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05-06-24 04:11 AM |
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| Main - Posts by Heian |
| Heian |
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 Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 59/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Posted by NightKevPosted by NightKevBy that I meant the Game (and subsequently, of course, the hack) was made for the NES. Not that you created an NES game from scratch or whatever. No problem; BTW, my "no" is in response to your second question. It's not a translation; it's a hack. Some more features that might be worth mentioning: * The number font has been tweaked so that the digits are all thinner; this way the single digits and double digits look good together, and are set off from the alphabet, making the scoreboard and its "9FURUTA, 8YUICHI..." look better. The inning numbers are in Japanese now. * Some of the teams have slightly unusual uniform colors so that no two teams look alike (as happened with New York and Utah in the original). The Yomiuri Giants actually wear orange shirts only in practice; same for the Hawks (pale yellow) and Eagles (gold). * The stats are actual totals from 2006; rookies either have last year's minor league stats, or for guys straight out of school, made-up-but-realistic stats. ^^; * There are more, uh, "short-tempered" players than there were in the original. These are the 12 team names in full: Chunichi Dragons Hanshin Tigers Yakult Swallows Yomiuri Giants Hiroshima Carp Yokohama Bay Stars Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters Seibu Lions Fukuoka Softbank Hawks Chiba Lotte Marines Orix Buffaloes Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles Since the original game, the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes have merged with the Orix Blue Wave, the Eagles have been created as an expansion team, the Hawks have moved to Fukuoka and changed owners twice, and the Fighters have moved up to Sapporo. (I hope their ownership never changes! Go Ham!) |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 60/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Duffjr, YES, Norkus is absolutely real; he's Akinobu Okada, who has now retired and is managing the Tigers. Just who the players are is worthy of a long FAQ. I'll post more on this later, but for now -- since I'm sure you're wondering -- Paste of NJ is Bob Horner, who was indeed hammering the ball at a 50-homer pace when he joined the Swallows in mid-season as this game was released.
One thing I forgot to mention! My game lists the teams in order of the previous year's standings. So the Dragons and Fighters won it last year, with the Yokohama Bay Stars and Rakuten Eagles finishing last. There isn't so much of a gap in this game, though, and you could certainly lead one of those tail-enders to the pennant if you tried. I was trying to decode the password system -- nobody wants to play a full season with a hack so I was trying to crib together some passwords that were about 33 games from the pennant: a mini-season, but long enough to play a series with every opponent. Unfortunately I couldn't solve it. One thing I did manage to figure out is that often if you reverse the 5th and 6th characters in a password, you still get a valid one. For example, EHABAEA puts you at 41-0 to start the season (Boston in the original; Yakult in this one; earned those 41 wins myself!), and EHABEAA is also OK, but you're Jersey/Nippon Ham this time. If you've ever wondered what happens when you play an entire season and lose the pennant race, try one of these two hacked passwords: CHXAACC (Giants: 162nd game, 26 wins; season ends in defeat after this game) CHXACAC (same here, 28/142) If you want to finish the season undefeated but still have the luxury of dropping a game or two (huh!?), try EBDBAAJ. Chunichi Dragons, two wins in the books already, but it's the "zeroth" game of the season. And Dr. Death, are you working on any other baseball games? I liked your Baseball Stars hack; that was a lot of fun. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 61/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Dr. Death, I'd love to see a hack of Baseball Stars II; that game had a lot of potential, but since you couldn't name your own players, the primary reason to play it sort of disappeared.
