#hex editing

Thanks to the dark arts (aka 010 hex editing), I've managed to swap Manuela for Cornelia on a 3 Hopes save. However Manuela herself still appears in the Camp.

So Imma put out an appeal of sorts, if you've ever dabbled in 3 Hopes modding at all:

Has anyone has figured out how to also make the swapped characters appear in the Camp?

so there's this game called spore creatures for the nintendo ds. i want the assets from it. the problem is that the rom does not unpack neatly into normal formats that people have built tools for. it just spits out some .bin files. my understanding is that getting these to turn into files that other programs can parse basically requires writing a bespoke extractor. after several years, i am ready to admit that this is just beyond my ability. i am not a hacker and dont have the time or energy to become one for the sake of this One Thing. however, there are people on this website who Are real hackers. if the person currently reading this is one, i am begging on my hands and knees: please help me (and the two other people who have tried and failed to do this.)

you can acquire a spore creatures rom from all the regular avenues and unpack it with ndsheader. it makes three .bin files and one .sdat file. i HAVE the stuff from the .sdat, that all unpacks as normal with tinke. presumably all the graphics and maps and stuff are inside rom.bin, which is an impenetrable fortress to me. i'm not sure if it's legal or polite to directly offer to pay money for ripped game assets, but ummm , if you can get usable textures/models/sprites from that .bin and send them to me, it may incentivize me to give you a reasonable amount of united states dollars as thanks.

What's this? I'm alive? Ohoho, indeed. I made a silly little sheep for april fool's day so that you all might enjoy.

I regret to inform you that I am not a hacking guy. Memory addresses and hex registers and things like that are what scared me away from “real” programming back in the day. When I ripped sprites and things like that, it was 100% the old fashioned way – in an emulator with 1:1 pixel aspect and the option to turn off layers. Or, worst comes to worst, you just paint the background out by hand, frame by frame.

Going back and having to do that for newer fangaming projects is actually weirdly difficult! Newer emulators don’t care about aspect ratios or having sharp pixels, it’s always filtered and blown up to whatever your monitor supports. It’s terrible. And when people do rip sprites nowadays, they do it by extracting the data directly from the game files, and it’s always in a million unassembled, individual tiles.

There’s no fun anymore, no technique. Just raw data.

CELL 2