Nes Save State Hacking Guide
A Beginner's Guide to NESROM Hacking.Version 1.5by Sliver XBest viewed at 800x600 resolution.This document is geared towardsROM hackers with little or no experience at ROM hacking, and thereforewon't hold anything new for those who know what they're doing. But if you'vegot some ideas and just can't seem to figure out how to make them a reality,then this should help you get started.Table of contents:The HexEditor: Your new best friend.Hacking NES ROMs will make you learnalot: Not only about how the NES works and how the games are set up andfunction, but also about Hex Editing, which will quickly become one ofyour most useful skills to have.
What you need is a good Hex Editorprogram, (if you have a PC, then is your best bet, hands down), NESticle, which is one of the bestdebugging emu's I've seen, some ROMs, and a lot of patience.Hexadecimal is a way of representinginformation in a computer file in a way other than the actual source codeor in binary. Hex digits are based on powers of 16, rather than 10 likepure decimal, and have a few extra digits which are A, B, C, D, E, andF. Also it takes two digits to represent one byte, or number. It may soundconfusing at first, but you'll eventually get the grasp of it.Example 1:Let's say you want to convert decimalnumbers into hex. Since hex is based on powers of 16, you have to counta little differently than with decimal. Let's say you want to count to20 in hex.
Here's how the order would go:Hexadecimal00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B0C 0D 0E 0F 10 11 12 13 140 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20Decimal EquivalentThis pattern is repeated as yougo higher, such as if you started counting past 20, you would get 15, 16,17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, 1F, 20. You may be confused, butthat's ok. It'll takesome time and practice messing around with it to get it down. However,when hacking NES ROMs, the range of hex numbers you'll be messing withprimarily will be between 00 and FF, which is 0 to 255 in decimal. A reallybig help to you is available if you have Windows 95. O nadaan parindey ghar aaja full song lyrics. Win 95's calculatorcan convert regular decimal numbers to hex. Just type in the number, andclick the circle that says Hex.
It should show the number in it's hex equivalent.Ok, I hope that this really rudimentaryexplanation of hex helps you out. Now that you have a vague understandingof it, we'll start to get into ROM hacking itself.NESticleNESticle.
Sure, it can't run alotof ROMs, has a crappy palette, and hasn't been updated in ages, but whenit comes to ROM hacking, this is one of the best damn tools you can get,and for one reason: The Magical F2 and F4 Buttons. Using F2 has many usefulpurposes, from graphics editing to getting hex values for text and tiles.F4 let's you view the palettes that are currently being used, which I'llgo into later in this document.
You're gonna need this program for mostof the procedures below, so do a search for it on the net, or get it at the bottom of this doc in the section. (however, dependingon when you read this, the URL's might not work.) Now it's time toget into actual ROM hacking, starting with.GraphicalHackingChanging a games graphics can befun and tedious at the same time, especially if you have limited artisticabilities (such as myself). There are two main ways of going about this:using NESticle's F2 button to bring up the Pattern Tables, or by usinga kick ass program called Tile Layer. Here's the pros and cons of each:NESticle:Pros:1:Allows you to do real time editing,so you can see the changes as you do them on screen.Cons:1:You can't save your changes unlessthe game has VROM (Video Rom).2:You're screwed if the game can'tbe emulated by NESticle.Tile Layer:Pros:1:Let's you save your changes on almostANY game, regardless if it has VROM or not.2:Allows you to arrange the tiles inorder so you can see them as they appear in the game. (more on this ina minute).3:Allows you to open two ROMs at once,so you can cut and paste graphics from one into the other.4:Also let's you edit Gameboy, SegaMaster System, Virtual Boy, and Super NES ROMs.Cons:1:You can't edit in real time, so youhave to make your changes, then load the ROM to see what it looks like.That's about it. A conjunction ofthe two is the best way to get what you want done, so get Tile Layer aswell.
