Hello. I'm working on a Donkey Kong hack for a friend of mine. I already edited some sprites and tiles with yy-chr. Now I'd like to create a new title on the title screen. I know that one single tile is used to create "DONKEY KONG". I want to take that tile and rearrange it. In the PPU memory view of the hex editor of FCEUX I see the tile ID's but when I change them and save, it won't stay. So can someone help me with this please?
It's probably stored in a compressed format (it doesn't have to be though). I'm not sure. I'm not sure what you're changing and saving, but changing anything in the ROM is sure to have an effect of some kind. You can't edit it from an emulator (like you can with CHR-ROM tiles).
I'm sure I've seen hacks of it where the title screen was changed, not sure how they did it, but you could look those up maybe and compare to the original ROM and see where the difference is. (in command prompt - "fc /b file1 file2). Or note the pattern that you see in the emulator, and see if you can find it in the ROM (that kinda works easily only if it's uncompressed though).
A lot of Nintendo's NES games use a form of run-length encoding for their title screens: two bytes for the nametable start address and one byte for the length, whether it's a run or a bunch of literal bytes, and whether the address increments by 1 or 32. I've seen code like this in Balloon Fight, Super Mario Bros., and Tetris.
ok, I got help from a guy at NintendoAge. At the address 3905 in the hex editor it starts to put the tile in place e.g. 20 83 C5 62. 2083 is the position, C5 means 5 tiles in a row downwards, and 62 is the tile's ID. There is also 43 for example instead of C5 which means 3 tile in a row to the right. Once figured that out it's really easy to edit.
Sounds like what tepples described.
tokumaru wrote:
Sounds like what tepples described.
Exactly. But I didn't really get it then.....
Maybe efficient data encoding formats are like the Matrix: hearing a description will give you misconception after misconception, and you have to see it worked out to understand it.