On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Every GDQ, I find out about several things that I feel are worth telling all of you about. It happened once again this year, and that’s why I’m now pointing you to an invaluable speedrunning resource, the Ocarina of Time Practice Rom.
Of course, I don’t think you’ll want to speedrun it. But if you ever want to test something out in the game and don’t want to play through the whole of OoT to do it, it could be very useful. It’s distributed in the form of a patch program, available for Windows, Mac or Linux, and you’ll have to do a bit of command-line typing to run it. And you’ll have to supply the rom file yourself, of course, but that’s the case with all the offerings proffered by our sunglasses-wearing green friend up above. The makers offer support for the Virtual Console release of Ocarina of Time, but if you choose to play it in real hardware, you should know that the Practice Rom requires the 4 MB Expansion RAM upgrade for your N64. If you came by your Nintendo 64 unit second-hand, open the little hatch on the top of the console: if the little module in there has a red top, that’s the “Expansion Pak,” as Nintendo called it. If it has a black top, then you don’t have the expansion, just the “Jumper Pak” that came standard. If there’s just a hole in there, then you don’t have either, and your system won’t work!
Let’s assume that you get it all working, and both have a new copy of the Practice Rom and a way to run it. How does it work, and what does it do? Once it’s started up, it’ll take you to the game’s title screen like usual. Press Start and you’ll be at the File Select screen as usual. Enter a name and start the file, and you’ll even be taken to the intro cutscene.
But no one says you’ll have to wait through it. Hold the R button and press L, and a menu will appear:
From here, you can use the Control Pad, or whatever your controller’s version of it is, to navigate this menu, while you continue to play the game, in real-time, with the Control Stick and other buttons. Pressing L selects things from the menu, and R goes back up a level.
From this menu you can warp to anywhere in the game, or give yourself any items! You can unlock the camera in 3D scenes and move it freely, or change the rendering to show collision surfaces. It even has its own save state manager. It’ll take some experimenting to find everything it can do.
Is this useful? Well, maybe? Or maybe not. Are video games useful? I present it mostly as a curiosity. If you just want to play the game then mostly it gets in the way. It’s not a randomizer or remix, it’s just straight Ocarina, but with these extra things added. It has a full user’s manual on its website, and to make decent use of it you’ll probably need to spend some time with it. Check it out, if you’re of a mind.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Didja ever finish a satisfying round of Tetris, and then, basking in the glow of your high score, stop to wonder to yourself: why four?
Why did Alexey Pajitnov, revered creator of the game, decide to use tetrominoes, the possible combinations of four squares attached to each other, as the basis of his game, and not some other number? Two is obviously too simple, and three is also pretty easy. Four is the smallest number that makes for an interesting game, so that was probably why. But can Tetris work with larger pieces? Could it work with, say, pentominoes, five-square pieces?
Well, why not try it for yourself, with today’s romhack: Zohassadar’s Pentris.
Pentris is built from Bullet-Proof Software’s NES version of Tetris (which is different from the Famicom version). It’s a BPS file, but there’s multiple utilities that can apply those, for Windows, Mac and Linux. For Win, Flips works well. Linux users may be able to find Flips in their distro’s repositories. For Mac, try Multipatch. The big advantage of BPS is that it contains CRCs of the original patch file to ensure that it’s working on its expected file, a continual problem with working with roms. As for where to get an original of NES Tetris from, you’re on your own.
Notably, Pentris is quite a bit harder than Tetris. It’s not kaizo hard though, it seems like it may be possible to have a lengthy game, but it’ll probably take you longer to develop a good intuition for what moves are good ones than it did for Tetris.
There are more possible pentominos than there are tetrominoes, so the long-piece is less common, and pentrises require five lines of setup instead of four, making them much harder to make than tetrises. In my several test games, I never managed to make even one. But mere survival is more difficult too. Pentris’ bin is 14 blocks wide instead of 10, which is more room to make mistakes. And some of its pieces are much more unwieldly than the worst of Tetris. Tetris has Z and S, but Pentris has Texas:
What are you supposed to do with this?
