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  • Joined: 20 Jan 2019
  • Posts: 13
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Curious about getting into SMS hacking
Post Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2019 10:17 am
Hi there all,

I'm new to this whole world, although have had a SMS since I was a kid, and would like to do some romhacking to put in custom sprites into Wonder Boy or Alex Kidd.

I did have a look around in the various editing sections here but I was not sure where to start. Could somebody point me in the right direction? I did have a go following along a thread here previously (in the case of Wonder Boy) but my sprite edits ended up crashing the game unfortunately.

Any advice or pointers would be appreciated. Nice to meet you all :)
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  • Joined: 19 Oct 1999
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  • Location: London
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Post Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2019 11:00 am
Alex Kidd has a full featured editor in KiddEd, which should make it easy to hack. In general, games store sprites uncompressed, but sometimes in reduced bit depth, to allow streaming the graphics in for animation. You need to edit them in place in the ROM, in whatever format they are in. Generic tile editors are usually fine for that.
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Post Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2019 1:32 pm
I gave KiddEd another try and managed to get it working this time. I had tried it in the past but it didn't end up saving properly (even now I can't override the same filename as the editor claims something else is using the same file for some reason, odd). Thanks though I should be able to persevere with this.

I did try hacking Wonder Boy in the past with TileMolester. While I was able to change the images and save them into the rom the emulator spits the rom out with Software Error. I'm missing something or using a rubbish tile editor.
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Post Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2019 1:56 pm
Your emulator is set up to use a BIOS, which includes a check that the ROM is unmodified - which obviously fails. The tile editor isn't correcting this. You should be able to disable this check.
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Post Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2019 2:55 pm
Good catch. Thanks for that, my tile change is showing up now :)

Appreciate the help Maxim
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  • Joined: 06 May 2012
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  • Location: France
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Post Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 9:06 am
Hi, there is also Master Tile Converter http://jmimu.free.fr/mastertileconverter/ that is made for that.
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