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RS, RP, MS on Defense


kingsoby1

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@Ian Jones its been more of a gradual wind-down. As for why a lot of is just simple demographics. Your average tecmo super bowl fan is now in his 40s. Work and family start to demand more and more time.

 

At first there was only one guy who even understood the nes architecture and the game code well enough to make hacks other than modifying game data and simple text changes:

jstout

 

Then cxrom came along and made the 32 team rom which was an amazing accomplishment.

 

Both of those guys have basically disappeared. They don't play the game online so maybe their interest in the game simply waned or they did all they wanted to with it.

 

I then finally learned the NES archtitecture and the 6502 language and then used data and the knowledge we had to completey reverse the game. That was probably in the thousands of hours of work. Its extremely time consuming.

 

There really isn't a way to create GUI editor to create new hacks. To create such a tool wouldn’t be practical. It would probably take more time than creating the hacks from scratch. And you would probably just be better served re-implementing the game in a modern programming language.

 

i have potential side project with the reverse engineered source code. If it doesn’t come to fruition within another year then I’ll probably just open source it.

 

We at least documented some of the major hacks with the hacking directory. But who wants to spend their time going thru 1000s of forum posts.Many irrelevant ones now that the source is 100 pct reverse engineered

 

Its super painful to code in 6502. Just adding two numbers together is like 10 lines of code. And thats if they are less than 255. The size of one byte.

 

 

 

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dang. so out of the 100s of folks that put d*cks on SMB and RCR, only 3 of them decided to show up to the TSB party? That's a shame. It looked like this was a cool little community.But yeah, I'd imagine that TSB is a pretty generational thing. And the hex stuff def looks painful. I dled that fceaux or w/e to see if it could help me make heads or tails of anything, but watching it highlight different sets of numbers made my head spin and all i really could glean from it is where it was drawing the loading screens and where it was drawing the field. Which is something that's actually in the sparse documentation available. It takes a long time for people to develop those GUIs but it does help the modding community around a particular game grow and stay involved. I wish you luck with your code but careful, I read they just shut down Gridiron Heroes (it was a FB game that was nearly identical gameplay as TSB).

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Most games that have gui tools are just for editing the data. Or level editors which again is just a data editor. 

 

There are gui tools for editing nearly everything in this game that is just data/graphics so I don’t quite understand what you are even asking for specifically. 

 

Messing with mario sprites is rather trivial since you can just use an NES tile editor program. Just like you could make all the TSB player sprites  marios if you were so inclined...

 

Gridiron Heroes was not “shut down” It was just ceased to be worked on and let die. 

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@bruddog i wasn't asking for anything, just making conversation while i had the forum up in my browser. And there are some good GUIs out there that let you do a bunch more than just graphics. I was able to learn at least half of the programming language for TS1 using a GUI called codex to edit behaviors and objects (which in that game is where over 50% of the behaviors are stored). With the Frosty editor for madden 19&20, you can edit way more than just graphics and rosters, you can even edit the physics of the game, you can really change anything about the game, and they made a patch for it that breaks down what all the values you're working with are doing. The civ games have some decent GUIs too, but I haven't gotten into them as much yet. There's usually separate GUIs for the graphics/animations side of games that work alongside programs like adobe and blender, but I stink at graphics so i leave them alone. But things like that churn out a lot of content for games and increase the longevity of the community, because more people can get involved on a creative level. Anything on this forum that says "change this value to do this"....GUI. Pointers for the ROMs behaviors and where they point to....GUI. What the snippet of code does that the pointers are pointing to...GUI. That playbook editor taught me as much about this game in 15 minutes as spending all night sifting through threads that point to what hex codes are doing, and there a few things I had written off as failed experiments, but once I saw all that offense and defense behavior stuff i was like hey i think i can implement this now and it can work. And think about how many times you or @jstout had to figure out this or that for someone, when it was something they likely could have easily worked on themselves if they better understood what they were looking at.

 

If this were a "hack NES games" community I would say yeah, a GUI isn't practical, but this is - or was - a community revolved around modifying the code to a single game. Again, I'm not asking for anything, its all a moot point now, just having a convo about the merits of GUIs in modding communities, like the last two people left in a mad max wasteland.

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  • 2 months later...

 

Could you imagine one centralized editor where you could edit everything in one spot? Large and mini-helmets, cut scenes, add hacks, edit playbooks, etc. Think like a SUPER TSB Tool. What would be even sweeter would be a revival of the TSB Ultra program tied in with the editor. One can dream, right?

 

On 1/4/2020 at 8:11 AM, GRG said:

Jstout was the best thing to ever happen to this site. We need a thanks Jstout thread

 

Jstout was, is and will always be the man. 

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I appreciate the kind words from everyone.  I actually stopped by to find out what happened to Gridiron Heroes and ran into this thread.

 

I feel a bit bad about disappearing from here.  A few years back, I had a hard drive crash where I lost countless notes.  Then I basically ran out of ideas for fun hacks and slowly stopped popping by.  I spent most of last year with a computer that would blue screen randomly a few times a day so doing anything became a massive headache.  But I do stop by now and then but usually not signed in.

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@jstout, any visit from you is always welcome! Too bad about the hard drive crash. Sometimes all you need is an inspiration to jump back in to the hobby and before you know it you are back hitting the floor running. Happened to me, I was inactive for years too. I missed lots of discoveries about the games code on the site and have been playing catch up since. But your efforts were instrumental in taking the game editing to a new level. Thanks for that sir!

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7 hours ago, jstout said:

I appreciate the kind words from everyone.  I actually stopped by to find out what happened to Gridiron Heroes and ran into this thread.

 

I feel a bit bad about disappearing from here.  A few years back, I had a hard drive crash where I lost countless notes.  Then I basically ran out of ideas for fun hacks and slowly stopped popping by.  I spent most of last year with a computer that would blue screen randomly a few times a day so doing anything became a massive headache.  But I do stop by now and then but usually not signed in.

 

So glad to see you still stop by. You're the man jstout. Much appreciate all of your work (and quite a few others). Hey buddy, guess what. I hack! I'm a hacker! lol. 

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  • 2 years later...
On 1/13/2020 at 5:28 AM, jstout said:

I appreciate the kind words from everyone.  I actually stopped by to find out what happened to Gridiron Heroes and ran into this thread.

 

I feel a bit bad about disappearing from here.  A few years back, I had a hard drive crash where I lost countless notes.  Then I basically ran out of ideas for fun hacks and slowly stopped popping by.  I spent most of last year with a computer that would blue screen randomly a few times a day so doing anything became a massive headache.  But I do stop by now and then but usually not signed in.

I will hire you and buy you a brand computer lol. Seriously though,  have plenty of ideas. 

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