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After looking at all these awesome portraits, I was about to say something like:
"Man, it would have been so cool to live in an era when you could be such a bad-ass warrior, but then I stop for a moment and realize there wouldn't be any toilet paper…"
And then I checked wikipedia…
Quote:Although paper had been known as a wrapping and padding material in China since the 2nd century BC, the first documented use of toilet paper in human history dates back to the 6th century AD, in early medieval China. In 589 AD the scholar-official Yan Zhitui (531–591) wrote about the use of toilet paper:"Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes".
During the later Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD), an Arab traveler to China in the year 851 AD remarked:
"They [the Chinese] are not careful about cleanliness, and they do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities; but they only wipe themselves with paper."
During the early 14th century, it was recorded that in modern-day Zhejiang province alone there was an annual manufacturing of toilet paper amounting in ten million packages of 1,000 to 10,000 sheets of toilet paper each. During the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD), it was recorded in 1393 that an annual supply of 720,000 sheets of toilet paper (two by three feet in size) were produced for the general use of the imperial court at the capital of Nanjing. From the records of the Imperial Bureau of Supplies of that same year, it was also recorded that for Emperor Hongwu's imperial family alone, there were 15,000 sheets of special soft-fabric toilet paper made, and each sheet of toilet paper was even perfumed.
Dang… who knew? I'm not sure what the imperial family needed with so much toilet paper though… I guess if I was a member of the imperial family, always being threatened to be invaded by some other army or assassinated in some power struggle, I would be constantly taking a shit in my pants too! :p
On second thought… maybe it wouldn't have been so awesome to live in that era…
I always thought the names Chang Sha and Tsing Tao were funny, but mostly because of similar sounding Spanish words.
chancho = pig, chancha = female pig, so every time I visited the city of Chang Sha, I thought about female pigs.
Singado = f**ked ( in some Latin American countries, at least ) but in slang, the 'd' can be omitted, making it singao. So Any time I saw Tsing Tao, I thought, Singao which means f**ked. XD
I got Tsing Tao by a Chang Sha!
Oh, I was thinking of something more along the lines of taking portraits from DOAE 2 and using them in DOAE 1, but if you guys are using portraits from other games, then that would be more work.
Actually, in spite of that, it would still be an usable feature. No matter what NES game you are talking about, they all use 8 x 8 pixel, 4-color Patterns with the exact same format. ( If it was not for that fact, programs like TileLayerPro would be useless. ) So really, the only problem would be that the user would have to specify the address of each Pattern that makes a portrait.
I still think it would be something that can have a potential for some use, as it can be used as a binary copy-paste mechanism for any byte-stream of data, but I can certainly understand that it would not be nearly as useful in practice.
LOL I love it how Lord Yuan Shu, the site admin, curses on posts, and the users ask him to tone down the language. It's like the Bizzarro world of message boards. XD
Actually, reading this made me wonder of a super-easy solution that can be implemented in DoaEd, but I doubt Niahak would want to do it. Picture this:
An option in DoaEd that asks for the following input from the user:
Input / Output ROM File to Edit: Full file path.
Input ROM File to get data from: Full file path.
Start address for Input file 1.
Start address for Input file 2.
Number of bytes.
After that, the tool would read Number of bytes starting from Start address of Input file 2, and copy them into Input file 1 starting from start address of Input file 1.
So what would this accomplish and how would it work? Well, in NES games, the graphics ( Patterns ) are stored sequentially, and always in the same format ( except when compressed, but that's rarely. ) So if you know the start address of a General's Patterns from 1 ROM and from the other, you can ask the tool to rip those bytes from the other ROM and dump them on the first ROM.
This would essentially "replace" the entire image of a General's portrait in one single move. Since all the patterns of any 1 General's portrait are ( usually ) stored sequentially, this would work.
For any "special cases" you can always provide the input parameters of just a single Pattern at a time, instead of a whole group of them. In other words, since this tool feature is nothing more than a byte-wise copy-paste of data from source to destination, it would work for -anything- you wanted to copy-paste, as long as you know -what- you wanted to copy-paste.
Additionally, the tool can go 1 step further and support batch commands. For example, another input parameter would be a text file that specifies the start addresses of sizes of various chunks to copy-paste from, and then the tool would do all those copy-paste sections.
After doing this copy-paste, you really only need to fix up any Palette issues that may arise. Not sure how messy -that- could get though, but a copy-paste feature like this one on DoaEd might still be useful in other ways, particularly for experimenting too.