I think my next sports hack will be for Bases Loaded II. The biorhythm system means that you have to shake up your lineup from time to time. I wish I knew more assembly -- getting some of those hidden stats to display on the screen would make the game even better. I also discovered a flaw in my hack. The Yomiuri Giants have no backup catcher -- if you try to pinch hit for Shinnosuke Abe, the game will tell you that you don't have another catcher. This problem occurred in the original game as well; I think Utah had only one catcher. In my casem I selected the rosters based on who had the most at-bats last season, and since the Giants former backup, Murata, isn't on the team anymore, I didn't notice that none of the 10 guys on the Giants' bench were catchers. I'll have to fix that. More "real player" trivia from the original: Utah pitcher #50 Quinta is Brad 'The Animal' Lesely; Philadelphia pitcher #20 Car (who gives up the homer in the demo screen) is a guy named Sanchez whose first name I forget. That team's clean-up hitter, Oko, is actually Warren Cromartie, who had a long and distinguished career in Japan with the Giants. Boston's Frieda is Randy Bass, who came within one homer of the single-season record in 1985 before the Giants intentionally walked him four times on the last day of the season. The original Japanese game has some outrageous flaws: the foreign power hitters can hit homers almost every time up, and some of them have different animations in which they're fat. They also have a bug that makes the game near-unplayable: the foreign hitters can't bunt, but if you swing halfway (instead of pressing B like a normal bunt), he'll square up like any other bunter. But he still has the power of a real swing! This 'bunt home run' thing ruined this game's reputation in Japan, and they never got the superior 'fixed' version that was sold in the US. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 62/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Posted by luis No, it's the North American cartridge "Bases Loaded (U).nes" (or something similar). If you patch it to the Japanese game ("Moero! Pro Yakyu"), it'll glitch, since the data is in different positions in the Japanese game. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 63/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Is there a dedicated forum for Zero Fission or for Metroid hacking in general? I'm thinking of taking on the challenge of creating a brief Metroid game (set years before Samus Aran's action) and am wondering if there's a better place to start a thread. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 64/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Those fonts are great, particularly the Old West one. My hat is off to their creators! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 65/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
A bunch of people here spent a lot of tine trying to hack F-Zero, and we never got anything done. One problem was the big precomposed 32x32 "panels" -- they have to be lined up just right for the tracks to be drivable, so while it's possible to spot the layouts of those panels in the ROM (Death Wind's is particularly noticeable if you set your hex editor to 32 bytes per line; an oval of numbers in a sea of 00 bytes!),
I actually managed to make an alternative Death Wind, but if you drive into certain areas, it becomes a farce as your car gets pulled every which way while the computer tries to get you on to a pre-determined path. The only other accomplishments I had were to make a new font for the times, which looked more like the font used for the speed, and to make a new Big Blue background which looks more tropical. I can't run this on the computer (Mac!) I'm in front of now, so I can't vouch for its completeness, but on my web site I spotted an attempt at new graphics on Silence and putting the tile numbers over the graphics in order to get a handle on the course layouts. These two files might also contain the tropical Big Blue; I'm not sure. The GBA F-Zero games have a slightly different panel structure. I think they're made of 8x8 tiles, the layout of which is then compressed. Perfect Guy, if he's still around here, decrypted this layout, but due to the fact that each tile has to butt against each neighbor in three or four exact ways (vertical and horizontal position of the round "barrier" circles, which side of the barrier the course is on, and then the position of the under-track shadow), making new panel layouts is extremely difficult. As a last resort, I looked into taking the 256 pre-composed panels in Climax, which are pre-built to fit with each other, and making 256 new and more interesting ones. I couldn't find where in the game they were stored, and eventually went back to hacking baseball games (^^  .
Your work on the original F-Zero looks great, though! Maybe we can have another go at it! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 66/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
OK then; maybe I'll just put up a "WIP" thread here since I'm not at all sure how far I'm going to go with this project.
A couple of questions while I've got your attention: (^^
* How can I get ZF to run faster? Can I turn off the display of certain things so that I can zip from room to room wihout having to wait five seconds or more? * Can the window be resized? It's often not big enough to hold the text. * Will your editor ever support moving graphics from Fusion to ZM, or should I go ahead and try doing that in Tile Molester? The storyline in my hear here is set mainly in a human-constructed space station and I've gotta have Fusion's BSL computers and metal catwalks (and the vending machines!), which are ideal. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 67/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Sorry about those patches not working -- but I can give you a bit of the falvor of those hacks by posting some ancient screenshots that I dug up (and please forgive the ugly white borders on the older ones):
* Before we found that 'panel map' with a the 00s to denote empty space, we had found an area that seemed to be track layout. These bytes actually define the larger panels. IIRC, two bytes correspond to a 32x2 strip of small 8x8 tiles. We were able to bridge Sand Ocean and Silence by making a row of blank track tiles: 
* Then, while we were tring in vain to make new courses, I had a go at making new backgrounds and fonts. Here's the new, more tropical, shallower Big Blue: 
(The font used for the time now looks like a taller version of the one used for the speed. Now I can't look at the original anymore. ^^) * Next up was to make Silence into Stonehenge. Would be a nice twilight scene but you have to pretend not to notice that the moon is immense, and the grass is 'flowing'.  ;
* I also managed to turn Port Town into a daytime scene with white clouds and green mountains. It's supposed to be the Arashiyama area of Kyoto: 
This is the game's title screen, so it really makes things look different. I was in the middle of making Fire Field into a dull gray moonscape when the project sort of drifted away. I still think a great F-Zero hack could be made if we could just get around this compression, and somehow give the user the ability to draw new 'panels' first before laying them out. When Nintendo made BS F-Zero 2, the panel maps are (IIRC) kept intact; what's different is the layout of the tiles that form these panels. Even if we could only make new panels, it would still feel like a new game One possibility is to take the 256 pre-made panels in F-Zero Climax, which the game has already prepared algorithms for computer cars to drive on, and redraw some of the redundant ones and make more interesting ones. Unfortunately I could never find any data about them in the Climax ROM. Guy Perfect, you wouldn't happen to know anything about that data, would you? ^^; GP Legend probably also has the ability to do this -- the mythical eReader cards seem to be formed by these same panels that are used in the Climax course editor. Climax has 16 different areas each with their own tile graphics, and plenty of tunes, cars, etc., so we could probably get some serious variety going on if we edited that game. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 68/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Just thought of something -- there was once a great site where someone had all the Mute City 1 panels saved as graphics, and you could enter the numbers of the panels and it would display them for you. I can't seem to find it anymore but I saved one example of the giant map that it output for you and can upload it somewhere if you want to see it.
