#homebrew rom

[mcoorlim]

“The Mad Wizard” Homebrew NES rom review

Get it here free: https://www.retrousb.com/product_info.php?cPath=30&products_id=137

[amyfarbright]

Sonic 1 Mega CD Port

(download here)

(if you think this is cool, consider helping me find work/money <3)

Welcome to the Next Level!

NOTE: I'm aware of issues regarding audio playback and transitioning between zones, and intend to push an update once the contest judging period is over. In the meantime, you can use level select (Up Down Left Right A + Start at title screen) to explore the game.

At the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show, a teaser for a Mega CD version of Sonic 1 was shown within a sizzle reel. No Mega CD version of Sonic 1 was ever produced, and this footage is almost everything we know about this project, but it's extremely likely that this idea is what morphed into the separate game Sonic CD, the only Sonic game officially released for the console.

In 2006, Stealth released the Sonic for MegaCD tech demo, marking the first time any substantial effort was made to bring another Sonic game to the console. It contained the title screens and first levels of Sonic 1 and 2, with three playable characters. In the following years, he would build on the ideas in that demo further, eventually reaching a point where his setup accommodated a Mega CD version of a rom hack called Sonic Megamix.

For a long time, this rom hack was the only way to experience Sonic 1's levels, and was the closest you could get to playing the original game on your Mega CD...

until now.

This is a port of the original Sonic the Hedgehog (revision 1, mostly) to the Sega Mega CD (running in Mode 2/off a CD). Not a mere one-zone demo, not affected by an original hack's mechanics, this is a full playable Sonic game running on the Mega CD, with the source fully available, and with the intent of enhancing the game with the extra hardware.

I started this project about a month and a half ago to enter into the annual Sonic Hacking Contest. This was done as both a learning experience for myself to learn new hardware (I was already familiar with programming for Mega Drive, but wanted to explore its addons), and as an example others can learn from.

This has been tested with BlastEm, Fusion, Gens, and on real hardware using a Mega Everdrive Pro.

Features:

Expanded Sound.

The Mega CD comes with a chip supporting PCM playback for up to 8 channels, complementing the 10 sound channels already in the Mega Drive. This port leverages that by moving playback of drum samples to a custom PCM sound driver running on the Mega CD CPU.

Because drums no longer need to play on the Mega Drive hardware, an extra sound channel was added in the main sound driver to allow for more sound effects to play without cutting out channels of the music.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get CD audio playback fully implemented in time for the initial release. Most of the pieces are there though, and I intend to add it in a future update.

An open-source Mega CD game. The scene for Mega CD has grown significantly over time, and over the years there has been new homebrew and hacks of other games, but not nearly as much done with the blue guy this contest is about. This port aims to change that; this is a full game running on Mega CD, with source code and development history available for browsing right now. Code for the kernel programs to load and run the game from disk is written in mostly C using the megadev toolchain. Rom hackers and developers more familiar with the Mega Drive standalone can use the code repository as an example of how to bring more full-fledged MD projects over to Mega CD with as few changes as possible.

Other features:

Custom loading screen while files are loaded from CD

Modified title screen, to remind you that this is indeed utilizing Mega CD hardware

Various bugfixes applied (for those familiar with Sonic Retro's Sonic 1 disassembly, FixBugs is turned on)

Much smoother special stage. The movement of objects making up the maze was unlocked, and the walls now display with 128 degrees of rotation (up from 16).

Even though I started this project to have something for the contest, I'm incredibly happy with what's been done so far, and I intend to work on it further after the contest to add more features. I consider this the beginning of a goodbright future for Sonic games and hacks on Mega CD.

Note: Debug mode and sound test have not been fixed to accommodate for the code that has been moved around. Try at your own risk!

Credits

Main developer: Amy Farbright

Playtesting and bug reporting: The Let's Talk About Sonic Discord

Special thanks: @fiffle, @milly, @crepe

Code used/referenced:

drojaazu's megadev toolchain

Devon's partial Sonic CD disassembly

SCHG How-to Guide

tversteeg's Rust implementation of rotsprite

Graphics used:

CD graphic on title screen: Sega Multimedia Studio, converted from sprites ripped by Mister Man

[bryce-bucher]

Games I've Seen in my Dreams

So I don't really have any reoccurring dreams necessarily, but lately I've noticed that I have a couple reoccurring events within different dreams. One of those is that I will often find myself in front of a bunch of bootleg game cartridges with custom labels (usually implied to contain romhacks or homebrew stuff), and then I get really excited to buy all of them and take them home to see what is on them (this would probably be my actual reaction in real life). I usually then wake up disappointed that it wasn't real. This has been a thing in my dreams for years now. The earliest time I remember it happening was in either late middle school or early highschool. I thought it would be fun to try and recreate some of the ones I've seen and give a brief description of them. The first cartridge I included above is from the first time I remember dreaming of this kind of thing, and all the other ones are from very recent dreams. I might do this again sometime if the dreams keep happening and I keep remembering them. Maybe I'll even put some effort into photoshopping them next time lol.

