Freeplaytech Forum

First off I would like to say thank you to Flavor for making me a Flash Cart and being helpful with helping me make this idea a reality.

So I have someone I care deeply about and want to show them just how much I like them so I thought of an idea.

Why not have a custom game created to help me ask them out?

So they has a NGPC (Camo Blue) and one of their favourite games is Magical Drop (Personal favourite as well) so I thought it would be great to see if it was possible to modify the game to do what I needed.

First thing was I didn't like the idea of using a PC and a emulator to do it I wanted a more personal touch so I was researching how to build flash carts and I came across Flavors cart and saw he had some being made so I sent him an email explaining what I would like to do and if he would be willing to help and he said yes.

So currently Flavor is making a flash cart and will be putting it into a game cart case but won't be drilling a hole for the switch.

My plan is to create a custom label for the cart and to design a game box to be printer onto glossy cardboard and it will be cut and folded to house the game like it was a proper game.

So while Flavour is doing the main part for me I have started on hacking the Magical Drop rom and working out how to make it work for my needs.

I posted a small How-To in the software section of this forum in case anyone liked this idea and wanted to make it themselves.

http://forum.freeplaytech.com/showthread...d=38#pid38

So I have modified most of the graphics and I might only have one more left to change.

My main part now is to create a story line to replace the intro story and all the conversations each character has before and after a battle. This will take a while as each character responds differently to whichever character you selected as your player so i will have to modify 8 story lines in total for each 8 characters and I will have to do a lot of testing on the emulator (So glad it has save states i haven't tested them though)

I wanted to show you all my progress and see what you think about this idea.

Original Title:


Modified Title:


Original Story:


Modified Story:


Original Gamefield:


Modified Gamefield:


Now game play wise I changed one of the drops to a love heart and the symbol when you get a drop that gets rid of all the drops at the same time.

Now the reason I didn't make the love heart red was cause the animation that happens when you get the special drop to remove all of the same drops was too small to modify.

I have left the other symbols as is cause they mean something to us. I will be making a booklet explaining the game play and also what each symbol on the drops means.

I still have a lot of work to do still but this is where I am so far what do you guys and girls think?

I guess there might not be that much interest in this project but still must provide updates.

So i've worked out the story and have replaced the original in-game. Does anyone have any suggestions for changes or possible spelling mistakes I might of missed please let me know.









I've removed the persons name and put #'s instead.

Actually, I think people are interested. It's just that most people haven't done anything like this. I assume they're reading along, but have no technical info/questions to contribute.

I only accidentally noticed the poll added to the top just now. Fantastic!

Yeah, I really think documenting this project is awesome, and I think people will read along and be interested in both the technical aspects and how she responds. I just don't know if many people will contribute.

Also, I didn't notice anything wrong with the text, but there was one part I had to re-read before I understood it. Maybe this would work better.

"To win your one true love, your spirit has been transported to your chosen fighter."

A very interesting project indeed I hope it all works out as planned for you.

True it's probably not something people really do all that often I know a guy changed the text in Zelda to propose but I found that having to load it up into an emulator on the pc for them loose the charm I think.

Although I could of left the game as is and changed the text I decided to change it and create a package and I've mentioned that there was a copy of the game with a different name so it might work but they are pretty switched on and will probably work it out before they have started the game up.

But I'll have to see if I can change the text to above or at least something easier to read.

I'm pretty confident it will work out as planned

I spent some time creating the story for the Mr fool character I haven't completed yet but it's coming along.

I'm not very good with creating a story with the restraints on how many characters I can use (I have been able to use more text at certain points by stealing text from another characters reply)

I have 51 images of each reply so instead of posting them here and filling up this thread I made an animated gif of the responses before and after the game play.

http://postimage.org/image/t5mqijwcd/

Nice. That's working rather well. I'm guessing that you're only hacking the strings. I think that's going to be the easiest for you. You can get away with just hex editing the ROM if you don't even lengthen a string. I'm not sure about the "stealing text" bit. I'm not sure how you're doing that. It may cause issues if it's not done right.

If you want to do this the "real" romhack way, you would need to find the string pointers. Typically, a game would have a whole bunch of strings (like you already found). Elsewhere, there would be the pointers to the strings. Maybe you've already found these and this is how you're "stealing" from other characters. If so, you're getting slightly advanced.

