Hello everybody, I'm totally new here and don't know much about NES programming, so I apologize in advance if my questions are really dumb.
So, a little background, back in 2007 I took up the challenge of hacking NG3 back to it's japanese difficulty, and although I managed to restore the damage done by the enemies to the original famicom values, restore the original power ups and eliminate the limited continues, I never found a way to edit the spots where the enemies appeared in each level, and change those enemies back to the ones used in the japanese original. So out in frustration I abandoned my project...
So anyway, what I want to do now is mod the game and change the levels around. And I want to start by redesigning some backgrounds.
Basically what I want to do right now is to find where the game stores the background for each level map so I can rearrange the position of the tiles that are used in it and redisign it, without changing the actual objects of the level, just the background. It's my understanding that I can edit the tiles with a tile editor, but that's not what I need to do. What I need to change is the position where a tile appears in the background.
FCEUX lets me see the tile file and nametable, (addresses 2000 to 22FF) but that's not where the actual map is stored in the ROM, just what is displayed right at that moment in the screen, right? So I'm trying to find where those values (that identify each tile) are loaded from, with the debugger, because I'm guessing that's where the actual map is stored, but so far haven't had much success, just encounter little chunks of the map here and there.
Since it's my understaning that there are no universal map/level editors, my plan is to find where the game stores the map and edit it manually, rearranging the placement of each tile. But that would still have the problem of the palette being different when the tile is used in another place...
Is there a better, more intelligent, way to do this? Perhaps it could be done with an already existing utility? Perhaps with Shiryu's NES screen editor? But how I load the NG map into it if I can't even find it in the ROM?
Anyway, thanks in advance for any advice and orientation.
So, a little background, back in 2007 I took up the challenge of hacking NG3 back to it's japanese difficulty, and although I managed to restore the damage done by the enemies to the original famicom values, restore the original power ups and eliminate the limited continues, I never found a way to edit the spots where the enemies appeared in each level, and change those enemies back to the ones used in the japanese original. So out in frustration I abandoned my project...
So anyway, what I want to do now is mod the game and change the levels around. And I want to start by redesigning some backgrounds.
Basically what I want to do right now is to find where the game stores the background for each level map so I can rearrange the position of the tiles that are used in it and redisign it, without changing the actual objects of the level, just the background. It's my understanding that I can edit the tiles with a tile editor, but that's not what I need to do. What I need to change is the position where a tile appears in the background.
FCEUX lets me see the tile file and nametable, (addresses 2000 to 22FF) but that's not where the actual map is stored in the ROM, just what is displayed right at that moment in the screen, right? So I'm trying to find where those values (that identify each tile) are loaded from, with the debugger, because I'm guessing that's where the actual map is stored, but so far haven't had much success, just encounter little chunks of the map here and there.
Since it's my understaning that there are no universal map/level editors, my plan is to find where the game stores the map and edit it manually, rearranging the placement of each tile. But that would still have the problem of the palette being different when the tile is used in another place...
Is there a better, more intelligent, way to do this? Perhaps it could be done with an already existing utility? Perhaps with Shiryu's NES screen editor? But how I load the NG map into it if I can't even find it in the ROM?
Anyway, thanks in advance for any advice and orientation.