Author Topic: My First SNES Rom Hack  (Read 8829 times)

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Offline willrandship

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My First SNES Rom Hack
« on: January 12, 2013, 08:10:04 am »
So, I decided I want to start messing around with SNES rom hacking, and I think I found a good game for the job. Uncharted Waters: New Horizons.

I'm feeling more confident ever since I noticed that the dialogue is in standard ascii, not in some weird 'A is 0' setup that's dictated by the graphical tile layout. That gives me hope about more of the ROM.

So far the ROM map looks like this:

Code: [Select]
Start Address End Address Size Description

0x000000 0x0B1E36 B1E37 Unknown

0x0B1E37 0x0B2377 541 People Names (Crew?)

0x0B2378 0x0B24A3 12B Unknown

0x0B24A4 0x0B29F0 54D Item Names

0x0B29F1 0x0B2A2C 3B Unknown

0x0B2A2D 0x0B2B29 FD Names of Some people (Royals?)

0x0B2B2A 0x0B5986 2E5D Unknown

0x0B5987 0x0BFB9B A215 Dialogue

0x0BFB9C 0x0E5A6D 25ED2 Unknown

0x0E5A6E 0x0EBE61 63F4 Tip/Tutorial Dialogue

0x0EBE62 0x0EBF8D 12C Unknown

0x0EBF8E 0x0EF346 33B9 Some kind of encyclopedia entries

0x0EF347 0x0EF474 12E Unknown

0x0EF475 0x0EF917 4A3 Discoveries Listing?

0x0EF918 0x0F7445 7B2E Unknown

0x0F7446 0x0FB3B3 3F6E Task-related Town Dialogue (Ship Traders, Kings, Whatnot)

0x0FB3B4 0x1FFFFF 104C4C Unknown - End of ROM

I don't actually know how to check for sprites and whatnot, or how to set up an emulator with a debugger. Those would help.
« Last Edit: January 12, 2013, 08:10:47 am by willrandship »

Offline Matrefeytontias

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Re: My First SNES Rom Hack
« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2013, 01:16:07 pm »
I think that one or several of the "Unknown" fields may contain the game's actual code :P good work so far. Unfortunately, I never used any emulator :(

Offline willrandship

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Re: My First SNES Rom Hack
« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2013, 05:59:39 pm »
Of course. :P I'm sure there are several areas like that. I also haven't yet marked out all of the ascii text yet. There are a few more tiny sections, ranging from 6 to 30 bytes, for specific uses.

I'm also fairly sure the sprites aren't compressed, since I used a 4 bpp sprite viewer and caught a glimpse of the font. I'm fairly sure the other sprites are 8bpp, though.

Offline Nick

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Re: My First SNES Rom Hack
« Reply #3 on: January 12, 2013, 06:08:39 pm »
I'm also fairly sure the sprites aren't compressed, since I used a 4 bpp sprite viewer and caught a glimpse of the font. I'm fairly sure the other sprites are 8bpp, though.
Did you just copy random parts of data to get the images? Or did you look at specific locations for it?
It's nice to see this, I hope you're able to figure it out completely, it'd be nice :)

At first I thought you were elementcoder, the avatars are confusing :o

Offline willrandship

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Re: My First SNES Rom Hack
« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2013, 06:15:28 pm »
lol, it's from halloween. I need to put my old avatar back.

I used a sprite editor that CLAIMED it supported 1bpp, 2bpp, 4bpp and 8bpp, but 8bpp turned out to be 1bpp X.X but I saw both sets of the text fonts. (one was 2 sprites tall)

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: My First SNES Rom Hack
« Reply #5 on: January 13, 2013, 02:38:14 am »
That game seems interesting. Not your typical SNES game too, as there are very few tactic/strategy game for SNES.

Offline willrandship

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Re: My First SNES Rom Hack
« Reply #6 on: January 13, 2013, 03:30:38 am »
It's quite fun. You get to sail the world as one of 6 people with different goals. One of them just wants to map the world, while another wants to take over the British empire for the Spanish.