I wanna try something slightly more ambitious now. Not sure how possible it is. Does anyone know how to go about editing art in ROMs without a disassembly?Specifically I want to edit Carbunkle/Has Bean in Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. Just the art tiles will do, though if there is a method to editing the mappings it would be profitable.
What I'd love to see is someone sort out the difficulty level, especially "easy"; seriously it doesn't matter if I'm playing DRMBM or Puyo Puyo (Mega Drive or Game Gear) trying to get past even the earliest opponents is annoying. At least the Sonic Team games' difficulty levels are fair; although, the "Fever" and "Transformation " rules are pretty game-breaking within the first few chains.
After I mastered chains, I actually found MBM a bit too easy. I thought Fever was much cheaper and harsh due to the overpowered offset rule (seriously seeing your entire chain slowly negated like that is soul crushing). Tsu is perhaps the most balanced gameplay wise, but I don't think it's as nice cosmetically and lacks a few bells and whistles like Exercise Mode. There are a lot of things I'd like to edit into MBM (like putting in Puzzle Mode or inserting an Aosth style Sonic sprite as a player character in cutscenes) but with no disassembly or resources so far, I think I oughta start small. Perhaps this topic should be merged with the other one.
Running the rom through the old KosSearch and NemSearch programs should net you some art if that compression is indeed used anywhere in the game, from there it's replaceable to a degree like if the compressed size is smaller than the original file unless pointer tracing is found. It may be an interesting adventure to try it someday. If the art is uncompressed it's even easier as you can view roms in Tile Layer Pro.
Apparently a lot of Mean Bean Machine uses a special compression made specifically for Puyo Puyo, which sets things back a little. The rest is Nemesis (not sure what but wouldn't surprise me if it was the MBM exclusive stuff like character sprites) and Robotnik's cutscene sprite which seems to be the one thing uncompressed, so unless I want to change that, Tile Layer Pro is pretty useless. Would the Sega Data Compressor be any use to this?
I'm guessing such a tweak could be possible through hex editing, don't ask me which part you'd have to edit though. I suppose such minor more possible tweaks could be fun as well. I'd like to try figure out at some point where the coding is so I can change the score to have their names like in Puyo Puyo rather than just 'DR R' all the time. Or make the Sound Test region free.
Run the MEan Beam rom through these programs to get the locations of the uncompressed art and decompresses them automatically. if Kos does exist this will help aswell. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64842423/NemKosSearchers.rar
It didn't load anything with the Nem Searcher. It got a few notices with the Kos Searcher surprisingly, though when I loaded the ROM in a tile loader, nothing had changed.
Well it's not quite the same, but I managed to make a 'patch' of sorts as a proof of concept: https://www.sendspace.com/file/qk77jh If you have Debugens, open this palette tweaked MBM (editing the colours made a Checksum Error but you should be able to skip over it). Now go to Exercise Mode and Import Dump the Vram file. Enjoy your new dancing mascot.
Run the ROM through fixheadr.exe (which comes with pretty much every disassembly) and it should fix the Checksum.
