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Monsters in adventure of Lolo

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 6:06 am
by Staffan
This is a kindof strange question and its not actually about SGDK, its a reverse engineering question but here we go:

Its getting time to add monsters. However, I dont really know their movement. Ive tried to play the original game and try to guess how they are programmed.

Im starting with the skulls, but their movement seem almost random to me. Im afraid that if I cant understand exactly how they move, I cant use the orginal levels, if my monsters might just work a LIITTLE differently from the original some levels might get uncompletable.

Any ideas? I thought I still post this in SGDK, because this is were my game belongs...

Re: Monsters in adventure of Lolo

Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2017 9:49 am
by KanedaFr
It remind me of a game I need to finish to port...

Enemy's AI is clearly not the easiest thing to understand....even more when you're RE it directly from raw disassembly.

On the game I talked about, only a part is understood.
How I made it ?IDA of course. It allows you to name var & func and see the code becoming more and more clear on every iteration.
Of course, when you localize 'something' interesting, the first thing is to play with the value using an emulator which allows you to patch RAM.
Personnaly, I use MAME and its cheat feature.

For exemple, I found a var which seems to be the y value of an enemy.
With MAME's cheat, I force the var (ie the memory address of this var) to be a fixed value.
I then play the game....and yes, the enemy won't move from a fixed row (which then confirm me it was a tile and not a pixel related value)

It takes a LOT of times and really depends of the tools available (based the system the original game was made for)
It's fun but madness is not far when you find nothing interesting within some hours ;)

It's also why, unless it's a very common game, hacked by a lot of people (like megaman, ....), noone will be able to help you : disassembling from scratch is a real P.I.T.A :(

Re: Monsters in adventure of Lolo

Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2017 11:43 am
by Staffan
Thanks for trying to answer my question and not brag about this being in the wrong forum which I was sure somebody was going to do :)
(Seriously thanks alot)

...but this was not an uplifting answer. The truth is harsh sometimes. Learning to debug assembly is hard, I dont know if I can cross that bridge, since I have so little time for this project. So far I have taken all sprites from the internet and programming has run smooth. But this would be a totaly different issue. To bad reverse engineering is so much harder than real engineering.

Thanx anyway :)

Re: Monsters in adventure of Lolo

Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2017 10:12 pm
by KanedaFr
post was perhaps more designed to be on Blabla but Step didn't move it, it's that he could accept it there,...so don't worry.

I didn't realize it was the NES game.
There is a lot of emulator and disassemblers or others tools, so it should be doable if you take this long road.
I only was able to found minimum info on https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Adventure ... lo/Enemies

Re: Monsters in adventure of Lolo

Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:42 pm
by Staffan
Thank you :) I think I'll use this background information and creates something that is "sort of" like the original. I'll rather design new levels than learn to dissasembly I think. Maybe when the children have grown up or something :)

Re: Monsters in adventure of Lolo

Posted: Sun Sep 03, 2017 10:59 am
by KanedaFr
It's mostly what people do.
I was very surprised "port" were in fact "similar" games and not based on original code.
It's something I can't do :(
It's why my ports are so long to do....I first disassemble everything ;)
Look at http://arhackde.spritesmind.net/ if you're interested ;)
(which make me realize I forgot to add all I did on my favorite GB game : Motocross Maniacs)

Re: Monsters in adventure of Lolo

Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2017 1:46 pm
by Staffan
HAHA I love bomjack.
I was actually thinking about a port on that as well. I've also thought about porting IK+, but then you really need to reverse engineer assembly. This Lolo port hovever will more be like "What if lolo was released for the 16 bit consoles", and as so the graphics will be new and the ones that hopefully plays it will not care about stuff to be exact.
/Staffan