Such A Hacker ;_;
(heh, that title's probably only going to make sense to xshirox)
I'm pretty proud of myself. I actually, for the first time ever, figured out how to do some stat hacking in a ROM without looking at anybody else's notes. Go me. Maybe I'll even figure out the music data for one of these games some day, too. ...well, maybe not, but still, this is big for me.
Since I'm so relatively close to completion on Ice Challenge, I've started taking some preliminary looks at some of the other games I've been considering hacking as future Nosuch releases. Among them is Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu, which is sort of a fighting game from the same line of games as the game that's become Ice Challenge.
To start me off, I looked around for where the preset characters' names are stored. When I found them, though, I noticed a string of random stuff afterwards, and it didn't seem to be more text like in Ice Challenge. Something clicked and I experimented, and eventually figured out how these bytes correspond to the stats and whatnot for each character.
Basically, I can do more with the character hacking in this one than just change their names and appearances. This bodes well.
The first five bytes in each string are, as was immediately apparent, the letters for each character's name. Interestingly, a preset can have five letters while it's only possible to use four letters when creating a character within the actual game.
The byte right after that... well, I don't have any idea what its use could be. Considering it went 00, 02, 04, and so on down the line for everyone, it might just be an internal identifier for each character. Maybe I should leave that one alone just to be safe. I do know what the rest of it does, though.
The next byte controls what's listed in the parentheses on the character's status screen. Neither of the actual translations I have for this game (one in English and one in Spanish, huzzah) ever fixed that part, but rahga.com suggests that it's their astrological sign. I trust that site, so that must be what it is. Huh, I guess their sign needs manual correction independent of the date/month data. Go figure.
Anyway, after that is the byte for blood type. In order, the possible options here are A (00), B (01), O (02), AB (03), and ? (04). I haven't noticed how this affects how a character handles, if at all, and I also don't know a damn thing about blood types in general, so I'd have to do some research before I start playing around with this part.
The next six bytes control the character's starting stats. It goes: HP, Punch, Kick, Throw, Defense, Speed. The first five use a simple key, so a one bit difference (e.g. 2C and 2D) would only amount to a one point difference in the game. The speed stat seems to work differently from the other stats, though.
The final two bytes are for, respectively, birth month and birth date. These two pieces of information are used to determine the character's move set. Both bytes use a similarly simple key (e.g. 00 through 0C are the months while 01 through 1F are for 1 through 31 on the day). For fun, I found out that it's possible to give a character a birth date of, for example, March 33, but I didn't look at how this affected their move set since, really, I wouldn't do that anyway. I didn't test what a month byte higher than 0C does, though.
So, yeah, this will prove interesting to play around with for one of my future hacks. First I have to decide who all I would want to include in the preset roster and start coming up with their exact stats from there.
I'm pretty proud of myself. I actually, for the first time ever, figured out how to do some stat hacking in a ROM without looking at anybody else's notes. Go me. Maybe I'll even figure out the music data for one of these games some day, too. ...well, maybe not, but still, this is big for me.
Since I'm so relatively close to completion on Ice Challenge, I've started taking some preliminary looks at some of the other games I've been considering hacking as future Nosuch releases. Among them is Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu, which is sort of a fighting game from the same line of games as the game that's become Ice Challenge.
To start me off, I looked around for where the preset characters' names are stored. When I found them, though, I noticed a string of random stuff afterwards, and it didn't seem to be more text like in Ice Challenge. Something clicked and I experimented, and eventually figured out how these bytes correspond to the stats and whatnot for each character.
Basically, I can do more with the character hacking in this one than just change their names and appearances. This bodes well.
The first five bytes in each string are, as was immediately apparent, the letters for each character's name. Interestingly, a preset can have five letters while it's only possible to use four letters when creating a character within the actual game.
The byte right after that... well, I don't have any idea what its use could be. Considering it went 00, 02, 04, and so on down the line for everyone, it might just be an internal identifier for each character. Maybe I should leave that one alone just to be safe. I do know what the rest of it does, though.
The next byte controls what's listed in the parentheses on the character's status screen. Neither of the actual translations I have for this game (one in English and one in Spanish, huzzah) ever fixed that part, but rahga.com suggests that it's their astrological sign. I trust that site, so that must be what it is. Huh, I guess their sign needs manual correction independent of the date/month data. Go figure.
Anyway, after that is the byte for blood type. In order, the possible options here are A (00), B (01), O (02), AB (03), and ? (04). I haven't noticed how this affects how a character handles, if at all, and I also don't know a damn thing about blood types in general, so I'd have to do some research before I start playing around with this part.
The next six bytes control the character's starting stats. It goes: HP, Punch, Kick, Throw, Defense, Speed. The first five use a simple key, so a one bit difference (e.g. 2C and 2D) would only amount to a one point difference in the game. The speed stat seems to work differently from the other stats, though.
The final two bytes are for, respectively, birth month and birth date. These two pieces of information are used to determine the character's move set. Both bytes use a similarly simple key (e.g. 00 through 0C are the months while 01 through 1F are for 1 through 31 on the day). For fun, I found out that it's possible to give a character a birth date of, for example, March 33, but I didn't look at how this affected their move set since, really, I wouldn't do that anyway. I didn't test what a month byte higher than 0C does, though.
So, yeah, this will prove interesting to play around with for one of my future hacks. First I have to decide who all I would want to include in the preset roster and start coming up with their exact stats from there.