Author Topic: Donkey Kong Country 4 hack  (Read 4973 times)

Awesome Panda

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Donkey Kong Country 4 hack
« on: June 14, 2011, 04:28:01 PM »
Because I was bored and I tend to procrascinate a lot during exams, I figured I might as well see what I can do with the DKC4 ROM. A little bit, from what I've done:

*Changed some of the colour palettes
*Altered some of the music to sound a bit more accurate to the original soundtrack
*Changed the font, because I felt like it
*Removed the "4" from the name because it looked stupid

Not exactly DKC4: VT03 edition, but whatever.

In case you're wondering why I didn't bother editing the text, it's because I can't actually find it in the ROM. It doesn't arrange the letters in ASCII fashion, nor can I find it by looking at the PPU itself. I find this kind of odd, given that (as far as I'm aware) most Hummer games do the former.

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codeman38

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Donkey Kong Country 4 hack
« Reply #1 on: June 14, 2011, 06:37:09 PM »
The reason you couldn't find the text is because it's RLE-compressed. This despite the fact that there are no strings of more than 2 of the same character, so this makes the text larger. :rolleyes:

Edit: If you're curious, the credits are at 0x2AF6D. 0x21 = "A", 0x22 = "B", etc. 0x02 appears to be the RLE marker.
« Last Edit: June 14, 2011, 06:39:51 PM by codeman38 »

Awesome Panda

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Donkey Kong Country 4 hack
« Reply #2 on: June 14, 2011, 06:50:53 PM »
Well actually looking at the data, I'm pretty sure the reason I couldn't find it is because the alphabet starts at 20 for some crazy reason. Getting over that, it's definitely easier to edit the text than with that Korean 105-in-1.

codeman38

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Donkey Kong Country 4 hack
« Reply #3 on: June 14, 2011, 06:59:14 PM »
WindHex32 is wonderful for finding this sort of ASCII-but-off-by-X text, incidentally; it has a "Relative Search" function built just for that. This is how I've managed to find hidden text in a number of bootleg games.

Awesome Panda

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Donkey Kong Country 4 hack
« Reply #4 on: June 14, 2011, 07:02:21 PM »
It might, but knowing what 64-bit computers are like I doubt it'd work on my computer.

Oh, apparently it does. :P Mind you, it could be useful for editing the music as well given that the values for those normally lie between 10 and 40 from what I noticed.

Doomkid

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Donkey Kong Country 4 hack
« Reply #5 on: June 17, 2011, 06:34:00 PM »
Cheetahmen, this hack is awesome and fixes the things that annoyed me oh-so-much about it originally.. Makes a decent game even better, I felt compelled to beat it all the way through a second time around because of this. :)

Ive been attepmting to do something similar to SMW NES. The Mushrooms look stupid in that game, like their face is slightly elongated compared to the mushrooms in smb3 / the real Mario World. That was easy to fix, so then I decided I would remove all the 3 eyed sun logos and that too was easy... but then fixing the small mario sprite to look more like the real SMW's small mario sprite has proven very difficult.. There is a hack of smb3 called Mario Chronicles which changes the small mario sprite to look like it does in Mario World, but even using that as a refernce was difficult. Here's the alteration I was attempting:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/405/marioz.png/

sadly it didnt work out that way... I misaligned everything by 1 pexel and now mario looks as if he's had a stroke.... But you're really good at these hacks, if you had a go at it maybe you could get some great results. The Mario Chronicles hack really helps as a reference for how to 8 bit-ify the mario worl enemy graphics.

SMW NES is basically perfect when it comes to the rhinos, goombas, chargin' chucks, boos and eeries, Ninjis, thwomps, fish and Pirhana plants... But the incorrect turtles, small mario and mushroom graphics have always bugged me.. But if they were fixed, then combined with the game genie code which fixes the way Mario jumps.... We could have a decent Mario World for NES on our hands. :p

Awesome Panda

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Donkey Kong Country 4 hack
« Reply #6 on: June 17, 2011, 06:41:05 PM »
Faceplant
Jun 17 2011, 06:34:00 PM
Cheetahmen, this hack is awesome and fixes the things that annoyed me oh-so-much about it originally.. Makes a decent game even better, I felt compelled to beat it all the way through a second time around because of this. :)

Ive been attepmting to do something similar to SMW NES. The Mushrooms look stupid in that game, like their face is slightly elongated compared to the mushrooms in smb3 / the real Mario World. That was easy to fix, so then I decided I would remove all the 3 eyed sun logos and that too was easy... but then fixing the small mario sprite to look more like the real SMW's small mario sprite has proven very difficult.. There is a hack of smb3 called Mario Chronicles which changes the small mario sprite to look like it does in Mario World, but even using that as a refernce was difficult. Here's the alteration I was attempting:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/405/marioz.png/

sadly it didnt work out that way... I misaligned everything by 1 pexel and now mario looks as if he's had a stroke.... But you're really good at these hacks, if you had a go at it maybe you could get some great results. The Mario Chronicles hack really helps as a reference for how to 8 bit-ify the mario worl enemy graphics.

SMW NES is basically perfect when it comes to the rhinos, goombas, chargin' chucks, boos and eeries, Ninjis, thwomps, fish and Pirhana plants... But the incorrect turtles, small mario and mushroom graphics have always bugged me.. But if they were fixed, then combined with the game genie code which fixes the way Mario jumps.... We could have a decent Mario World for NES on our hands. :p[/quote]I might try to do that if I can figure out what that Game Genie code does. /:)

KingPepe

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Donkey Kong Country 4 hack
« Reply #7 on: June 17, 2011, 11:49:54 PM »
Faceplant
Jun 17 2011, 06:34:00 PM
Cheetahmen, this hack is awesome and fixes the things that annoyed me oh-so-much about it originally.. Makes a decent game even better, I felt compelled to beat it all the way through a second time around because of this. :)

Ive been attepmting to do something similar to SMW NES. The Mushrooms look stupid in that game, like their face is slightly elongated compared to the mushrooms in smb3 / the real Mario World. That was easy to fix, so then I decided I would remove all the 3 eyed sun logos and that too was easy... but then fixing the small mario sprite to look more like the real SMW's small mario sprite has proven very difficult.. There is a hack of smb3 called Mario Chronicles which changes the small mario sprite to look like it does in Mario World, but even using that as a refernce was difficult. Here's the alteration I was attempting:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/405/marioz.png/

sadly it didnt work out that way... I misaligned everything by 1 pexel and now mario looks as if he's had a stroke.... But you're really good at these hacks, if you had a go at it maybe you could get some great results. The Mario Chronicles hack really helps as a reference for how to 8 bit-ify the mario worl enemy graphics.

SMW NES is basically perfect when it comes to the rhinos, goombas, chargin' chucks, boos and eeries, Ninjis, thwomps, fish and Pirhana plants... But the incorrect turtles, small mario and mushroom graphics have always bugged me.. But if they were fixed, then combined with the game genie code which fixes the way Mario jumps.... We could have a decent Mario World for NES on our hands. :p[/quote]Funny enough, I tried doing a graphics hack of it and it seemed that almost all the SNES sprites could fit in with the NES ones. (So Hummer did trace it off screenshots or the TV) I don't know if I still have it, I'll check.

MLX

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Donkey Kong Country 4 hack
« Reply #8 on: June 18, 2011, 04:58:28 AM »
I think they may have tryed to copy everything perfectly but the result may have been not good looking so they made their own for some stuff.