There's a link to it in the section at the bottom of this doc.Ok, now we're gonna start some actualROM hacking by screwing around with some of the graphics in Super MarioBrothersWhat you need:NESticleTile LayerA ROM of Super Mario BrothersLoad NESticle, then click on File,then click Load Rom. You'll be given a listing of the directories in yourcomputer. Go to where your Super Mario Brothers ROM is located and loadit. Now, hit F2, and you should see a screen like this come up.This may look like a bunch of garbled shite to you, butthis is actually the graphics being used by the game. (In Super Mario Brothers,these are actually ALL the graphics in the entire game.) The ones on theleft are the sprite tiles, such as Mario and all the enemies.
The oneson the right are the background tiles. See, most ROMs don't store theirgraphics in order, but have their tiles jumbled around. Tile Layer canhelp with that, but I'll get into that in a second. Anyway, click on thevery first tile on the left side, which you might be able to tell is theback of Mario's head. Another screen like this should pop up.This is where you can edit the graphics, in this casethe back of Mario's head. (The numbers at the top aren't important forthis kind of stuff, but will be useful later on when you get into textediting.) The tile is composed of an 8x8 grid with 4 colors, which arethe boxes on the right. (Note that the top color is transparent.) You canright click on the tile or the pattern tables to change the colors shown,although usually NESticle doesn't show the correct palette.
The best thingto do is to get the graphic you want to change, such as Mario standing,on the screen, pause the game, then get into the pattern tables and startmessing around with a tile that's a part of Mario standing. You'll be ableto see the changes as you do them, which is useful as hell. As far as editingthe tile, just pick your color by left clicking on it, then start paintinglike any other paint program. Once you've done the back of Mario's head,click on some more tiles and mess around if you want.Ok, so now you've changed some crap, but there's stillone more important thing left to do.
Go to File, then click Write VROM.This'll save your work to the ROM.However, there are alot of ROMs that don't have VROM,such as Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda, so any graphics you changein NESticle won't be able to be saved. Or maybe all those jumbled tilesare confusing the hell out of you. What if you're wanting to hack a gamewith no VROM, or want to see the tiles like they appear in the game? Easy,it's time to break out Tile Layer.For the sake of making things slightly easier, put yourMario ROM into the same directory as you have Tile Layer. If you're usingWin9598, you need to go into MS-DOS Prompt. Go to the directory whereTile Layer's at and typetlayer.exe xxx.nes (xxx is the name of theROM)You should now see this:Yup, more garbled crap. However, this isn't the game'sgraphics.
Hit either down on the arrow keys or page down a few times untilyou see the jumbled tiles, which in Super Mario Brothers is at the verybottom of the file. Here's where one of Tile Layer's coolest features comesinto play. Click on the back of Mario's head, then go over to the clipboard and hit right click on your mouse. The tile should now be on theclipboard.
Now click the front of Mario's head and put it in front of thetile of the back of his head. Doing this you can arrange the tiles to wherethey actually look like they do in the game, like this.Doing this makes it a hell of a lot easier to do graphichacks. The way it works is identical to NESticle's tile editor. Just rememberthat you have to re-insert the tiles back to where they came from. Suchas if you changes Mario's face, you need to left click the altered tileon the clipboard, go over to the left screen where the ROM data is, thenright click it over the original tile of Mario's face.
As always, rememberto save before you quit!That about covers basic graphic hacking. But wait, what'sthat? You'd like to know how to change words and such in a game? Well,that's a whole new subject, which is covered in.AlteringTextChanging a game's text is a littlemore complicated than you would think at first. Changing the graphics ofthe letters in the Pattern Tables or Tile Layer into other letters is definitlynot the way to go, as it doesn't change the order of the letters, and makesmost of the words become gibberish.
