lazzeri Posted June 13, 2003 Author Share Posted June 13, 2003 so you can only hack bins that have AHD files.is there a way to make AHD files. YES, you can only hack those ROMs... As i've already told i'll be more than glad to show anyone how to generate those files... Pretty easy if you know what you're doing (i mean if you ever used showgfx or hack-o-matic, which are basically the same thing) BTW, i'll work in something like Hack-o-matic linked to a "create-an-.AHD" feature... It will greatly ease the process... (at least I still have hackomatic that works pretty well) ... But B&W and with no animation of whatsoever... AND you have to find your own sprites... Just imagine: One day you just pick Tempest 2000 (as quoted), "de-sprite" it and share with the community... Then everyone will be able to do it's own hack... Wait and see... That's the very first public version... Things will be even funnier... :wink: Regards, Lazzeri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan Iacovelli Posted June 13, 2003 Share Posted June 13, 2003 ok, works pretty good just tried it keystone kapers love the editing sprites thing. one question though: no way to change the color of the sprite your editing? I notice that the color of the sprite you match(ie the cop hat is black and if you add to it it will match that color). but so far it's works ok. Dan Iacovelli ps. hack o matic would be good for the playfield only and then edit the sprites using your program it will make a good combo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazzeri Posted June 14, 2003 Author Share Posted June 14, 2003 ok, works pretty good just tried it keystone kapers love the editing sprites thing. Nice! one question though: no way to change the color of the sprite your editing? I notice that the color of the sprite you match(ie the cop hat is black and if you add to it it will match that color). but so far it's works ok. As far as i know you have to change an entire line, it is not possible to change one pixel only. Good news is that i just realized how can i do it - i mean i finally figured out the color info on the "mess" generated by 2600gfx. So now i am able to change colors (private testing, doing manually, has been working well.... I'll first automatize it, then made public)... I guess this will be available pretty soon... :-) Anyway, hard to promise anything... Regards, Lazzeri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan Iacovelli Posted June 14, 2003 Share Posted June 14, 2003 well, I think that most of us on the board are fimilar with distella and 2600 programing that it won't be hard to change the color. (the only programs that will be hard too is the bins that 8k or more since distella only works with 2 and 4k bins) Dan Iacovelli Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted June 14, 2003 Share Posted June 14, 2003 I dunno...it's pretty neat to have the sprite sizes layed out for you. Creating all the ahd files is going to be quite a chore though. Color is a whole new can of worms, since the games have this stored differently. Some like Pitfall! use a table for all the sprites...some like Adventure have seperate tables for each sprite. Some have no color stored at all, but grab the color as the game runs (like the grail in Adventure). And there's the single/multicolor sprite problem (as far as editing is concerned). A game that is programmed with single color sprites would not be possible to alter to be multicolored...the tool is going to have to recognise these differences and not allow the user to add more colors than the game can actually store. And just to get the color byte locations, you'd have to look at disassemblies to find them...major pain if they haven't been disassembled and commented already. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted June 17, 2003 Share Posted June 17, 2003 I dunno, I think we'd be surprised at the number of ROMs you could programmatically derive some sprite colors for by finding each write to a player color register and going back till you find an LDA,X or similar instruction (or rather, the byte that corresponds to that mnemonic.... with the 65xx having only 256 possible instructions and most not being relevant to this purpose, it shouldn't be hard to make an array of values to look for.) I don't think you could really make it part of a tool like this but it shouldn't be too hard to write something to at least give you a list of possible color locations. In fact, most of the games that people hack tend to have single-color sprites so you'd probably be looking for a normal LDA/STA pair or the X/Y equivalents. Not that I have time to try something like that right now Anyway, great work, lazzeri, it kinda takes the showgfx/hackomatic thing to the next level. For better or for worse Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted June 17, 2003 Share Posted June 17, 2003 dupin' the night away.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazzeri Posted June 18, 2003 Author Share Posted June 18, 2003 well, I think that most of us on the board are fimilar with distella and 2600 programing that it won't be hard to change the color.(the only programs that will be hard too is the bins that 8k or more since distella only works with 2 and 4k bins) Dan Iacovelli You see, i'm actually seeking for the color info on binary form, inserted in the middle of the code... Madman's job but worth it... Actually is quite "easy" to find it if we're talking about long, colored sprites. But for the little ones, or for the single-colored... I truly need help on it... Anyway, i'll try my best on it and any help would be greatly appreciated... Regards, Lazzeri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted June 18, 2003 Share Posted June 18, 2003 Actually is quite "easy" to find it if we're talking about long, colored sprites. But for the little ones, or for the single-colored... I truly need help on it... Problem is, that there a too many ways for color coding. While simple 4K games usualy use quite simple methods, larger games are using more sophisticated and twisted code (table driven, often with various levels of indirection). E.g. when I converted Ikari Warriors to NTSC, I found color and graphics data was stored interleaved! Without disassembling you are stuck in those cases. