I was kinda bored and started thinking about some ROM hacks that could be done w/ VB games. By ROM hacks, I mean adding/changing parts of the game, like levels, not stupid stuff like changing Wario’s face to an egg, or plain cheats/change in difficulty, like a faster guy, unlimited lives, etc.
I didn’t put much thought into this (as you can probably tell), but here’s a preliminary list of stuff I thought could realistically be possible.
3D Tetris – different puzzles in puzzle mode (make a VB rather than a Race Car or something)
Golf – different courses
Galactic Pinball – different tables (although I think there may be too much custom stuff for each table)
Insmouse – different mazes
Jack Bros – different mazes
Mario Clash – different levels
Red Alarm – different levels
Vertical Force – different levels
Baseball – different teams (heh, who cares :P)
Wario Land – different levels
I left some games out either because there’s not really much to do with them (like Virtual Lab), or things like different guys in Teleroboxer, which probably have quite a bit of custom code for each character, which would be VERY difficult to change. Most of the stuff I noted would likely have a generic engine with level data (except probably Galactic Pinball).
I don’t think all of these should be done either, I was just throwing them out there. IMO, new levels for Wario Land would be the coolest, although I played with it a couple years ago and it wasn’t obvious how to do it. A custom Star Wars Death Star level for Red Alarm would be pretty sweet too, and the ability to change styles of ships would be cool.
Heh, I was looking at some of the dictionary search stuff yesterday and noticed RIFF and WAVE in Golf (both versions). This stood out, because those words are in the header of a wav file. I looked, and there are actually 2 wav files in the ROM (header and all). I pulled them out with no modifications (looked at the header to see how much data to copy), renamed it to .wav, and it played on my PC.
They’re attached to this post, and you can find them in the ROM(s) at 0x04d128, 0x04e684. The one is definitely the club swinging, the other is either the club hitting the ball, the ball hitting a tree, or maybe both/others (I didn’t pop the game in to check). So, I guess you should be able to pretty easily plunk your own wav file in if you wanted to change it (or maybe overlay someone yelling in the club swinging sound for some humor, and an excuse for why your shot sucked 😀 ).
Not that anyone probably cares (besides maybe Brian 😉 )… but here’s a patch for Virtual League Baseball (US) that allows you to select any team in the normal game (Regular teams, plus All Star and Miracle/Galaxy).
Because of the limited space to do any tricks, I had to modify how the selection worked. Now, rather than wrapping left and right when you get to the edge of the team selection, it goes to the next or previous team. It only wraps at the first team (USA) and the last team (All-E-League). To select the new teams, either go left from USA or right from Switzerland. I also made it so you can play against the same team. There’s a glitch that the COM selection square appears at the top when selecting some of the new teams as your opponent.
The patch only works on the US ROM, though it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to make it work for the JP version if anyone was interested (it’s probably the same code, but apparently in a different place in the ROM).
BTW, I didn’t see an easy way to allow you to select the new teams for the Pennant Race… when I did, it locked up because there weren’t enough other teams in the same league.
Would anyone be interested in being able to make your own 3D Tetris puzzles (in puzzle mode)? I’ve got it figured out how to do it, but I’m not sure about making a proper level editor, and if nobody is really interested, I’ll probably either push it off until later, or hack something crappy together. Of course if anyone can make a decent GUI for it, let me know 🙂 .
Is there a way to incorperate a brightness control in some games? Galactic Pinball is a bit dim to my tastes.
Even if you cannot make a menu (which I think will be impossible), it would be nice if you could bring out patches for the different modes. By that I mean that if you have like 5 different brightness modes that you can use 5 different IPS patches on the ROM. In that way you can flash the games with a brightness setting you like.
No clue if this is possible at all, but it would be a nice hack in my opinion!
I’ve been irritated about the game settings in Nester’s Funky Bowling, the name, gender and weight stays there for each round but the player settings, game type and music are reset for every restart… not a big problem, just irritating when wanting to start a new game directly after another.
That’s a topic that is over 10 years old and It’s good to be resurrected.
– SPACE PINBALL (proto) would be great. But it needs some patching really bad.
I tried to play other day but it’s practically impossible with just one ball. And if finished the 5 tables, a “Congratulations” followed by “The End” and the Final Score would make it look like a real game.
