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View topic - What's smspower's stance on other people's hacks?

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  • Joined: 16 May 2002
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What's smspower's stance on other people's hacks?
Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 1:07 am
You may or may not be aware of the Sonic Hacking Contest, most of the entries usually are hacks of the 16-bit games, or even mods of the 3D games, but there was a little gem amongst them this year: Sonic the Hedgehog Frenzy.

Even I don't know who this "Yoshister" guy is, and I don't know if he posted about his hack anywhere else, but I think it should be quite notable for our 8-bit world, because it's quite possibly the first complete overhaul of Sonic 2, and a pretty good one at that. The final Zone seems to be unplayable, though.

So, where do we go from here? Should it be mirrored on smspower in some capacity? Does it get a hack page? Maybe Bock and/or Maxim should try to find "Yoshister" and get him to register here? Dunno, but it might be interesting to discuss about this hack.

For the time being, here is a video of it.
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  • Joined: 29 Mar 2012
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 6:42 am
I suppose that in the archivist capacity of the site, the hack should be preserved here...
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Revo
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 7:44 am
Yoshister is already on the forum, I created a thread for his last hack: https://www.smspower.org/forums/16613-Sonic2ZenIslandHACK and his hack page: https://www.smspower.org/Hacks/SonicTheHedgehog2-SMS-ZenIsland-Mod
 
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 7:56 am
Yes, we would like to collect all the hacks really for preservation purposes but especially the good quality ones. It’s just a matter of the time it takes to collect them and create pages.
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 8:02 am
And page done: https://www.smspower.org/Hacks/SonicTheHedgehog2-SMS-Frenzy-Mod
 
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 9:01 am
I see, I didn't know he already was a member here, thanks. And apparently I didn't even know that Sonic 2 Zen existed, wow. Though, in the topic you linked to, it looks like Yoshister uploaded an updated version of Zen on november 2017, while the hack page still featured an older one, so I took the liberty to amend that. But now I'm having second thoughts about it, because maybe I should have created a patch instead of uploading the whole rom? I'm sorry to derail my own topic, and I'm even more sorry if I indeed did something wrong. Since I don't know how to create a patch, I'll stop here before I do even more damage.

Actually, one more question: shouldn't the Frenzy screenshots be replaced with proper 248×192 ones? I won't insist, though, since I got myself in a pretty bad place the last time I talked about proper screenshots.
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 10:52 am
Yes, please make patches rather than upload roms and use 1:1 screenshots wherever possible. I may have used different ones out of laziness.
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 11:35 am
I used screenshot given by Yoshister, exept for the title screen. You can change them if you want.
 
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 11:54 am
As I mentioned above, I don't know how to create a patch, and I'm not going anywhere near a screenshot again after what happened the last time, so I'll leave both tasks to someone else, I'm sorry.
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 12:20 pm
Making patches is super easy with flips. It’s a shame to be afraid of mistakes but I guess we can all sympathise.
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Post Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2020 12:49 am
Tom,
There's nothing to be sorry about here, you helped out and nobody got hurt, nothing bad happened. Most of the time "digital things" (web pages, programs, etc) need revisions, and that's just natural progression for digital things.
Take it easy, try to be happy & stay awesome :)

best regards,
- dink
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Post Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2020 3:04 am
Maxim wrote
Making patches is super easy with flips. It’s a shame to be afraid of mistakes but I guess we can all sympathise.
No, I'm not afraid of mistakes, please let me explain.

About flips: I once tried to use it to apply an ips patch of a hack because I couldn't find a prepared rom, and I had a less than pleasant experience with it, because it took over my system despite me saying "no" to its file association question. I had to clean the registry by hand for 15 minutes afterwards, so I don't look forward to use it ever again.

Fortunately, out of necessity, I found this useful online tool a few days ago: http://www.romhacking.net/patch/, I really think it should be mentioned on smspower in some form. Thanks to it, I managed to replace the complete rom I uploaded by mistake with an appropriate ips patch.

Maxim, please clean up the file I can't permanently delete, or bizarre things happen:

(no need to fairy it, it's just a heads-up)

About screenshots: maybe you don't remember it, but some time ago I got involved in a discussion here on smspower because I was creating a page for something and I took my time to take proper 1:1 pngout'd screenshots, just to find out that someone else created that page with sloppy screenshots in the mean time, and I reacted less than politely. To avoid further issues like that, I try not to discuss the possibility to replace screenshots anymore, I merely pointed out that the provided screenshots for Frenzy have borders, but there's no way I'm going to replace them with proper ones with the risk to be yelled at for it.

I still try to be helpful despite the forced https hurdle which heavily hinders my means of browsing (the other day I created a Credits page, for example), and I always try to keep my occasional bad behaviours under control after all the times I had to apologise to the community (both here and elsewhere), but... I'm still human, a bad human perhaps. There's a reason I'm superbanned from many websites (including ocremix and tasvideos), after all. I've been banned multiple times even from Retro, too. And don't get me started about my real life, I'd exceed phpbb's maximum post length.

Speaking of which, sorry for this long post, but I can't sleep. Again.

*sigh*

Best regards.
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Post Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2020 7:43 am
I guess making file associations is helpful for the average user. I suggest you look at flips’ command line mode as that probably bypasses the “average user” part. BPS patches have the useful feature of checking you’re patching the correct file, and they are much smaller for significant changes, so it’s nice to have both. Ideally I’d find a way to generate the patches automatically...

I’m happy to see screenshots replaced with 1:1 versions. I’ll back you up if there’s some trouble, or you can post them in the forums and I’ll do the replacing.
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