Some real damn bad examples of thiscan be found in some hacks from a year or two ago. Also, opening up a ROMin a text editor like Notepad won't accomplish anything either. So howdo you do it? First you need to get a program called Thingy, which youcan also find in the section at the bottom of this document. You don't need to do anything withit yet however. It's time to fire up NESticle again, and for thisexample we're going to use a more text heavy game than Super Mario Brothers, Dragon Warrior 1.What you need:NESticleThingyA Dragon Warrior 1 ROMA text editor, such as NotepadLoad Dragon Warrior in NESticle,and hit F2 to bring up the pattern tables. On the left pattern table you'llsee 0 through 9 and all the letters of the alphabet.
It'llsay #00 on the top of the tile grid, just like the one with Mario's headfrom earlier. Remember how I said they weren't important for graphic hacking?Well, they're important now. Open up Notepad or whatever text editor youhave (although programs like WordPad and Wordperfect are probably bad ideas.Stick with crap that does plain ASCII, like DOS EDIT or Notepad.) and typethis:0=00Or if you're using a non multitaskingOS like MS-DOS, just write it down on paper for now. Keep clicking theother numbers and letters and keep writing down the numbers that show upon the blue bar above the tile grid. These are the hexadecimal values forthe letters and numbers as they're stored in the game. Once you get allthe values down, (including the ones for punctuation, and the one thatmeans space, which is F5) you should have a list that looks something likethis:00=001=102=203=304=405=506=607=708=809=90A=a0B=bAnd so on.
If you've beentyping this into a text editor, then save it as dw1.tblIf you've been writing it down on paper,open up your text editor and put all the values down just like shown above,then save it as dw1.tblWhat this file is is a table filefor use with Thingy, a program that'll save you countless hours of hassle. See, NES ROMs almost never use the ASCII system to store their text, soviewing them in a text editor won't show them at all. What this tbl fileyou just made does is it tells Thingy what values stand for what letter,so you can see them in plain text, which is alot better than searchingfor 37 11 18 1D (Thou in Dragon Warrior) in a hex editor and replacingeach letter byte by byte with other hex values, unless you LIKE doing thatcrap. When I first started messing around with ROM hacking 4 years ago,that was the only way, by god, and it sucked in the worst of ways. Anyway,put the Dragon Warrior ROM and dw1.tbl in the same directory that you put Thingy in. You'll be promptedfor your file's name: just type in what your Dragon Warrior ROM's nameis, with the extension, such as dragw1.nesThen it'll ask you for your table'sname.
Type dw1.tblWhen it says Second Table, just hitenter. You should now be in the main program, which'll look like this.The left screen is the hex values of the information inthe ROM, and the right screen is what your table file has listed as meaningfor those hex bytes. Hit S, and type in art andhit escape.You'll see something like this.(some of the byte definitions are missing because I didn't feel like writingout the whole table, but you get the idea.)You can now actually see the words as they are, insteadof as hex bytes. Here's how this same part of the ROM would look withouta table in Thingy, or in any hex editor for that matter.Pretty heinous. Now you see why Thingy kicks so much ass.But before you start changing anything there's a few things you need toknow about text hacking.
For one thing, most games use pointers, whichis a subject I'm not going to go into in this document. Basically whatit means is that you can't make a line of text any longer than it alreadyis without screwing up something, unless you remap it to somewhere else,which is a bitchy process. So sticking with the set length of your textlines is the best thing to do at first, at least until you start to learnmore about ROM hacking. Here's an example of what I'm talking about.Let's say you've got a line of text that says I'mthe king of Dank Land!That gives you a total of 26 bytes to work with, sinceyou count the spaces too.Putting more than 26 letters, numbers, ect in this line willcause strange and weird shit to happen more than likely, so here wouldbe a few examples that would and wouldn't work.Things that would work:So now we must journey. 23 bytes long.Bleah, you make me sick!24 bytes long.Today sucks. 12 byteslong.Things that wouldn't work:I'm going to run really fast now.33 bytes long.Mmmmm, frozen cow pies! Yeah!29 bytes long.You get the idea. Ok, now to change some text.
(Finally!)Hit J, which is Jump to Position in Rom. Hit enter onManual Address, and type in 0.
