so for a while now I have been pokin around in the data for the 1989 NES game River City Ransom (a.k.a. Street Gangs, a.k.a. Downtown: Hot-Blooded Story)
I'd like to get saltworlders involved in making an elaborate ROM hack, going well beyond the usual "text & tiles" type hack, to make something more like a different game on the same engine...
I made this colorful map of what I understand of the ROM data so far: http://saltquix.gith...o/barf/map.html still workin on it
here's a rough plan... subject to interest from you guys of course
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I continue to investigate where things are in the ROM and also the data format involved, & add to the page above
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at this stage any truly intrepid wonks are welcome to crack open a hex editor to manually try to make use of this knowledge... but this isn't recommended....
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I develop some simple command-line tools which can pull out certain bits of info in a readable text-based format, then push back once you've modified it in your favourite text editor
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so if you're interested in getting involved at that stage you'll need to be happy to work with doing stuff with a command line and version control (github). i'm happy to help as much as I can though.
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next I'd start work on visual editors (like the actual geometry of a location, where raised surfaces and walls and pits and exit zones go)
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finally, i'll attempt to consolidate all the separate little tools into a nicely wrapped-up single GUI app
I don't wanna dictate a theme for the hack...I'd rather let things emerge and percolate as they will, driven by experimentation
i think this could be cool. thoughts, comments, suggestions welcome....
(here's a useless bit of tech triv for ya: the background graphics for locations that are 3 or 4 screens wide are stored completely different to backgrounds for locations only 1 or 2 screens wide... the data is in a different format, even physically they are stored on a separate memory chip within the cartridge... #wow #whoa )