[haootia]

can anyone extract usable assets from this .nds file (REWARD)

so there's this game called spore creatures for the nintendo ds. i want the assets from it. the problem is that the rom does not unpack neatly into normal formats that people have built tools for. it just spits out some .bin files. my understanding is that getting these to turn into files that other programs can parse basically requires writing a bespoke extractor. after several years, i am ready to admit that this is just beyond my ability. i am not a hacker and dont have the time or energy to become one for the sake of this One Thing. however, there are people on this website who Are real hackers. if the person currently reading this is one, i am begging on my hands and knees: please help me (and the two other people who have tried and failed to do this.)

you can acquire a spore creatures rom from all the regular avenues and unpack it with ndsheader. it makes three .bin files and one .sdat file. i HAVE the stuff from the .sdat, that all unpacks as normal with tinke. presumably all the graphics and maps and stuff are inside rom.bin, which is an impenetrable fortress to me. i'm not sure if it's legal or polite to directly offer to pay money for ripped game assets, but ummm , if you can get usable textures/models/sprites from that .bin and send them to me, it may incentivize me to give you a reasonable amount of united states dollars as thanks.

dm me for discord or email if you think you have the chops... peace out *disappears into the shadows*

[fragmented-heart]

Due to the situation with vimms lair I'm here to remind you to be hush hush about rom sites. DM them, make a private page, just make sure it's not easy to see publicly.

[cornertheculprit]

We now just need Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright localized to make this complete. I hope that is the next announcement for Ace Attorney. Almost more than AA7.

....did you mean ported to the switch? plvsaa has been localized since 2014 ^^;

[timegears-moved]

giggles

[elv13s]

There's something wrong with my dog, can't quite wrap my head around it tho.

[moonsidesong]

my friend is gonna play pokemon emerald when i homebrew her ds runs excitedly around in circles!!!! she's never played it before so i feel like i'm sharing a piece of my childhood with her .... i love you so much pkmn emerald

[weirdlittlegames]

Hacker voice: I’m In.

I softmodded my 3DS over christmas following this guide. it was a little spooky seeing my 3DS in hacking mode but now i can play some roms directly on my 3DS and I have a custom Sonic OVA theme now! B)

[zosonils]

is there a 3ds homebrew app for discord because i think that'd easily be the funniest device to argue from

[wild-battlebond]

that's true even if all handheld pokémon titles aren't enough for you there's still other games. because you can get a huge chunk of the other monster taming games in this world onto a 3DS too

[iluvjesus666]

fuck yeah i think i just got homebrew working on my old wii

[savageboar]

rewatching vinny playing mother 3 again and i still cry like a baby at that intro sequence

[cardboardluigi64]

So over the course of about a week, I had extracted the game roms from the various Virtual Console games I had bought on the Wii, 3DS, and Wii U over the years when their online stores were still up. (Well actually, my brother had bought Final Fantasy 1, Circle of the Moon, Minish Cap, Phantom Hourglass, A Link to the Past, and Super Metroid, but whatever. We shared the consoles.)

Now I can do whatever I want with these roms, whether that's using them in an emulator, or putting them on a flashcart or some other rom loader to play them on authentic hardware.

Some of these were easier to get than others. For the Wii U Virtual Console games, I used the Dumpling homebrew application to dump all of the games, and from there, it varied depending on the game. For N64 and DS games, I just had to find the files and rename their extensions. For NES, SNES, and GBA games, I used a program called wiiuvcextractor that converted the proprietary formats they used to more common formats used in emulators (.nes, .sfc, .gba). It was pretty easy to use. And then for the Wii games, I used a program called nfs2iso2nfs to stitch the files together to make an ISO. It was easy enough to use once I knew what I was doing by reading a guide a bit more carefully.

The 3DS Virtual Console games were a bit more complicated to do. I had to go through GodMode9's file explorer to go through the files for each VC game to export the roms. The Game Boy and Game Boy Color games were easy enough to deal with (just had to rename the extensions). The one Game Gear game I had bought, Sonic Triple Trouble, I had to decompress with an application called mdfTools. I don't remember whether or not I just dragged and dropped it or used a command prompt, but it wasn't hard either way. And then there's the one NES game I had on 3DS, The Mysterious Murasame Castle. It was a Famicom Disk System game, and hoo boy, was it quite a doozy. First of all, I had to use a hex editor to copy and paste the actual game data without the filler data to a new file labeled .qd, and then I had to download Python specifically so that I could use a specific Python script so that the .qd file could be converted to a regular ol' .fds file.

It was quite a hassle, and technically, it would probably be the hardest one to do, given that some very basic hex editing shenanigans had to be done, but somehow, I found extracting the roms from the Wii Virtual Console games to be far more infuriating.

After some trial and error trying to extract files from the .wad files I had extracted from my Wii (with mixed results), I had found out about a Python program called vcromclaim, which streamlined the whole process, but I had to provide a NAND dump to use it. So after some more trial and error trying to find a program that could create a proper NAND dump, it took even more fiddling to get it to work because I have a monkey brain, but eventually I was able to get it to work... except I wasn't able to extract the one Neo Geo game I had, The King of Fighters '98, because it used a specific kind of compression. According to the readme on github, I would've needed some Python thing called PyCryptodome installed. I don't know what it did, but if I wanted to get every Virtual Console game I owned, I would need to install it. This took several attempts, but I had to reinstall Python outright because it turns out I didn't install it right the first time, but eventually, I got it to download, and got King of Fighters '98 properly extracted, too. And as an added bonus, I got all of their respective digital manuals as html files, so that's pretty neat.

So I know what you might be wondering after reading all of this, because I've come across the same comment trying to look up guides and tools for this whole process.

"Why go through all of this hassle just for a couple of game roms? Wouldn't it just be easier and faster to just go to [INSERT ROM HOSTING SITE HERE] and download the same games?"

To which I say:

Anybody can go onto the internet and download game roms. I should know. I've done it plenty of times myself. But it was never about the games. It was about wondering if it was possible and seeing if I could do it myself. Life's a journey, not a destination.

[elv13s]

Nyghtmare The Ninth King's Main character ARYN art progression throughout the development journey. and a bonus trivia: Aryn’s inspiration