You should now be back at the beginningof the file. Hit S, and type listen thenhit escape.You'll be at the line of text atthe beginning of the game where King Lorik is talking to you, shown here.Alright, now to change what the king's saying. Move yourarrow keys until you've highlighted the first letter of listen.Click space. Now move and highlight the last letter of words,and hit space again. You'll now be in a screen where it'll ask you to typein your text.
Nes Rom Hacking
The cool thing about this is that it won't let you go overyour byte limit. Let's type in something like, Iwant my Rage CD backNow hit escape, and hit q. Now loadthe Dragon Warrior ROM up in NESticle and start a new game.
When Lorikspeaks to you, it'll look like this now.There you go, you now know how to change a ROM's text.Just remember to stick to the original length for now, and you'll be ok.Now we're going to go into the last topic this document's going to go into,PaletteHackingWhat's palette hacking? Well, whenyou're hacking a game's art, sometimes you might want to make your newgraphics use different colors than the ones they already are using. Forthe sake of you not having to go on another ROM hunt, we're goingto change some color palettes in Super Mario Brothers.What you need.NESticleA Hex EditorA Super Mario Brothers ROMLoad up Super Mario Brothers in NESticle. Press start,and pause it as soon as you start on World 1-1. Now is where the otherMagical Button in NESticle comes into play, the F4 key.
Hitting it willbring up a screen that looks like this.These are the colors currently being used by the game.They way this is set up is that each palette is a set of four colors, withtwo rows of four palettes each. Here's where we're gonna change some thingsaround. See the first palette on the second row, the one that's light blue,red, rust, and brown? This's the palette Mario uses when he's in regularor Super form. Click on each of the colors and write down the hex valuesit'll show, which will be 22 16 27 18.
CloseNESticle now, and open your Mario ROM in your hex editor. (you can evenuse Thingy without a table as a hex editor if you want.) Now search for 22162718, that's right, don't use any spacesbetween the values. When you find it, change the 16to 0C and the 27 to 2A.Save the file and reopen it in NESticle. Mario's colors will now look likethis.You've now changed Mario's palette. There's a side effectto this though. Any other sprite using this same palette will also haveit's colors changed, like the Spiney's I think. Another thing to rememberis that in alot of games the first match won't be the palette you're lookingfor, as the same thing might be in the ROM multiple times.
So when it comesto this, you need to use trial and error, changing each one until you findthe right palette. Remember to make frequent back ups though! One morenote about palette hacking, sometimes the ROM won't list the first color(which is the transparent one), so say if you weren't finding any matchesfor 22 16 27 28 in the ROM, try searchingfor 16 27 28. Also, the NES has a total of64 colors, which are shown here with their hex values on this chart.
Youmight want to save this to your hard drive for future reference, as it'sa big help in finding what colors you can use.(I can't take credit for this image. I think Toma created it. Hopefullyhe doesn't mind me using it.)That's it for palette hacking. By now you should havea decent idea of the basics of NES ROM hacking, although you may want toread this every now and then or any other docs on the subject to get moreunderstanding. Remember, ROM hacking isn't something that is simple, sothe best way to get better is to just experiment around and see what youcan do. Anyway, have fun, and happy hacking.UsefulResourcesHere's all the programs used inthe above procedures. If one link doesn't work, try the alternate linkfor it.NESticle Tile Layer ThingyOh yeah, if you find anyerrors, or some of the links don't work, ect, or just need to ask a questionabout something, you can email me at address.Page designed and created bySliver X.
Hacking Nes Mini
2000 The Pit of Shite.
Html Game Save Editor
Learn more about the different mods and hacks available for the SNES Classic Mini. Follow our easy tutorials and guides to install mods and hacks to your console like adding more games or playing different consoles.All tutorials have been updated in July 2019 to reflect the latest changes and recommended stable releases.Guides.The instructions in the tutorials are the same for both the SNES Classic Mini and NES Classic Mini.We will be adding more guides in the future. Do you have a specific tutorial you want to see? Leave us a comment below!