ROM Hacks
Title: Super Nazi Penis Cartel Freedom Fighters 3
Hack of: Super Mario Bros. 3
Release Date: December 25, 2004
Plot: Help a rambunctious Jewish testicle save his beloved land from the invading Nazi Penis Cartel!
Back Story: Dr. Floppy wondered what would happen if someone took clichés from every low-brow ROM hack on the planet, and combined them into a single game? This is the result. While the hack was intended as a satire of the low-brow genre, some mistook it for a poorly-designed satire of Mario 3 itself. Needless to say, the whine&cheez segment of the ROM hacking community didn't take too fondly to this hack...
[For those of you into hot anal action, here's the gay IPS file!]
~*~ Future Dr. Floppy ROM Hacks! ~*~
It pleases me to officially announce my next ROM hack: Super Catholic Bros.
Some may be wondering why I'm going backwards, so to speak? That is, why would I hack Mario 1 after spending sixteen months hacking Mario 3? Truth be told, I considered several games to use as a platform for my sophomore hack, among them Mario 1, Zelda 1, and Metroid. I was very close to doing a hack of Zelda, but in the end, Mario 1 won out. The plethora of programs available is second to none (there's a reason Mario 1 comprises about half of all ROM hacks), and the game itself isn't too hard to work with.
See, both Zelda and Metroid are very old games that were very large for their time. Because of this, both games used clever programming 'shortcuts' to save space. These shortcuts are invisible to the naked eye, but become quite apparent upon attempted hacking.
The overworld of Zelda consists of a screen grid of sixteen-across-and-eight-down. So the original programmers just defined these 128 screens, then selected each one individually and started plugging away with something resembling the Mario Paint stamp tool, right?
Wrong. Zelda's overworld screens are defined individually out of 128, but each screen is actually a series of vertical strips. The game has a 256-member vertical strip databank from which these strips are chosen. (Actually, a couple dozen are redundant "all mountain" throwaway strips, which opens the possibility of user-defined strips.)
Metroid uses a similar space-saving trick. As you recall, the original game consisted of five zones separated by elevators (which for some reason played the "grandfather clock" chime sequence). Anyway, the entire game (all five zones) can be mapped out on a 30 x 30 grid. (If you want a nice picture frame border, it's 32 x 32.) There is no overlap between zones.
Instead of using a metrosexual vertical strip databank, Metroid programmers used a databank containing entire screens themselves! Thus, each of the individual rooms in Metroid is defined only by a hexadecimal number. Long, repetitive horizontal or vertical corridors were achieved by programming a 14-14-14 string of rooms, or a 29-29-29 stack.
So why didn't players notice this sleight-of-hand, call bullshit and go play Kid Icarus instead? Because the same room looks different depending upon the zone in which it's seen. See, the five zones all have their own independent palettes and object banks. For example, a "Type 11" room in Brinstar might consist of a thin blue stone floor and a three-object-thick ceiling of blue bushes. But in Norfair, a Type 11 room appears to be a dark red rock floor and greenish-bubble ceiling. And in Touran, the floor is a silver metal pipe and the ceiling is a series of armaments. What you have in all these cases is the exact same screen with the exact same physical layout; only the sprites and colors have been changed. In fact, that's the true purpose of those elevators- to give the game time to swap zone database info.
Rest assured, I have ideas for both Zelda and Metroid hacks in the years to come, but for 2005, it's going to be Mario 1. Since the game itself is small in terms of sprites and levels, I'm going to do a more in-depth hack. Palettes have already been changed. Levels, I believe, will be altered as well. I'm even going to attempt something even the whine&cheez crowd shies from and alter the game music. I've already learned the basics behind music hacking: it's an extraordinary headache.
Anyway, I'll try and post some SCB screenshots here sometime before February.
