Pc Engine / turbografx hacking

[phart010 | 1,705]

I am interested in doing a simple hack for a Turbografx game. Just replacing some sprites and changing some of the in game text.

Eventually may even change the music, and sound effects, but let’s focus on just sprites and text for now

How difficult is that to do? What tools are recommended? Is there a website that has good walkthroughs for doing this?

 

Edited May 22, 2021 by phart010

[phart010 | 1,705]

@Sumez@0xDEAFC0DE@TylerBarnes

Just paging you all because from posts you seem to have technical background and this subforum doesn’t seem to get much attention 

[0xDEAFC0DE | 1,277]

Unfortunately, I have no experience with TurboGrafx. Generally I would look into emulators and see if any have some ROM hacking ability. As well as searching around for PC Engine / turbografx plus ROM hacking, sprite / tile editor, etc. 

[Sumez | 2,934]

I've done a bit of PCE hacking myself, but it was a pretty painstaking experience, since I couldn't find any ready made tools for the purpose. 

I fired up the game in MAME since that's the only emulator I could find with a useful debugger (and it is probably the least user friendly debugger I have seen in my life, with a mostly command based interface). After figuring out what needed to be changed, I edited the hex values manually. 

There are a few people who have done PCE homebrew though, so I'm sure some tools do exist. 

[phart010 | 1,705]

11 hours ago, Sumez said:

I've done a bit of PCE hacking myself, but it was a pretty painstaking experience, since I couldn't find any ready made tools for the purpose. 

I fired up the game in MAME since that's the only emulator I could find with a useful debugger (and it is probably the least user friendly debugger I have seen in my life, with a mostly command based interface). After figuring out what needed to be changed, I edited the hex values manually. 

There are a few people who have done PCE homebrew though, so I'm sure some tools do exist. 

Do you know what the titles of those home brew are? I’ll see if I can track down the authors

edit: just googled pc engine homebrew. There is a pc engine homebrew site that has a bunch of titles and many seem to be made by Aetherbyte

Edited May 24, 2021 by phart010

[TylerBarnes | 184]

I wish I had more cross platform experience to lend a helping hand. I have no idea how PC engine works. 

  A common method of changing text would be to look at a hex dump and see if any of their tiles were assigned to ascii values. You should be able to see plain text in the text interpreted side of a hex editor if that is the case.