Survey: What screw-ups while rom hacking make you the most mad?

Mmmm.

sssshhhh.....
Le pug is talking.

Well, I have a funny story to tell. Jambo, don't kill me because I had to lie to you when this happened.

So, one day I get a message from Jambo51 asking me to help him fix some bugs on the 649 patch. (At the time, I did not know that he was looking for someone to take over.) It was a graphics bug, however these graphics were not normal. They were tile based, but with a custom structure set done by GF, not LZ structure. So, I couldn't fix them by normal means. Therefore, I went and blanket copied the clean FR into the 649 patch until it fixed the error. Then, I did it again, but in a smaller subsection. This process repeated until I found the error and fixed it. However, this process did not go smoothly. At one point, I began doing this to the main 649 patch, neglecting to make a back-up. When I went to start over the blanket copying, I realized my mistake. Mind you, this was the only copy of the current version of the patch in existence. The last back-up was 3 months old. I almost died. Jambo knew something was wrong when I asked him if he had a back-up on his hard disk, but he replied saying the one he shared on DropBox was the only one. I told him I had too many Explorers open and I had simply lost it on my hard drive and I didn't want to search for it. Luckily, DropBox has a back-up feature that saves all versions of a file for the past month. Without this feature.... Well, you know. Yeah. This didn't make me angry, but it scared the crap out of me.

I think Pokémon ROM hacking is a screw-up, and it bothers me. ("Angry" is a strong word, let's keep it for when strong emotions are actually called for.)

Here's a story from the other hacking community which I've been notionally a part of since the end of 2003 - the Sonic hacking community centred on Sonic Retro, which at the time was still named Simon Wai's Sonic 2 Beta after the man and his discovery. Nemesis was a prominent researcher-hacker (he's since moved on to writing an emulator which is to the Megadrive what bsnes is to the SNES) who had discovered a compression format included by Sega in the SDK which they gave to many developers including Sonic Team and which was used in Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 to compress art assets.

In 2005 he showed off his latest project - a complete disassembly of Sonic 2. This in itself wasn't too special, since people had toyed with disassembling parts of the ROM for research purposes, but Nemesis went one step further - he split out all the data into separate binary files so they could be edited separately, because the assembler can process include/incbin directives to pull them back in when run and produce a functioning ROM. This completely changed the way everyone worked with the games. The old editors either repointed everything and made a massively inflated ROM (a toolmaker named Esrael was known for this methodology) or had odd limitations because you only have a certain amount of space to work with; these made way for new editors which just edit the little binary bits separated out of the stock ROM, which are incorporated into the ROM when it's assembled. In addition, ASM editing became a lot more accessible, because there was no faffing with pointers - everything got neater and more professional.

Pokémon hacking is what Sonic hacking was prior to Nemesis' invention, and nobody seems to have the slightest interest in a split disassembly. Everyone is too happy with their decrepit tool ecosystem with strange and arbitrary limitations and an inability to cope with things being repointed. To me, that's a screw-up.

karatekid552 said:

Well, I have a funny story to tell. Jambo, don't kill me because I had to lie to you when this happened.

So, one day I get a message from Jambo51 asking me to help him fix some bugs on the 649 patch. (At the time, I did not know that he was looking for someone to take over.) It was a graphics bug, however these graphics were not normal. They were tile based, but with a custom structure set done by GF, not LZ structure. So, I couldn't fix them by normal means. Therefore, I went and blanket copied the clean FR into the 649 patch until it fixed the error. Then, I did it again, but in a smaller subsection. This process repeated until I found the error and fixed it. However, this process did not go smoothly. At one point, I began doing this to the main 649 patch, neglecting to make a back-up. When I went to start over the blanket copying, I realized my mistake. Mind you, this was the only copy of the current version of the patch in existence. The last back-up was 3 months old. I almost died. Jambo knew something was wrong when I asked him if he had a back-up on his hard disk, but he replied saying the one he shared on DropBox was the only one. I told him I had too many Explorers open and I had simply lost it on my hard drive and I didn't want to search for it. Luckily, DropBox has a back-up feature that saves all versions of a file for the past month. Without this feature.... Well, you know. Yeah. This didn't make me angry, but it scared the crap out of me.

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Wow that would've been horrible lol. Good thing DropBox is amazing haha or else Jambo would've probably flipped. My first practice rom hack I did I didn't back up at all and like inside a week already destroyed the rom. Back ups are so amazing... but sometimes things are just running so smoothly you forget to back up and if things go wrong, it's an old backup and just lost tons of work...

Probably when I used to wrong A-map to insert a map. Yeah, good bye month of work and hello break from Rom hacking!

when you cant find the right block!

I remember when I first started rom-hacking, I did the stupid thing and decided to not research on any of the hacking tools or actually learn how to work with them and I decided to make my very first hack from there. I remember doing the whole starter town and first route and had it mapped really, extremely good, except some tile errors but I did not pay attention to the borders and the movement positions (don't even ask what I did for scripting, I am not proud of my 6th grade self).