So basically, this wouldn't be an all-out image editor, but would still have its usefulness and it can theoretically be used to copy-paste any chunk of binary data from 1 ROM into another. It would also be very easy to implement in DoaeEd.
I doubt you could sell it because of copyright, but it might be an option for the hardware-modding community to download it for free.
I'm not an expert in copyright law, but I believe due to the Millenium Act, a ROM could not be resold and repackaged, even if you claim that it is a "parody" in which all the text is changed. Even so, chances are, you will not be changing everything. Original artwork, sounds, music, and text of the actual game will still exist in your mod.
It would be like taking a movie like Transformers 3, and editing the clips of the movie and adding a few of your own to make a different story, and then trying to get your edited version showing on theaters. I believe if you want the copyright of a parody to stand legal ground, you have to code the parody game from scratch, and it has to be clear that it's a parody and not just a ripoff of the original work. If you try to make money from a parody and it fails these qualifications, you can be sure that the original creator will seek damages. I could be wrong though…
On that note, yet another reason why you guys may want to consider the possibility of making a game from scratch, instead of modding an old one. ( Yea, I know you guys are not going to jump at that thought already… just saying. )
Well, creative differences are always going to happen. If we use that as an excuse for people not to work together on a game, then none of the modern games would ever get made. The last time a single person worked on a whole game by themselves was… well, it was a lot more common in the NES era, but that's about it… ( guess you got me there! )
Now as far as source control, well, there is…. Source Control… ( Tortoise SVN is a common one that is free ) of course, the exception being that real source control for binary files works through a "check-out" system and that's hard to do when you only got 1 binary resource file for the whole project. ( The ROM )
I still say it can be done. You can work on an edit while someone else has it "checked out" and when they check it in, you create an IPS file of your changes you were working on the side, and then apply the IPS patch of your changes to the freshly-checked-out version of the ROM you checked out.
As long as people remember to check-in their changes in rotation, and discuss what areas of the ROM they changed ( to avoid "merging conflicts" ) then it might work… Verify and check your applied changes before "submitting" your changes and letting someone else take lock ownership of the file in rotation. Since DOAE hacking is a side hobby for you guys, this rotation system might work pretty well. I doubt all of you guys mod the game at the exact same time anyway. Just remember to submit changes regularly so other people can get their turn at their work.
I don't expect you guys to actually do that of course, I'm simply saying this game is not all that popular and there is already a congestion of mods for it. Remember the video game crash of the 70s – 80s? Analysts say it happened predominantly because there was too much choice for consumers. If the supply of your industry's products out-weights the demand for them, to the point that the supply-demand determined market value of your good is below the cost of production for it, then your industry is doomed to fail.
Of course, DOAE mods are free, but I'm sure you get my point. There aren't that many people who would play mods for this game, but there are plenty of mods for it too. It's expected that not too many people would pick any one of the mods here. I'm sure the people who made like 150+ mods of NES Metroid or NES Legend of Zelda have the same complaints about attention. :)
As far as promoting it, that's always an option. I'm sure there are people out there who would be willing to play these mods and don't know about them yet, but not sure how many of them are out there. I would think the best bet is to "advertise" them on places like GameFaqs and romhacking.net, ( is zophar's domain still running? ) but IMO, anyone who knows enough about ROMS and mods to be willing to pick up this game probably already knows about Gamefaqs and romhacking.net, so I'm not sure how many other places you can go to promote this… ( Maybe you guys should upload youtube demo videos for the mods too? )
EDIT: Yea, sorry for the long-ass posts. I got nothing better to do… :p ( Oh shoot… I should go to work! :p )
Aww… that sucks… But you got to consider that mods are a risky business in terms of attention. Think about it this way: The 10 people who actually still play this game are all working on their own personal mod. :p I think if you made a mod for a more popular game, you would get more attention.
I tend to "struggle" with this too. How many people do you think actually care that I spent dozens and dozens of hours extracting complete Generals info for Destiny of an Emperor 2, along with complete maps for every square-inch of the world of DOAE 2? Not that many! DOAE 2 is an old game, and it's a non-US released game. I made the decision to work on my tools for DOAE 2 knowing full well not too many people would care about my end-product, outside the 10 or so that come to this board. I hacked DOAE 2 for me and my own personal satisfaction, not for others. Heck, I even have a bunch of other such data dumps that I haven't even published, so it hasn't been "consumed" by anyone but me.