Pentris doesn’t appear to monkey with NES Tetris’ piece generation. The NES game picks pieces almost entirely randomly, rerolling just once if two of the same piece in a row is selected. More recent versions use “bag” systems that guarantee that you get all the possible pieces in a reasonable amount of time, but neither NES Tetris nor Pentris hold your hand like that. If you’re depending on a 1×5 piece but the RNG doesn’t feel like giving you one, you’re left to lump it.
In addition to that Texas abomination, there are also “long L” and “long J” pieces, and identical versions but with the extra square moved one space up the bar part, a piece that’s like half of a picture frame, and, invading from Rampart, the dreaded U and Plus shapes. Where you choose to place them, as they relentlessly fall, is up to you.
If you focus on survival you can advance a few levels. A good beginner’s score of Pentris is about 5,000 points. My highest so far is about 6,800. I don’t know how many points a pentris is worth, but if it scales like the multi-line clear points from Tetris did it’s probably very valuable.
I feel like I should mention there is at least one other game called Pentris around, a web game that doesn’t seem to be maintained too well. It has some of the same ideas behind it, but it also has other sized shapes too, including single blocks. I don’t know much about it, but I do know it is substantially a different game from the romhack Pentris.
Many of them seem to exist only for the questionable thrill of playing character from Property X in Video Game Y, fun for a few minutes maybe, then time to move on. They’re so disposable, and there are so many of them, that I’ve resisted linking to any of them here.
And I’m not going to claim that playing through as Max, from underground comic, cult adventure games and short-lived cartoon show Sam & Max, is much different. But if there’s any irreverent comic character that feels like they were made for this kind of beat-em-up nonsense, it’s the hyperkinetic rabbity thing themself, so please take this hack as representative of the whole. Video, two minutes long:
Max in Streets of Rage 2: Hack (by Metal64, Ultimecia and Dazz) Video (by RetroGaming)
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
It’s been difficult to keep up a consistent stream of romhacks for Thursdays, due partly to the demise of romhacking.net. Although… it doesn’t look very shut down to me? In fact, it’s been switched to news only, so while it’s no longer a (somewhat) comprehensive database of hacks, through the efforts of a dedicated staff, it still passes along information about particularly prominent hacks.
But hold on a moment, didn’t Nintendo already make one of those? Yep, it was Super Mario Bros. DX, and it made excellent use of the hardware. But the GBC had a smaller screen, and so the levels were slightly modified to account for the change in scale. This new hack, Super Mario Bros. Mini, keeps the designs of the original eight worlds, choosing instead to redraw all the characters at a small resolution. There are other changes, too. The engine is completely different, recreased using GB Studio, with just enough of the physics changed to completely screw with your muscle memory. If you’ve mastered the original SMB, this fan remake will prove unexpectedly deadly. There are other rule changes, like awarding extra lives from defeating many enemies with a Starman and reaching the top of the flagpole, that award enough extra lives to make up for it.
While the eight original worlds are here, the main attraction is another full set of eight worlds you can access after finishing the originals. They include many new features, such as new bosses, vertically scrolling areas, and other surprised that I won’t spoil… although you can see them as the later half of this complete, 1:27 playthrough of the whole game.
Super Mario Bros. celebrates its 40th birthday next year! The players who grew up with it are aging steadily. It remains to be seen if its legacy will extend onward among new generations of players. It’s impossible to say for certain, but I think it has a good shot at it. Hold on Peach, there’s still millions of players coming to rescue you!
Here’s some more screenshots from the first worlds of Super Mario Bros. Mini, showing off some of the redrawn graphics.
It’s a grievous blow to the game editing community, but Nightcrawler, the maintainer of the 19-year-old hack repository and community site romhacking.net, is shutting its doors. The reasons why are the top news item on the site, probably the last new news item that will ever be posted there.
romhacking.net as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.
They mention several reasons, but say a collection of users who had offered to take up the site for disingenuous reasons. The details were not mentioned, but they mentioned by way of comparison what happened to emulator author Near, creator of higan, and that can be easily taken as a bad sign.