One thing that proved to be difficult was editing the names of the tracks. Sounds like something that would be trivial to find, but it wasn't. Also, no one ever found any data about the speeds of the cars. It would be nice to restore some balance by giving the non-Fire Stingray cars a little more speed. (I got the graphics from one of the BS F-Zero 2 cars into the regular game, but they were glitchy, the palette was off, and in any case the stats didn't change.) You two know a lot more than I do about the programming aspect, but I could probably still make aesthetic adjustments like new backgrounds, etc. A lot of the background graphics are repeated and there isn't much space to make new stuff like there would be with Climax or GPL. SMKdan, did you actually figure out what the compression is? Years ago, we were unable to discover what the relationship between the two-byte compressed value and the raw tile numbers was. Guy got it for MV; it was something that hadn't been used in other games (and was in fact very difficult to convert into -- my tracks were full of glitches). I suspect that with some flexible 32x32 panels that can connect with various things, we could make some really good courses just by taking advantage of the course-specific panels. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 69/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Just downloaded this (it's the Program 1 ROM, in case anyone is having trouble) and I love the graphics and new music!
The game itself is harder than the original, and playing with a keyboard, I'm utterly hopeless -- took many tries just to get past stage 1 and was very thankful for the extra life that you placed there. (Having become used to the tighter control of the GBA Castlevanias, I'd almost forgotten how tough this game was.) Finally reached the bat boss on stage 3 and he doesn't seem to line up for your axe throws like the original one did. He got the best of me and I haven't tried again yet. Where did the new music come from? Stage 1 to 3 sounds pretty familiar, but I can't place it. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 70/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
VL-Tone! Great to see you back! It was your giant track PNGs that I was trying to find before. How did you make those? I'm interested in making new courses first (since we can always do time trials on those) and then worrying about computer AI.
If you made those PNGs directly from the ROM data, does that mean that you figured out the relationship between the 2-byte pairs and the 2x32 "strips" that they define? Once we can make new strips, we can make new courses. Smkdan, that old F-Zero thread was on the "old" Acmlm board, so it probably would have taken some digging to find it. Look through that thread (from 2004!) and you'll see us slowly slogging through all the basic stuff from this game -- at the time the inner workings of this game were like a complete mystery. And Guy, did you generate that map from the X and Y values that you found, or did you just draw it as an approximation? I'm wondering why the game defines so many points in places where they don't seem to be needed. The 5 points down the backstretch, and the 3 following the starting point, don't seem to do anything -- the car could just head for the point right before the next curve without any problems, right? (I ask this because I'm designing a TrueType font for one of my grad courses, and if the Mute City 1 course were a letterform, all those points would be deleted.) |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 71/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Anikiti's hacks are indeed amazing, but he really needs to tone down the difficulty. While sometimes it feels good to figure out the amazingly difficult puzzle he's given us to solve, and then execute it, doing a stage 50 times generally isn't fun. I found myself refusing to give up in his last game just because I wanted to gaze at the beautiful graphics in the next world!