The moral of the story? Making a mod for a game that is -this- old and unpopular is probably not going to get too much attention "out there", especially when you consider most people don't play ROMs, and those who do usually don't play NES ROMs, and those who do usually don't play unknown games like DOAE, and those who do usually don't play hacks and only want to play the original game, and those who are willing to play hacks have about 10 different hacks for DOAE to choose from since almost everyone in this board has made their own hack. And those who do might not have heard of this board or your hack, and those who have might just not have picked up your hack yet and might be busy on like the other 9 hacks for this game. :p
It's like Drake's equation, except instead of estimating the number of planets with intelligent, advanced life, it estimates the number of gamers who would actually play a specific NES ROM DOAE mod within a specific time frame. ( Since the day you published it, until today. )
So if you are willing to invest a lot of effort on a project like this, you need to accept this up-front, otherwise you might be disappointed at the lack of attention later. I am personally happy with my DOAE 2 work. Even if no one would have ever been interested, I did that work for my own satisfaction, not for others. Besides, I'm probably the only one out there who now has made maps for DOAE 2. ( There are already 100+ people who have made a map for Dragon Warrior 1, so why even bother with that… at least I have a monopoly on DOAE 2 maps. :P ) I guess that's just my 2 cents? :)
Also, I feel this is a good place to remind inquiring minds that I personally don't play mods. It's just not my thing. I am a video game purist, and there are very few games I play with mods. ( There is only 1 game I play with "mods" and that is SNES Civilization with some "game rules changing" Game Genie codes. ) I'm even reluctant to play fan-based translations because technically they are "mods" but I make a few exceptions here and there. ( DOAE 2 being an example. ) I even swallow the BS crappy, game-crippling bugs of games like Might and Magic 3 for the SNES just so that I can feel that I'm playing the original game. Oh, and finding out that someone actually modded the "clean" release of Earthbound Zero didn't make me too happy either, even if they had good intentions for it…
Anyways, cheer up mate! I'm sure your hard work still gives you bragging rights, no? Besides, as Lord Yuan Shoe said, hacking this game is not meant to be done to make your e-penis any bigger, but rather because you enjoy it. :)
PS: Maybe this is a good example of why you guys should unify your efforts and make a single hack of DOAE with everyone's efforts combined. I bet that would be a lot more of a kick-ass mod from a team effort, and "less choice means more likely your product will be selected for consumption in the market" as well…
Hey.
I didn't know you could run from Boss Battles either. Try it out -without- the Game Genie code and see what happens. ( Probably will need a lot of load-state. )
Actually, there was never any "date" involved. It was just sending messages to people and never getting a reply. On the other hand, I went to the strip club again tonight and managed to get another e-mail address from one of the dancers! Of course, I probably won't get a reply but what the heck. :p I guess they're playing mind games with their customers? lol guess I'll find out in a couple of days. She left me all hot and bothered and I think some of the highlights of the night might be modded if I discussed here. ( Yea I know this is not GameFaqs but I should act like a mod if I'm going to have that title… )
Hey.
Sorry it took so long. I wasted my weekend pimping girls at this online dating site I've been visiting. I managed to get rejected 16 times this weekend! Yay! It's a new personal record for me! ( Disclaimer: A "rejection" to me includes sending a message and not getting a reply, sending a simpler "ice breaker" message or comment with no reply, or other similar "hey, I'm trying to get your attention you *****" methods. OK I'm actually nicer than that though. :p ) It was one hell of a waste of time but oh well, at least I tried. ( I don't feel too bad though cause the response rate of messages guys send is pathetically low, judging from all the complaints. ) Should have spent that time working on the DOAE 1 map generator though… /Mini-Rant
Anyways, here are some new Game Genie codes for DOAE 1:
No Castle or Fort Battles:
OGNNZGSK
Always win battle after someone attacks:
AEXXLPLP
Can always run from a battle:
AEUOKNYP
The Always win battle code is actually an old one I had which I used to use for testing of DOAE 1 stuff. Please double-check those and let me know how they work.
Also, as a consequence of hacking the run from battle, I discovered that:
Code:Chances of running from a Boss Battle ............ = 4 / 32 Chances of running from Pirate Force ............. = 30 / 32 Chances of running from Brigand + Bandit Force ... = 27 / 32 Chances of running from Rebel Force .............. = 24 / 32 Chances of running from random battle with General = 20 / 32And of course that means that the chances are set in stone and have nothing to do with Agility.
EDIT: OMG this message board supports Courier font! That's freaking awesome for posting tables and formatting text! Stupid LameFaqs never supported that, in spite of all the people asking for it! YAY!