What we did with CFC2 (and I think many translation hacks would go this route) was to extract all the strings to a text file. I had a program to do that and a program to take a text file and insert it back into the ROM. It would figure out all the strings and adjust the table of pointers accordingly. This is pretty advanced, as you'd probably need to code a custom program to do this extraction/insertion. I do think there are some ROMhacking tools for this sort of thing, though.

If you want to do more digging on this, go to
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/
and look at the "Script Extraction/Insertion" tool category. I can't say I've used any of those tools, but you might find something good. I also must say that this may be overkill for your project, so maybe it's not worth spending time on. My main point here is just to let you (and whoever else might read this) with additional info.

Oh, and by the way, it's a
"noble cause"
not a
"nobel cause"
Maybe that was a typo.

(02-25-2012, 02:41 PM)Flavor Wrote: [ -> ]Nice. That's working rather well. I'm guessing that you're only hacking the strings. I think that's going to be the easiest for you. You can get away with just hex editing the ROM if you don't even lengthen a string. I'm not sure about the "stealing text" bit. I'm not sure how you're doing that. It may cause issues if it's not done right.

If you want to do this the "real" romhack way, you would need to find the string pointers. Typically, a game would have a whole bunch of strings (like you already found). Elsewhere, there would be the pointers to the strings. Maybe you've already found these and this is how you're "stealing" from other characters. If so, you're getting slightly advanced.

It's going great so far it's just getting hard to think of things to say for the character and I have 7 more to do after this one

What i've found is that even though a string has text it also has pointers which will either change the picture of the person talking and also change to a full new text of screen. When i said i've stolen text I mean that I have been able to move the pointers so one conversation is still all up say 100 characters but I don't have to stick to this character can only use 5 characters in the whole conversation so if i steal the extra space from the other character talking then i can expand this characters text and move the pointers further along but i'm still stuck at 100 characters.

I did have some issues where I occidentally added 1 more character to the total file size and that wrecked all the graphics etc cause they pointers weren't where they were meant to be if that makes sense

(02-25-2012, 02:41 PM)Flavor Wrote: [ -> ]What we did with CFC2 (and I think many translation hacks would go this route) was to extract all the strings to a text file. I had a program to do that and a program to take a text file and insert it back into the ROM. It would figure out all the strings and adjust the table of pointers accordingly. This is pretty advanced, as you'd probably need to code a custom program to do this extraction/insertion. I do think there are some ROMhacking tools for this sort of thing, though.

Yeah that is way beyond my current understanding i've only learnt that pointers for the text and when a characters tile changes in the text window can be moved around as long as i don't add any extra characters and this would be an issue for translating as the translation wouldn't fit some of the time using my method unless it was rewritten to fit into the allowed space.

(02-25-2012, 02:41 PM)Flavor Wrote: [ -> ]If you want to do more digging on this, go to
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/
and look at the "Script Extraction/Insertion" tool category. I can't say I've used any of those tools, but you might find something good. I also must say that this may be overkill for your project, so maybe it's not worth spending time on. My main point here is just to let you (and whoever else might read this) with additional info.

I'll have a look and see how it all works currently I seem to be doing ok and making it work as I don't have a set script to go off just an idea and some remarks.

(02-25-2012, 02:41 PM)Flavor Wrote: [ -> ]Oh, and by the way, it's a
"noble cause"
not a
"nobel cause"
Maybe that was a typo.

I caught that when i made the gif but I was just to tired to fix. I did a lot of typo's last night i didn't quit changing the text to almost 4am as I couldn't sleep but I will go over all the text once i've finished the story for Mr Fool to make sure I have everything correct but thanks for keeping an eye out any help is appreciated

Ok I just finished off the first story line and have put the image as a animated gif again from start to finish.
It's 3.17Mb so it's a bit big but worth the read I haven't gone through and checked the spelling yet or fixed up the title screen story to make that section read easier.

http://postimage.org/image/psglykgxn/

Here is the last screen:

I just received the Flashmasta and Linkmasta from Flavor today (Thanks for helping me out)


Install was quite easy and I was surprised how small the Linkmasta was (for some reason I thought it was bigger in pics)

I grabbed the latest version of my hack and uploaded it to the cart and I must say it looks even better on real hardware than the emulator the screen does a great job at making it look even nicer

Sorry about the bad pics I only received it tonight it would be so much easier in the day.