However, Gideon Zhi on Bluesky offers a different take, that suggests comparison to Near is greatly inappropriate, and that Nightcrawler was severely burnt out and refused offers to help. I don’t know which is more accurate, but the details are offered suggest there may be something to his version of events. Gideon Zhi isn’t one, I think, to cover something like that up. Ah well, drama.
Maintaining a hugely popular website for 19 years is a huge drain on your time, energy and finances. It’s possible that ultimately Nightcrawler needed, or even just wanted, to retire, and that’s okay.
I’ve made frequent use of romhacking.net over the years, both in researching two romhack ebooks and the Romhack Thursday feature on this site. While what the maintainer of romhacking.net says in their news post, that there isn’t as much of a need of a centralized site for collecting and presenting romhacks as there was back in 2005, I still found their site extremely useful, and I think it served a vital role. I will greatly miss it, but I understand their wishing to move on. They took the step of uploading the whole site contents to the Internet Archive, which is a forward-thinking move that I applaud.
Will they ever return to updating the site? Anything is possible, but I expect not. Will another site arise to take its place? Who knows, there’s definitely demand for it. I wish Nightcrawler well in any event, and thank them for their service.
Game Informer’s site, as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.
Since then, GameStop has kept the magazine going as a house publication, at times distributing issues for free to customers. It seems the announcement was sudden, with management sending out a tweet about the publication’s closure while staff was being notified of the ending of their positions.
There are older game magazines in Japan, of course, and US game magazines lately have had things pretty tough with competition from the internet. It’s surprising that they’ve managed to keep going for this long.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
We’ve not done Romhack Thursday for a while. As the winds of the ‘net, and my attention, blow around randomly, sometimes there’s more things that seem worthy of posting than others. This one definitely fits the bill though.
We’ve posted about 10yard’s intriguing Donkey Kong hacks Galakong and Vector Kong before. I don’t think they’re actually hacks in the classic sense of the term, modifications of a game’s software intended to run on its original hardware, or at least an emulation or simulation of it. Galakong might, and Vector Kong definitely does, rely on Lua support in MAME to produce, respectively, a version of Donkey Kong where Mario teams up with the ship from Galaga, and another version of Donkey Kong limited to the Girders stage, a.k.a. Ramps, but with sharp colorful line-drawn artwork akin to that produced by Atari’s later Vectorscan monitors.
10yard let us know that they have produced a front-end to a variety of Donkey Kong romhacks, 90 in total. It runs on Windows an Raspberry Pi, although if it runs on the latter I suppose it must also be possible to get it to work on Linux? Maybe?
It’s not just a front end though. It presents all of its mods through an interface that itself plays like Donkey Kong! You move Mario around the levels of the classic arcade game (they’re connected vertically), and each is littered with arcade machines. You can play them with coins collected them as DK rolls them through the boards, and also earned by getting good scores in each game. Collecting more coins not only gives you more chances to play, but it unlocks further games in the collection.
You download the package from the Github page linked above. You must also provide the MAME-compatible romsets for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3. (It might work without without all of them, but fewer games will be available.) Of course, it’s up to you to rip, or otherwise provide, those files. If you provide them, it’ll handle all the patching for you automatically. It even includes its own custom version of MAME to play them.
Both Galakong and Vector Kong are among the hacks provided, but there’s so much more to see and play besides those, including Halloween, Christmas and Doctor Who themes hacks. There’s really too many to mention here, and I’ve only started unlocking games myself. I’ll leave you with the closing link, and some screenshots of the hacks included that I’ve managed to unlock so far.