Anyway I started the rom and went straight into the starter town, movement areas were everywhere. I had no idea what I did wrong, and I spent the next two days trying to figure it out on my own (not even paying attention to the movements tab on a-map) and then gave up and looked online to find out what I did wrong. Yeah, its a very minimal type of thing to screw up on but that got me really angry and annoyed.

I've done pretty much everything at least once in a ROM. But the the thing I detest the most is tile inserting. It is so confusing and hard to do, I even get mad just from having to think about it. I used to work a lot with rpg maker back then and I did everything, from scripting, to mapping, tile inserting, writing, etc. I can do these things with Advance Map but since I'm still new to it, I have problems while using it.

Its annoying having to make every single thing that you want to add the right size and then place it correctly. Then comes the most awful part, the palette changing.

FrostedDragonite said:

when you cant find the right block!

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Hover over it, then look at the bottom corner of the screen. The block's number is given. The only place this doesn't work is for border blocks. (WHICH DRIVES ME INSANE!)

karatekid552 said:

Hover over it, then look at the bottom corner of the screen. The block's number is given. The only place this doesn't work is for border blocks. (WHICH DRIVES ME INSANE!)

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Maybe shinyquagsire will add this in MEH

Anyways, since i'm a spriter this will be spriting based, When the indexing meses up then the whole rom goes bat**** crazy trying to do random task ALL BECAUSE IT DIDN'T LOAD RIGHT AND ALL THAT S*** :P

Ace_Master_of_Turtles said:

Maybe shinyquagsire will add this in MEH

Anyways, since i'm a spriter this will be spriting based, When the indexing meses up then the whole rom goes bat**** crazy trying to do random task ALL BECAUSE IT DIDN'T LOAD RIGHT AND ALL THAT S*** :P

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I know what you mean, I try to insert an image and I'll go into the rom and go into battle and the rom will get all black and buggy and make fart noises at me lol

The first couple months or so of making my first hack were rather harsh. I was still just learning how to do pretty much everything, and I would forget to back up/copy the ROM I was using before doing something major. Needless to say, things would go wrong, and I'd have to start all over.
The most annoying thing would be when I tried to load the game in NO$GBA (which worked out for me a lot better than VBA) and it would give me a screen similar to this:



That was the screen of death of me. Every start up, I would hope and pray that the game would continue without giving me that screen.

I could never predict when it would do that, because sometimes it would give it to me for no apparent reason, or at least not a reason that I could figure out.

AkameTheBulbasaur said:

The first couple months or so of making my first hack were rather harsh. I was still just learning how to do pretty much everything, and I would forget to back up/copy the ROM I was using before doing something major. Needless to say, things would go wrong, and I'd have to start all over.
The most annoying thing would be when I tried to load the game in NO$GBA (which worked out for me a lot better than VBA) and it would give me a screen similar to this:

That was the screen of death of me. Every start up, I would hope and pray that the game would continue without giving me that screen.

I could never predict when it would do that, because sometimes it would give it to me for no apparent reason, or at least not a reason that I could figure out.

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My hack gives me this too! The irony being, it runs on supercard, meaning it runs on real hardware, without an issue.-_- lol

That screen was extremely annoying when i was first starting out. Thank god I got it to go away, hopefully for good...

... I probably jinxed it now, didn't I... :P

Le pug said:

accidentally drawing a GreatBlock on top of tiles when you simply meant to draw one block but forgot to choose the pencil tool (advancemap 1.95)

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Oh my god, this. And to do with UNLZ. Every time I try to use UNLZ it just laughs in my face.


Also, writing a really long, epic script, and forgetting to save. Im sure everyone's done that one at some point haha.

What's annoying me most is whenever I accidentally write new bytes to the ROM in a hex-editor
or if I simply forget to count +1 to a thumb-offset :D

What annoy me most is there is too much things I want to do, I did something, and I'm not pleased with it and I do it again, although there are tons of works. Sound a little crazy but that's my problem. One more thing is learning new knowlege, it takes lots of time and really make me mad if I failed.

KennyKid said:

What annoy me most is there is too much things I want to do, I did something, and I'm not pleased with it and I do it again, although there are tons of works. Sound a little crazy but that's my problem. One more thing is learning new knowlege, it takes lots of time and really make me mad if I failed.

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That's actually how one should do everything. Unless you're satisfied with what you have come up with, you shouldn't leave it look "okay", but something better.

Anyway, you can handle this "issue" easily by planning everything out from the start. Don't just start doing something from scratch - rather write notes about what you want to accomplish and write the code/data (with whatever tool you use) that implements that wanted feature then.
All you have to do then is to test if it works like you'd assume it to. If it doesn't, figure out what's wrong and you're done.

(Besides, writing complicated events is a lot simpler when you write notes about what they're supposed to do first.)

The thing that currently annoys me the most is when i've finally finished inserting new tiles and changing palettes and then there is a colour which I stuffed up when editing the palette.

There was a fix posted by Hackmew a while back for Emerald ROMs; it claimed to fix the HP underflow bug through use of the Pomeg Berry. What he failed to say was that it broke HP recalculation for a very small amount of cases and in only very specific circumstances. It took me ages to figure this fact out through vigorous backup-checking.

Oh, and Ctrl-Z on XSE. My god...