the ROMs. However for things such as art editing, level editing, etc. SonED 2 will be very useful to you, you may want to check that out. SonED 2 is a little difficult to get used to at first, but there are many threads on the forums here you can search for, that people have got help in using the program.

Edit: Bah Irixion, beat me to mentioning SonED. :P

Sleep tyrant · May 28, 2008

One last thing before I make a good start.
I know this is incredibly off topic but I need to know this, I have tried and tried but never got it to work.
SonED 2
I have downloaded it, I have gone into the s2 folder, I have copied the rar file and the actual folder of xenowhirl 2007 Sonic 2 Disassembly. Added my sonic 2 (REV 01) and renamed it s2.bin and ran the split batch file and nothing happened. Whenever I open SonED2, click open and sleect the project files from the disassembly folder it just displays the SonED2 HUD (Coordinates and stuff) but all I get is a completely black screen.

Can someone tell me in detail how to get this right please, and please don't redirect me to a the manual because that hasnt helped me, sorry to be so much trouble.

Once more sorry about being so off topic and annoying.
Thank you to everyone who has helped and thank you for not ignoring my NooBish questions.

Irixion · May 28, 2008

I'll PM you with my contact info. I'll help you out :P

Sonic Advance Question

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