DKAFE (by 10yard, for Windows and Raspberry Pi, on Github)
Most of the hacks include a screen like this one, that tells you what scores you must reach in order to earn coins. 3rd place usually isn’t terribly difficult to reach. For many games, a 1st place score will be reached around the time of the Conveyors board in Level 3.This is the game selection mode. Coins you earn are rolled down the ramps from the top of the screen; you have to collect them in order for them to count!Before starting each hack, you’re presented with a text description of the game and how it plays, and who made it.Here’s Galakong, which has been linked from this site before. The game is slightly easier, objectively speaking, than standard Donkey Kong, but it’s easy to get your attention split between the ship and Mario and make mistakes because of it.Pac-kong replaces the roaming fireballs with the ghosts from Pac-Man. They move mostly randomly, like the fireballs, did, but they’re much faster. You can become invincible by collecting an Energizer, which turns Mario into Pac-Man temporarily. Pac-kong’s one of the harder hacks present.Donkey Kong Anniversary Edition changes the boards slightly, and replaces the bonus items with presents and balloons. In case you didn’t know: you can collect items off the edges of girders by jumping at them: if you hit the edge of the screen during your jump, Mario will be bounced back to around the place he leapt from, and will (usually) be unharmed!Donkey Kong Wizardry changes the Girders level substantially. They add new pits to leap over, changes to the way the ramps tilt, and adds other surprises. You get an advantage though: if you press the Player 2 Start Button (the 2 key), it’ll freeze the fireballs for several seconds.Donkey Kong Lava Panic adds a tide of deadly fluid constantly rising up from the bottom of the screen. It becomes important to get the lower rivets on the Rivets board before they become submerged!The Halloween and Christmas-themed hacks change the Girder stage greatly. When barrels (or whatever analogue that hack uses for them) fall off of a gap in the middle of the screen, they may randomly decide to go either direction, adding even more uncertainty to Mario’s progress. Be careful!
It’s too light to make it an official Romhack Thursday post, but it is Thursday, so…. or rather, it was, yesterday, when this was slated to go originally, except Fully Ramblomatic premiered and I figured I should strike while that iron was hot. This iron, after all, is more malleable at lower temperatures.
Alex Zandra on Mastodon, @zandra@mastodon.social, who is @zandravandra on Cohost, put together a list of her favorite Mega Man romhacks that looks pretty interesting.
The games are (in order through the series): Mega Man Speed Bomber, Rollchan No Constancy, Rollchan At The Tokyo Olympics, Mega Man 4 Voyage, Mega Man 5 Double Jumper, and Rockman 6 Spirit of Hackers. The closest I’ve come to playing any of them was Rockman No Constancy, before Roll was put into it. There are lots of hacks that are difficult even to play, so curated lists of them are very useful!
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
The critical consensus on Ultima Underworld is that it was a high point of the Ultima franchise, a then-unique (and still fairly distinctive) kind of game, a 3D fantasy adventure released nine months before Doom, with a detailed dungeon and a high degree of player agency.
Ultima Underworld got a Playstation release, but only in Japan. It is not a straight upgrade from the DOS version, it’s got different cutscenes and anime character portraits, as well as interface differences. Still, it could well be worth playing for its own sake.
Often for these romhack posts I’ll try to apply the patch myself and take my own screenshots, but in this case the patch is over 120 megabytes, and itself to be applied to a CD game ISO, and a substantial game to learn and navigate in itself, so I’m going to pass this time and just use screenshots from the game’s romhacking.net entry.
Look at that anime-style character art. I guess this counts as the third JRPG post in a row.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
It’s another video! And it’s Nintendo related! I bet you’re just thrilled!
This is one, however, is far from something the Big N would approve of. Snooplax goes into great detail in explaining the history of hacking Super Mario 64, the first 3D game to really have a substantial hacking scene–I don’t count things like DOOM, since to a degree it was made to be extensible. Nintendo never dreamed that people would do the things to the Mario 64 engine that they have, which has included optimizing it to the extent that it can run at 60 fps on original hardware!
Seeing all these hacks together in one video is rather inspiring. There’s been not one, but at least three, major Super Mario 64 level editors, with different degrees of flexibility and detail. What enthusiasts have done with the engine over the years is surprising, and there’s no end in sight, so please enjoy this look back at this prolific scene.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Look at that title and marvel a bit. Doom on a C64! What an idea. How could it even be possible? What an age we live in. It is a time of wonders. Children are our future.