EDIT EDIT: It doesn't seem to support the PRE tag on Code though, so it eats the extra space on the " 4 / 32" text. :/
EDIT EDIT EDIT: OK, it looks like I can just use PRE on my own as an HTML tag… so… Yay again!
OK I'm a little confused now… when you say "Thai women" what equipment are you referring to? Because so far, my personal experience has been that… it takes a lot of balls to be interested in ROM hacking DOAE! heyooo!
It's OK, I know I have no life. :p I don't have family here and that gives me a freedom from certain responsibilities that I often forget most other people don't have. I was just curious because he seemed to drop by at least once a day, until I asked my question. :p
Ah, I've seen that account name before. I just didn't know it was James' account.
As far as recommendations on ASM, really, the best place to start is just programming in general. If you can understand a higher level language like Java or C#, then the move to ASM is not so bad.
Conceptually speaking, ASM code will write to some memory, read from some memory, compare some values, add, subtract, call subroutines, jump conditionally, and so forth. In higher level languages, you have reading and writing to declared variables, comparing declared variables or hard-coded values, add, subtract, multiply, etc, calling functions, doing while and for loops, and so forth.
I would argue that ASM is easier than a higher level language due to its limited syntax and well-defined, simple instruction set. It is only harder because it requires more code to do the same thing, it's less "logical" than higher level languages, ( bad use of the word but w/e ) and the jumps can really lead to spaghetti code very easily, but if you know Java or C# you should be able to look at an NES assembly instructions cheat-sheet and make sense of it. I'm sure other people would disagree with me on that though…
Hmm I would think he would have at least posted something like "hey MeteorStrike, thanks for trying to help but that's not the code my site is using, etc." or something similar to that… He's keeping me in suspense! :p
Sure, I can look at the always retreat issue tomorrow night. ( i.e. the "weekend" ) I personally prefer the "always win battle right away" cheat though. I posted that code for DOAE 2 in case it helps…
As for hacking Walk-thru walls codes and no random battles without knowing ASM:
Walk-thru walls:
This is probably impossible without ASM. In most cases, the game will write some temporary data at some RAM locations as it calculates if walking into a tile is permitted. However, these are temporary memory locations. Using regular RAM codes to make that kind of change ( i.e. a "runtime memory cheat" ) will likely severely screw up the game, since those temporary memory addresses will be reused potentially many times every second for many things.
No Random Battles:
For the same reason as the Walk-thru walls code, this one is also not doable without ASM hacking for -most- games, however, in -some- games, random battle probability is calculated differently.
For example, Dragon Quest 5 and Paladin's Quest for the SNES will both calculate an integer after a battle in some range. This number is written to a specific address in RAM and then decremented by 1 with each step. When this memory reaches 0, ( or in some games a negative ) a random battle will occur. For those kinds of games, using a cheat to keep that number at that address to something bigger than 0 will prevent random battles.
Hacking -this- type of value is -almost- as easy as hacking infinite HP for games. ( It's only slightly harder because you don't know the exact value at any one point in time, whereas with HP you can just see how much HP you have which makes it easier to find. ) If you have hacked infinite HP cheats for games already on your own, then you might be able to hack this kind of cheat as well.
How can you tell if a game uses this numbering system for random battles? Easy: Save-state on the world map, then start walking in a very specific pattern and count how many steps it takes to encounter a random battle. Then, reload and walk in those -exact same- steps.
If the number of steps it takes to get to a random battle is always the same, then the game probably uses this kind of numbering system and can be easily hacked without ASM. Otherwise, you will likely need to go into ASM for hacking.
For Destiny of an Emperor, the game does not use this kind of system, so you're screwed, but on the other hand, Walk thru walls and no enemy encounters Game Genie codes have already been hacked for both DOAE 1 and 2, so I don't think you need to look into doing those codes for this game. I know I posted these codes for DOAE 2 recently, and I'm pretty sure I posted those codes for DOAE 1 back in 2009 on GameFaqs… is there some other game you were thinking about?
EDIT: I checked the kongming site and they are listed there. I'm sure James won't mind if I post them here, especially since I'm the one who hacked them. :p
No Random Encounters
AVNYAKSZ
Walk Through Walls
NYONALAO
Speaking of James… it doesn't look like he has an account here?
By the way, Walk-thru walls, No random battles, and Enemy always drops item are some of my favorite Game Genie codes, and I ( almost always ) hack those first for RPGs, as they help tremendously with "research" when exploring the game. ( Although the Enemy always drops item cheat is not nearly as useful to me anymore, since a Data Extractor program can just rip those values out for me for all the enemies… )
