Options available for editing arcade graphics ROM data

[Tornadoboy]

Options available for editing arcade graphics ROM data

What editors for arcade ROM graphics are available that still work?

Thought I'd throw this out there as a topic as searching the web just keeps leading me in circles. I know of Turaco classic, Turaco CL and A.G.E but all of them are quite dated and I can't even get most of them to work under 64-bit Windows 7/10 or to recognize the ROMs under XP. If some programming genius out there wants a project, there's certainly a major gap out there for this kind of program that's current.

I've got a few ideas for some funny hacks involving some bootlegs like Popeye and Hyper Olympics for example, also I'd love to try to edit a few games that are only available in Japanese so they're in English, though I suspect there's more involved in that than editing graphics.

 

[Brentradio]

I used Turaco almost 20 years ago to change my Pac Man roms to Jack Man.

But that's about as far as I got doing anything like that.

More pics here

 

[Tornadoboy]

Nice work!

I want to screw around with the bootleg Popeye so Olive and Brutus have changed places and it's Olive who's running around trying to kill him.

 

[Interlock]

The problem is that unlike newer games the sprites aren't stored as art files but rather as bits in the code.

And since, again, unlike any console games, there's no standard to arcade hardware, software, or ROM layout there's not really going to be a tool to do this. Now, somebody's probably put the effort in to do it for games like Pac-Man where a lot of people want(ed) the ability to do so, but I'm not so sure if Popeye will work with any program or have one written for it even individually. Somebody would need to map out the exact ROM addresses where the graphics are, convert that code to art and colors to show on your computer screen, and then only begin to make the intense user-interface required to make it easy to be an artist.

 

[HudsonArcade]

Nice work!

I want to screw around with the bootleg Popeye so Olive and Brutus have changed places and it's Olive who's running around trying to kill him.

Brutus uses many more sprite tiles than Olive... it'll likely take significant code mods.

Swapping Olive and the Sea Hag would be easy

 

[Tornadoboy]

Turaco I've never gotten to work, but AGE used to work pretty good and supported quite a large number of classic games. Aside from having an older operating system compatible to run it I'm guessing my issue is the MAME ROMs available at the time it was programmed are labeled differently than they are now and perhaps checksums are different too, so it has no idea how to recognize them. I once hacked The Pit in all kinds of very juvenile and undignified ways and it worked fine through an emulator, though I had no actual board to give it a true test on. So I'm guessing since apparently it was possible before it should be a matter of updated the program to run on newer OS's and recognize the newer standards for the ROMs files, but again I'm hardly an expert.

Brutus uses many more sprite tiles than Olive... it'll likely take significant code mods.

Swapping Olive and the Sea Hag would be easy

Now there's an idea! I guess I could always just swap Brutus and Olive's heads, but that wouldn't be as funny as moving the entire characters. I could have Wimpy smoking weed instead of eating a cheeseburger too.

 

[english2]

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/turaco-sprite-editor-for-windows.557530/