Of course there’s more to it than that. There is a whole class of “retro” game that amounts to implementing the actual game on separate hardware, and using the supposed host platform as a glorified display and input device. That’s what’s going on in this case. Doom is really being run on a Raspberry Pi in a plug-in cartridge on a processor that’s underpowered by modern standards but far outpaces that of even Doom’s base configuration, and is thousands of times more powerful than the Commodore 64 to which it pipes its output.
But there’s still some technical interest in the means. The device that runs it is a “RAD Expansion Unit,” a DIY device that emulates a C64 RAM expansion, and apparently can even take over from the 6510 CPU and drive the system’s hardware directly. It works by writing to the VIC-II video and SID sound chips itself.
There was still a lot of coding work required to make this possible. A C64 has somewhat decent sound hardware, but the VIC-II chip has severe limitations on what it can display. The Raspberry Pi has to take the game’s display and port it, in real-time, to a graphics chip that can only display up to four colors (out of only 16) in each character cell, and that’s by sacrificing half of its horizontal resolution. Doing that on the fly itself is a noteworthy hack.
Could it be possible to run DOOM on a C64 without such assistance? At native resolution, ha ha ha: no. The memory limitations are too grievous, so at the very least you’ll need a RAM expansion.
I’ve mused at times on whether it might be possible if one uses the character screen as a kind of super-low-resolution graphics mode, each 8×8 character block representing either a 2×2 pixel grid (so, a resolution of 80×50) or a single pixel (40×25). Even at such a resolution 60 fps is probably out of the question, for it takes a lot of cycles to change every tile every frame, but maybe at 30 or 20? 15, 12, 10? (60 is divisible by a lot of numbers.) I will leave that question to people who are more current with C64 assembly coding.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Some months ago there were the “Gigaleaks,” huge troves of internal Nintendo files and documents that revealed a lot about abandoned projects and the development history of popular games.
There was so much information in them that people are still discovering new details. One thing that was surprisingly overlooked was source code for the version of Super Mario Bros. included in the SNES remake within Super Mario All-Stars. The source contained quite a lot of interesting commented-out lines and other data, that seemed to indicate that it may have been a hacked-up version of the source to the original Super Mario Bros.
A lot (but not all!) of this has been covered on the Prerelease page for Super Mario Bros. on The Cutting Room Floor. You can go read about it there. There resides information on scrapped enemies and objects, weird modes and behaviors of existing objects, and lots of other curiosities.
For the 38th anniversary of the release of Super Mario Bros., Nimaginendo Games made a romhack that seeks to recreate many of these abandoned elements, and shows it off in a Youtube video. The hack can be downloaded from a link in the video’s description, but only for a little while! I should emphasize that it’s not a real prototype, but a speculative recreation based on information from the leaked source. It even has an older version of SMB’s title screen.
Extra! Did you know that an early working English title for Super Mario Bros. was Mario’s Adventure? And Nintendo of America even made a promotional flyer with that name! These images come from Flyer Fever:
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
It’s another romhack post that’s really not a romhack, but kind of pretends to be one. Gridlock’s 21st Century Roguelike Pac-Man (which I’m going to call 21CRPM) at first looks a lot like the arcade classic, but then becomes something really, really different.
It becomes so different that the game it most brings to mind isn’t Pac-Man but Frog Fractions. It keeps piling on the play mechanics, in a way that the game makes apparent is meant to be humorous, but also sort of, kind of works. I mean of course it’s me saying this, ๐ณ๐๐พ ๐ฏ๐พ๐๐๐๐ ๐ถ๐๐ ๐ช๐พ๐๐ ๐ก๐บ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ ๐ ๐ป๐๐๐ ๐ฑ๐๐๐๐พ๐ ๐๐๐พ๐, so maybe I just like that sort of thing. Although the way it’s the most like roguelikes, permadeath, making you start completely over after losing, is possibly the weakest part of it. I had to start over a lot.
You start in the middle of the normal Pac-Man board, in a field of dots, and the ghosts roaming around as usual. It’s not exactly like classic Pac-Man; ghosts can catch you much more easily on corners (you’ll get caught this way frequently times before you adjust), and the AI is a little different. The Red monster, Blinky/Shadow/Akabei/Oikake, can actually turn right after coming out of the box, and move up through the paths above it.
