So, yeah. I’m one of the chosen ones that got the Faceball ROM early. Just to prevent misunderstandings: I got the ROM early because I’m a nice guy. I don’t do this for money or to get a free copy. I will buy both, the normal and the collectors edition. The original version is a really great game. I played through it multiple times and I think it is easily worth 100$.
I spent the last 4 or 5 days hacking around in the ROM and have already discovered allot of things. It is my first ROM hacking project, so I needed some time to figure everything out. I focus on changing the gameplay and don’t try to fix the typos. Special thanks go to Greg Stevens and HorvatM who pointed me at the right tools. The Sacred Tech Scroll from Guy Perfect made things allot easier for me. He also took the time to explain me how to write asm statements and get them into a ROM (even though he didn’t know what he was helping me with).
That said. manipulating the ROM is fairly easy. After 2 days I could already do things I would have thought are not possible. I can’t wait for what guys like HovratM or Greg Stevens can pull of. So here is what is possible so far.
There are 14 mazes in the ROM which I can freely modify. Meaning I know how to:
– change wall positions
– change wall types (I was hoping to find a mirror wall-type as there are some hints in the game that this was planned but it seems like they didn’t make it into the code.)
– change enemy start position
– change enemy strength
– change enemy drop item
– change enemy attack behavior
– change enemy movement behavior
– change enemy escape behavior
– how to attach a shield to an enemy
– some other stuff I can’t remember right now
– oh yeah, there is a Facball enemy I can use
I also think I know where the items that simply lie around in the levels are stored, but I didn’t play around with that yet.
On top of that I figured out how the mazes are loaded. This allows me to create completely new ones, put them somewhere in the ROM and load them instead of the existing ones.
As I said before, there are only 14 mazes. This means if I manipulate maze 1 it changes for all 4 stages. However, I figured out where the selected stage is stored. After that I wrote some code that is executed instead the original maze-loading code. This allows me to load what ever maze I want and yeah, this means I can have 56 different mazes in the game.
However, I only tested this in a very simple way.
OK, that it for now. Ask questions if you want to. I will keep the updates coming.
Ohh… just as a side note: I cleaned up the original ROM. Due to the way the ROM was dumped it contained the code two times. I simply removed one copy and padded the ROM. Now there is plenty of space for complex mazes. I also changed the ROM header information.
thunderstruck schrieb:
Ohh… just as a side note: I cleaned up the original ROM. Due to the way the ROM was dumped it contained the code two times. I simply removed one copy and padded the ROM.
Oh, so it is overdumped? I was already wondering, because to my knowledge the ROM should be 8 MBit, not 16.
I should replace the Faceball ROM on the site with a correct dump. Can you send me a fixed version with the duplicate removed, thunder?
thunderstruck schrieb:
Ohh… just as a side note: I cleaned up the original ROM. Due to the way the ROM was dumped it contained the code two times. I simply removed one copy and padded the ROM.
Oh, so it is overdumped? I was already wondering, because to my knowledge the ROM should be 8 MBit, not 16.
I should replace the Faceball ROM on the site with a correct dump. Can you send me a fixed version with the duplicate removed, thunder?
I only did this for my modded version… but you only have to remove half of the file. No big deal.
i do recall that you mentioned 1 unused level was hiding in the rom? any chance you will include that level in your hack?
I believe you are recalling a similar statement from HorvatM for Mansion of Insmouse. He found the “DEMO” level of the game in the ROM, which is only used in the game for the opening sequence but isn’t actually playable, and you can edit the level and sort of play it using InsmEdit, but I think the level is still unbeatable and doesn’t connect to any of the other levels in the game.
do we have proof this was actually a legit VB game that was being worked on at the time? i mean how do we know the guy who had it didn’t just create the game himself? is there like list of titles that were being worked on? cos i dont remember ever hearing this one before..
shenmueso wrote:
do we have proof this was actually a legit VB game that was being worked on at the time? i mean how do we know the guy who had it didn’t just create the game himself? is there like list of titles that were being worked on? cos i dont remember ever hearing this one before..
There was an official flyer made for the game and released by Bullet-Proof Software at the time. You can see a high resolution scan of this flyer here:
You’ll notice that the images on this flyer contain portions of the exact same game that has now been made available online.
Also, DanB has been working with the ROM of the game to make his new Ballface game, and he informed us that located within the Faceball ROM is evidence of the fact that the source code for V-Tetris (the other game made by Bullet Proof Software) had been copied and modified for use in this game, likely with the purpose of saving some time in the making of this game. That source code, as far as anyone knows, isn’t available to any private coder, so chances are that only Bullet-Proof Software could have had the original source code for V-Tetris to use in Faceball.
Here’s his post about this, and I’m assuming I interpreted it correctly:
i do recall that you mentioned 1 unused level was hiding in the rom? any chance you will include that level in your hack?
I believe you are recalling a similar statement from HorvatM for Mansion of Insmouse. He found the “DEMO” level of the game in the ROM, which is only used in the game for the opening sequence but isn’t actually playable, and you can edit the level and sort of play it using InsmEdit, but I think the level is still unbeatable and doesn’t connect to any of the other levels in the game.
The existence of the DEMO level was already known before I started hacking the game, though I don’t know who discovered it and how (by trying random 4-letter English words?).
There doesn’t seem to be any unused level in Faceball. The level layouts and their associated data are all close together in the ROM and there are 14 of them.
Ahhh… What I meant by saying that you “found the ‘DEMO’ level of the game in the ROM” was that you determined its location within the ROM, and it can now be edited using your level editor. I can see how it could be interpreted as you originally discovered it, but that’s not what I meant. I was reading old forum posts and was under the impression that DogP was the original person who discovered the level, after doing some work with the dumped ROM of the game, but I’m not sure about that.
A list of all passwords can be found in plaintext in the ROM, the last one being “DEMO”. I found it when I did a full text search for a known password in the Insmouse ROM. It was first published in my FAQ: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/games/?r004ff005
HorvatM wrote:
There doesn’t seem to be any unused level in Faceball. The level layouts and their associated data are all close together in the ROM and there are 14 of them.
I agree. I searched through the whole ROM to find something that looks like a maze but I didn’t find anything beside the 14 mazes.
OK… I programmed the part that writes the mazes, enemies and so on to the ROM. It seems to work pretty good but I only tested it by looking at the output and comparing it to what was originally in the ROM. I still have to update the pointer arrays that point to the mazes though. The GUI also doesn’t contain a the elements to configure the player position yet. However, the alpha version should be done soon.
DanB wrote:
Cool that you’ve made so much progress so fast! Did you find out if 10×10 squares is the maximum level size?
It is. The game crashs if a wall is longer then 10 segments. If I add wall outside of a 10×10 square the start and end positions are recalculated to fit into the 10 x 10 square.