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazzeri Posted June 18, 2003 Author Share Posted June 18, 2003 I dunno...it's pretty neat to have the sprite sizes layed out for you. Creating all the ahd files is going to be quite a chore though. True... Anyway, it is actually a little easy ;P and i'm getting the hang of it so i'm getting faster everyday. For instance, i took 15 min to map the ROM and an extra 15 to create the .AHD for Frogger - and man, the sprites were well hidden... Actually my main problem is time: Working my a** out lately, so not so many free time... But i'll keep trying to finish paint-a-sprite, and also try to make one new .AHD file every day or so... Let's see... Color is a whole new can of worms, since the games have this stored differently. (...) A game that is programmed with single color sprites would not be possible to alter to be multicolored...the tool is going to have to recognise these differences and not allow the user to add more colors than the game can actually store. And just to get the color byte locations, you'd have to look at disassemblies to find them...major pain if they haven't been disassembled and commented already. Also true... I'm actually enabling on paint-a-sprite that every sprite's line (scanline?)can be changed to any color on the 16-color pallete. I'm not shure but i guess that if a user "overpaint" the sprite the game might crash, right? The fact is that colored sprites can be "easily" mapped on the game ROM - sometimes. Again, i'm NOT a ASM programmer, not to mention that i know d*ck about how the Stella works... Sad but true... I only know what to do when it became obvious for me. For instance, the above is the color info for the Walking / Standing Mario character as it appears on DK: 0b3f |10100110| 0b40 |10100110| 0b41 |01000110| 0b42 |01000110| 0b43 |01000110| 0b44 |01000110| 0b45 |01000110| 0b46 |01000110| 0b47 |01000110| 0b48 |01000110| 0b49 |00001111| 0b4a |00001111| 0b4b |00001111| 0b4c |00001111| 0b4d |00001111| 0b4e |01000110| 0b4f |01000110| (changed to binary to avoid formatting problems...) So it's based on that that i'm changing color info... When i see a "big cottonstick" laying on the ROM, i bet that that's some sort of color info... If any of you fine gentlemen knows something that can make the process less painfull, i'll be really thankful... Regards, Lazzeri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazzeri Posted June 18, 2003 Author Share Posted June 18, 2003 I don't think you could really make it part of a tool like this but it shouldn't be too hard to write something to at least give you a list of possible color locations. Wow, it really would help a lot... Not that I have time to try something like that right now Anyway, great work, lazzeri, it kinda takes the showgfx/hackomatic thing to the next level. For better or for worse Thanks, i guess... Now seriously: Thanks Raindog! And any help would be greatly appreciated... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted June 18, 2003 Share Posted June 18, 2003 If any of you fine gentlemen knows something that can make the process less painfull, i'll be really thankful... Since the lowest bit is not used for color information, data patterns that don't use it are most likely color informations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazzeri Posted June 18, 2003 Author Share Posted June 18, 2003 Problem is, that there a too many ways for color coding. E.g. when I converted Ikari Warriors to NTSC, I found color and graphics data was stored interleaved!Without disassembling you are stuck in those cases. OUCH.... Anyway, i'll try to solve the problems on the "simple ones"... And they're already freaking hard enough, you know... I mean, i know that there's a lot of things that i just can't make due to my own limitations as a programmer / "debugger". For instance: Interleaved sprites on RR. I might have to rewrote huge parts of my software for that and i don't know if i'll be ever able to... But i'm always trying to find a way! Regards, Lazzeri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazzeri Posted June 18, 2003 Author Share Posted June 18, 2003 Problem is, that there a too many ways for color coding. E.g. when I converted Ikari Warriors to NTSC, I found color and graphics data was stored interleaved!Without disassembling you are stuck in those cases. OUCH.... Anyway, i'll try to solve the problems on the "simple ones"... And they're already freaking hard enough, you know... I mean, i know that there's a lot of things that i just can't make due to my own limitations as a programmer / "debugger". For instance: Interleaved sprites on RR. I might have to rewrote huge parts of my software for that and i don't know if i'll be ever able to... But i'm always trying to find a way! Regards, Lazzeri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazzeri Posted June 18, 2003 Author Share Posted June 18, 2003 I don't know if you guys had already downloaded it but i just added 4 new .AHD files: Pacman, Ms. Pacman, XMan and Air-sea battle. Take a look! http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=28523 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted June 19, 2003 Share Posted June 19, 2003 Don't worry too much. It's probably only that strange Australian humor Andrew is presenting here once again. Thomas is getting too familiar with my sick sense of humour. Of course I'd prefer people to take the time to learn how to program '2600 games of their own - and I've been doing tutorials to help people do just that - but we can't all be heroes. Though I would consider it quite rude for someone to hack one of my pieces of software without asking first, I don't think it's up to the author of a "hacking tool" to enforce that. It's up to the morals of the individual hackers. I was not seriously suggesting the software should be banned. I was making the point, in a roundabout way, that the more noble thing to do is to write your own stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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