My hack is dropping out, why ?

[Old_Atarian]

*** Moderators: Could you move this to hacks forum please ***

* Sorry About posting in the wrong place, it won't happen again *

 

in my learning how things work phase, i tried hacking Laser Volley nothing big just changeing sprites and stuff with hack-o-matic.

 

well after i changed the detonator sprite and saved the new bin under a diffrent name, i tried it out and when i got to the detonator (the first one) it just went to a black screen and stopped dead.

 

The Emulator i am using is PCAE win 2.5 (Does this matter ?)

 

now is there somthing i should do after making a change to a rom before saving it that would prevent this from happening ?

 

thanx for any help in this area

 

OA

[StanJr]

better take another look at exactly what you changed. Sometimes the bitmaps also include other vital information that helps the game run. Double check that.

[Old_Atarian]

oki doki did not know that thanks Stan Jr.

 

OA

[Nukey Shay]

The thing is that the game might be sharing bitmap info for other things (when hacking games, this is an easy way of picking up spare memory...try to share as many byte values as possible). So if one (for example) ends with a string of 3 $24's...and another one begins with the same string...you can move them back-to-back and cut out 3 of them That's 3 bytes of free rom. Doesn't sound like much, until you add them all up later (the current hack I'm working on has over 250 bytes that are shared).

 

When in doubt, disassemble. Then you can see exactly what else is accessing those bytes. Distella will label everything that it detects, and you'll just need to search for the labels. If there are areas of the program that remain unlabelled, you'll need to create a .cfg file that it can use to help it.

[Old_Atarian]

Thanks Nukey Shay , i will get a working hack yet

 

I