Double Dragon hack

[Matthew]

People always complain that Double Dragon is too difficult, they can't get past the first 2 screens. This is a shame because they never get to fight with a barrel or knife.

 

So,I have hacked Double Dragon to make it more playable.

 

1)Enemies are easier to defeat, this ramps up the further along you get.

2)Changed the first stage so that you are battling women.(they are easy, just fly kick them)

3)Increased Player one's life to 5 bars of health (instead of 2)

4)Two player games have 3 bars of health each (instead of 2)

5)Changed "TECHNOS JAPAN" to "HACKED BY MB"

 

 

This is my first attempt at hacking an Atari 2600 game.

Matts Double Dragon (PAL) a.bin

[Matthew]

A couple of things I noticed when hacking this game.

 

The health value for the enemies on level one is used to initialise other things in the game (4). So you can't change it easily without screwing up the game.

This is why I opted to change the character type for the first level instead (women are easier to defeat).

 

For the following levels I just needed to edit a table(indexed by level value) to reduce the enemies health.

When I say "health", I mean the amount of times you need to knock down the enemy.

 

I can change the character type for any level, except the seconds. Looks like this is re-used by something else.

 

Another interesting point, notice that there is only one enemy on screen when there is a weapon in play (stick,knife or barrel).

Originally I wanted to give the player a stick at the start of the game, but I quickly realised that this would be impossible due to the way things are drawn.

 

Atari programs are interesting, you can see were the programmer tried to save space (rom/ram), it is this re-use of variable that can make hacking a pain/fun.

[Nukey Shay]

Two words: Elbow Smash. Get the timing right for that and you're undefeatable.

[Matthew]

Two words: Elbow Smash. Get the timing right for that and you're undefeatable.

 

Yep, beat this game when I was a kid using nothing more than perfectly timed elbows.

 

But not everyone has my profound abilities, hence the hack.

[+FujiSkunk]

Hey, any plans on releasing an NTSC hack?

[Crazy Climber]

Yeah, elbows worked in the arcade version also. When I was short on money, I would elbow smash my way through Double Dragon to kill time and get a few watchers/etc..

[TheCheeseLover]

Could I use this sensational hack to do a batman hack im doing? I'm technically hacking a hack.