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Askorium

do you like them video games? what about those there romhacks? well pop on in here and talk about them then! what are you waiting for?!
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raocow
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Askorium

Post by raocow »

May this be a general romhacking question thread! Might as well condense it all in one thread, for those little questions that may not be worth a whole thread about.

Let me start the ball by asking what exactly goes into a 'patch' - say, for example, you want the 'no sprite limit' patch. How much work does that involve?
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Re: Askorium

Post by yoshicookiezeus »

I wrote:xkas is easy. Just download it and put the ROM and the patch in the same directory as it. Then, copy cmd.exe from your System32 folder (found inside the Windows folder on the C drive), and put that in the xkas folder as well. Make a backup of your ROM before this next step, just in case. Open up cmd and type "xkas patchname.asm romname.smc" without the quotation marks and with the obvious substitutions, and the patch will be applied.

There are some patches that need freespace defined, though. For those, you'll also need the Free Space Logger and Lunar Address. Drag your ROM to the Free Space Logger to get a .txt file containing a list of all of the free space available in your ROM. Select one of the addresses (preferably one with an 8000 or another big number in the second column) and enter it into Lunar Address (without the initial 0x) to get the PC address corresponding to it. Then, enter that PC address (without the colon) into the freespace label in the patch, and proceed according to the above instructions.
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Re: Askorium

Post by raocow »

Holy crap, that IS easy!

Man, wow.
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Re: Askorium

Post by AnimeRules »

EDIT: Woops, you actually wrote it in this time.
EDIT 2: Man, I got confused to who posted when and in what order, oh well.
Last edited by AnimeRules 14 years ago, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Askorium

Post by yoshicookiezeus »

Already fixed. Apparently I quoted the wrong version of that post (I have like ten versions of it spread over various forums...).
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Re: Askorium

Post by AnimeRules »

offtopic:Woah, ten versions?

ontopic: What exactly does the item memory index do? Does it just keep track of what has been collected?
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Re: Askorium

Post by yoshicookiezeus »

AnimeRules wrote:What exactly does the item memory index do? Does it just keep track of what has been collected?
As far as I know, that's exactly what it does:
The Lunar Magic help file wrote:The item memory index value controls which area of RAM the SNES should store a temporary record of the coins and other items that a player has gotten in the current level. So the general idea here is to use different index numbers for other levels that your main level has exits to. Typically, you'd use 0 for the main level and use 1, 2, and 3 for other levels accessed by pipes or doors. You can technically share the same number between two levels, but you run the risk of having the game mistakenly thinking that certain coins and such are already taken, so they may end up being mysteriously gone when the player enters the room. You can still safely get away with it in some cases though.
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Re: Askorium

Post by Blinx »

Is there a reason you're moving cmd.exe to that folder? Cmd is command line for windows right? couldn't you just cd to whatever directory it's in or use the full file name?
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Re: Askorium

Post by raocow »

Is there a prompt that supposed to appear in the command window after patching?

I just tried adding the 'no sprite limits' patch and I have a hard time telling why my boos are disapearing anyways.
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Re: Askorium

Post by yoshicookiezeus »

Did you set the sprite memory to 10? That's the setting the patch is designed to work with. Oh, and even with the patch, there is still the table limit of 12 sprites to take into account.

Blinx: Yes, you could run cmd from its original folder and type in the entire pathway, but since copypasting the program is so much easier, I don't see why you would want to do that...
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Re: Askorium

Post by raocow »

Hmmm.

Does the boo rings, or the larger sprites like the fishing boo and such, do they still count as 'one' sprite?
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Re: Askorium

Post by HarmfulGravemind »

I know that the boo ring are multiple sprites, about the big boo, I have no idea
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Re: Askorium

Post by yoshicookiezeus »

Yes, they still count as one.

(If you want to get technical about it, stuff like the Boo rings and beams actually consist of one sprite controlling several so-called "extended sprites", but those have their own sprite tables and don't take up slots from the normal ones.)
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Re: Askorium

Post by HarmfulGravemind »

are you sure? boo rings tend to make spawning other ennemys alot difficulter. I always had problems with sprite limitation when there where a boo ring.
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Re: Askorium

Post by yoshicookiezeus »

RAM Map wrote:$7E:1892 - 20 bytes - Cluster sprites type. 00 = None (free slot), 01 = 1UP (bonus game), 02 = Unused (Would crash if used), 03 = Boo from ghost ceiling, 04 = Boo from Boo ring, 05 = castle candle flame, 06 = Sumo Brother flame, 07 = Reappearing ghost, 08 = Death bat. The pointer for those is at $02F825.
In other words, yes. I think that your problem most likely has to do with sprite tile memory issues, instead of actual lack of free sprite slots.
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Re: Askorium

Post by raocow »

Super quick question:

what is the level that the game starts at, that is one screen with the little intro message. And can you make it more then one screen? Can you use a door and stuff?
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Re: Askorium

Post by HarmfulGravemind »

I think it is C5, for the rest I don't know.
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Re: Askorium

Post by Argumentable »

Yeah its C5 like it says in the SMWC FAQ. I just tried a quick test going through a door and having the message box pop up, so I'm pretty sure you can do whatever?

You can definitely do more than one screen
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Re: Askorium

Post by yoshicookiezeus »

As long as you don't allow Mario to die (after getting a Game Over, the life counter wraps around to P5) or hit a message box, you can do pretty much whatever you want with the intro level.
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Re: Askorium

Post by raocow »

raocow's daily annoying question!

I've seen in hacks cases where mario would just step on the edge of the screen and warped to a new level. I thought that was that 'warp hole' thing in the sprites section but apparently it's not? What does that do, then? And how would I set up a thing so Mario/Demo just has to passively touch this invisible block to warp somewhere?
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Re: Askorium

Post by yoshicookiezeus »

That effect can be achieved with a custom block (very creatively named the Teleport Block) that comes included with Blocktool. However, since the original Blocktool is conducive to slowdown, I would suggest using BlockTool Super Deluxe instead, and set it up with this block pack containing both all the original Blocktool blocks adapted for BTSD and a readme about how to actually set the thing up.
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Re: Askorium

Post by raocow »

Oh man.

Oh. Man.

I, raocow, have inserted A BLOCK. "What the Hell" is now officially "non-vanilla" !

*cheers*

Man, I don't get how to change it's appearance yet, but I'm sure I'll stumble on that.

VVV

I was about to look for this tomorrow but oh man, tomorrow caught up to me!
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Re: Askorium

Post by yoshicookiezeus »

raocow wrote:Man, I don't get how to change it's appearance yet, but I'm sure I'll stumble on that.
/me links raocow to the Map16 part of SMWCentral's FAQ
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Re: Askorium

Post by raocow »

Welp, might as well keep bothering people

So since I was basically in the leap of thing I figured I'd explore AddMusic. I'm using Romi's one. Now, I think I understand pretty much everything. I open com.com, and it's addmusic.exe romname.smc musicname.txt . I type all that in the promt, and the program tells me that the song is incerted and everything! However, it doesn't seem to work? Like, in the intro thing where it starts and gives you the intro message, I can't get that to go away, and all the number options tell me 'not used'.
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Re: Askorium

Post by flameofdoubt »

Not sure about the intro thing but i know from my own exploits that lunar magic will always say "Not Used" for all extra music slots, whether you insert it correctly or not, so tell it to use the correct "Not Used" slot and test it out by opening the rom.
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