NightKev, I can translate the text on the screenshot page if you like. It's names of worlds for the most part. Should I just post it here? |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 72/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
SMkdan, I'm looking at your 26th and 27th posts (made on June 20) and am still figuring out what your explanation says! ^^;
Could you give us amateurs a straight-from-the-game example of how those bytes pull data from that 3rd table and bring about the lines of 2x2-tile squares? Table 2 -- the row pointer table -- in particular is giving me fits. What exactly does 'is indexed by' mean, in your document? Long ago, knowing nothing of how it worked, I saw a number of "BE 71" bytes following the 32x16 Big Blue panel layout. I turned just the first one to 'C4 C4', arbitrarily experimenting, and got: 
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| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 73/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
OK VL-Tone, I think I've finally got it. Your and SMKdan's explanations go from big to small, whereas I'm trying to imagine how the course starts with the little tiles and then builds the 2x2-tile 'macro-tiles', then the rows, then the big panels.
Forgive my slonwess, but using your examples, is this correct? 
* From this set of 256 mini-tiles (8x8), a 'macro-tile' is made from four of them, like this: 
They're stored in the order 'upper left, lower left, upper right, lower right', so at index 0F19 somewhere in the ROM ('table 3') we'll find 9A 9A 9B 9B. * The game then strings 16 of these macro-tiles to form a row. One row that contains macro-tile 0F19 is this one: 
...stored at index C676 in 'table 2'. Since that row is used many times -- namely rows 4 through 10 in the large 'panel' here: 
...we'll find "C6 76 C6 76 C6 76..." in the table where Sand Ocean's panel composition is described, possibly elsewhere if other courses have the same stuff at their starting lines. So the game isn't actually compressing this stuff; it's just creating re-usable chunks of intermediate size because at the 32x16-tile 'panel' level too much data is re-used, and laying out thousands of tiny tiles is similarly unwieldy? And what we course-makers might want to do is to re-arrange these 'macro-tiles' (keeping their structure intact) into new rows, and/or re-arranging existing rows into new panels? |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 74/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
What's with all the flaming? This has the potential to be a seriously funny hack!
First off, the face looks great. Borat doesn't actually wear a red suit, so I was going to suggest changing it to light blue (or maybe gray, but certainly not black). But if that conflicts with the blue sky, go ahead and keep it. I haven't even played it yet, but the Princess had better be Pamela Anderson and Toad has to be Azamat Bagatov. Yes, the needless swearwords should be dumped. (And I think you got it wrong to begin with -- doesn't Borat, still struggling with English grammar, yell out of the car that he's going to eat the other driver's shit?) Why not be creative and change the bricks to something out of Cold War-era Soviet architecture or something? Might be tough to get that much flavor into a 16x16 block, but maybe at least get some gray panels in there instead of a needless obscenity. If you can hack the music, make it Central Asian / Balkan in flavor like the fantastic movie soundtrack. And -- this goes without saying -- the lettering should be in Cyrillic! It doesn't even have to make sense; the TV show didn't bother about correctness or even pronounce-ability. (The movie, OTOH, used correct Russian for quite a lot of it; I liked this intellectual bit sandwiched between the vulgarities.) Keep at it; this could be a lot of fun! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 75/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Luigi-san added massively immense floating white letters in the background telling you which Koopa Kid you're fighting!
Pay attention, people! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 76/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Whipped this up in about half an hour. Roman letters straight from Nintendo, basic Cyrillic, then some Kazakh-only letters, then two from those bone-brained Uzbeks, then Central-Asian-style 1 and 7.
Made it with Tile Layer Pro at double size, so you should be able to paste them in if you like. GREAT SUCCESS!  |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 77/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Posted by drjayphd Actually the Cyrillic displayed underneath the names of people being interviewed in the movie, and in the credits of the movie, is seemingly-normal Russian, and the maps seemed OK too. It's the speech that isn't Kazakh. (Borat speaks Hebrew and Azamat speaks Armenian.) On the TV show, though, the Cyrillic letters are unpronounceable nonsense. I was thinking CKY could either use the correct letters, or just stick them in at random to get the feeling of the TV skits. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 78/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
MaxKnight, would he be interested in adding the sound novels that were never translated?
I translated three of the four and they're not half bad. Unfortunately I must have messed up the HTML because most browsers don't seem to be able to display them well. The "a name=..." parts don't work. (The airship novel seems to work OK in MSIE.) http://www.geocities.com/tuffydabubba/ I'd love to add these to a serious hack of this game, as I spent a decent amount of time making them. Can you get any use out of them? |
| Main - Posts by Heian |
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