Also, eating the Energizers in the corners doesn’t make the ghosts vulnerable. Instead, Pac-Man can shoot the dots he eats at the ghosts to defeat them, and while an Energizer is active his shots are stronger. Pac-Man must be facing into a corridor in order to fire, meaning he must often be running directly towards a ghost before he can shoot it. The Red ghost has the least health, and can often be gunned down even without an Energizer, while the Orange ghost has a lot of health, and usually must be shot while it’s traveling away down a long corridor. Fortunately, he’s not any smarter than he was in the arcade game.
A big difference is the Hunger meter at the side of the screen. It constantly runs down, at an alarming rate, as you play. If it runs completely out, the game ends immediately, regardless of how many lives you have left! You have to make sure to keep tabs on your hunger. And dots and ghosts don’t refill it, only fruit does, and only a bit of it. What Pac-Man can do, however, is save it for later: he has an inventory now, and grabbed fruit go right into it. You press the X button to bring up a menu, and can then pick out the fruit and munch it on down.
If you had to rely on the fruit from the center of the board though you’d starve pretty fast, so now Pac-Man has the ability to plant fruit in the maze. If you plant it, of course, then you can’t eat it, but it doesn’t take long for it to sprout and start generating new fruit of its own. You’ll soon have to start relying on this to survive.
When you clear the board of dots, the monster box opens up and when you go inside you get this screen:
This somewhat sarcastic screen appears to suggest that there’s more to the game than the starting screen. And it’s right.
Once you clear the board of dots, the game doesn’t end. Ooooh no, you’re just getting started. No, the board you start in is the “home” location in a much larger maze, accessed through the tunnels on the sides of the screen. As you explore this maze, new locations will be filled in on a map in the lower-left corner. The borders of this map aren’t the ultimate edges either. This greater map is created anew with each play; sometimes you’ll have tricky situations right near outside the starting board, and sometimes it’ll be fairly easy going. There are ghosts and dots and fruit in these boards too, and sometimes more Energizers, but there are no regeneration boxes. Ghosts you defeat out there turn into eyes, but have no way to turn back into ghosts, and eventually just fly away.
Out there in the maze there’s a lot of weird things to find. Like shops.
And quest givers:
And locked treasure rooms:
And areas of solid stone, and ore, that must be dug through Minecraft-style with a Pick (go into the Tools section of the menu to use it):
And a whole Pokemon-themed area:
And there’s crafting! And you can spend Galaxians you find to enhance stats! And boss ghosts to defeat! And probably more! I keep finding new parts to the game as I play. The game’s itch.io page even claims there’s a final boss to defeat, in the form of an evil version of Pac-Man, but I haven’t found it.
You can save your game, but in roguelike style, your session ends when you do it, and its deleted when you resume. Your game ends either when you run out of lives or your Hunger meter depletes, and both are way too easy to have happen. I find it helps to plant at least one fruit on each screen, but don’t carry around too many: if you’re holding too many things you become “Encumbered” and slow way down!
It’s an enjoyable game, for awhile at least. Pac-Man’s movement speed quickly feel much too slow for exploring the huge over-maze. His movement speed is one of the things you can upgrade by spending Galaxians, but I’ve only just recently even found one of those in the maze, and it was in a locked treasure room. It feels like there’s a lot more to the game than the permadeath feature allows me to see, but I’m still trying.
It is true that, ultimately, 21CRPM is a joke game, and the point is that Pac-Man doesn’t need elaboration upon, and the extra mechanics exist mostly to feel tacked on. There may not even be a real point to them. But neither is there a point to video games in general, and it’s still fun to explore them, for a while.
One of those boss ghosts you can receive a quest to defeat. They take a lot of damage, speed up as you deplete it, and can even fire back at you. You might want to craft a shield before taking one on, out of three Iron Bars (made from ore) and a piece of Wood (bought in a shop or acquired from using the Pick on a tree). You might be able to use a Sword on one, but they break quickly and I haven’t tried it yet.
