What tools do you use to code/hack games

shilmover

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All,

its been a while since I've done 6502/z80 coding, but I would like to get back in the game. Maybe I can code some of the ideas I have.

My question is this. For those of you that build game mods (multigames/ROM hacks/etc). What tools would you recommend? (compilers/assemblers/disassemblers?)

Thanks in advance.
 
I have some ideas for a couple games that I want to work on as well, so I'm quite interested in answers here too. The only answer I can give is the obvious one: the mame debugger with hacked rom files.
 
I have some ideas for a couple games that I want to work on as well, so I'm quite interested in answers here too. The only answer I can give is the obvious one: the mame debugger with hacked rom files.

I know I can do that, but building a ROM Hack in MAME is fine... you just need a hex editor. I am thinking of running custom code on potentially custom hardware...
 
I've downloaded or written assemblers and disassemblers for all the CPUs i've played with (6502, 6800, 6802, 6809, Z80, 8080, 8086, 8088, Z80, 65000, 65816)... there's old unix command line source for most CPUs.

If you're just dumping asm to comment it and not to reassemble it, the disassemblers built into MAME debug work relative well. (And it's pretty easy to make c wrappers for them to turn each into a command line disassembler if you care to).
 
Any one know of any docs that explain how the sprites are stored in ROM for say Pac Man (or others). I found a couple of docs, but none that explained it well.
 
Any one know of any docs that explain how the sprites are stored in ROM for say Pac Man (or others). I found a couple of docs, but none that explained it well.

Grab the graphics hacking program Turaco that's allows you to edit and modify the graphics roms. It's way easier than editing the ROMs directly :)

A good way to get a handle on the graphics format for a game is the mame source, there's a definition of the graphics format for the game as part of the driver definition.

- James
 
If you're just dumping asm to comment it and not to reassemble it, the disassemblers built into MAME debug work relative well. (And it's pretty easy to make c wrappers for them to turn each into a command line disassembler if you care to).

IIRC, the latest MAME release has a standalone disassembler.
 
Grab the graphics hacking program Turaco that's allows you to edit and modify the graphics roms. It's way easier than editing the ROMs directly :)

A good way to get a handle on the graphics format for a game is the mame source, there's a definition of the graphics format for the game as part of the driver definition.

- James

Yep... Turaco is the way to go. Helps alot on debugging graphics issues too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-WHRJvk94k
 
Grab the graphics hacking program Turaco that's allows you to edit and modify the graphics roms. It's way easier than editing the ROMs directly :)

A good way to get a handle on the graphics format for a game is the mame source, there's a definition of the graphics format for the game as part of the driver definition.

- James

Sigh,

It wont run under Windows Vista or Windows 7. I guess I need to build an older system...
 
Ok. So I got the program on my eprom burner system and it now runs, but it does not work.

For pacman, I get a "pacman.5e not found" error. I have the pacman rom in a ROMs directory that i configured Turaco to use. I have the drivers downloaded and installed.

Any ideas?
 
Any one know of any docs that explain how the sprites are stored in ROM for say Pac Man (or others). I found a couple of docs, but none that explained it well.

Mame source code... src/vidhrdw/pacman.c

...or the source code to 6-pac... look in the screen saver routine...
 
I found a programmers manual for the Defender boardset on Sean Riddle's old webpage. I was looking for some others, maybe from Atari in th elate 80's, for some of the ones that use the 68000 processor.

Which programmers manual did you find ?

=Dan
 
I use a combination of dasm and/or recomp to convert ROM data to assembly. Then I use MAME debugger as well for testing. This is enough for hacking existing ROM code.

For writing new software for hardware, I have some experience with using Z88DK to write custom software for the Sega G80 hardware (Eliminator, Space Fury, etc), which is Z80 hardware. While I did get "Hello World" for the system running in MAME, the ROM code didn't actually run when put into actual hardware. So MAME is only good up to a certain point for debugging software before going to hardware.
 
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