Satan's Hollow makeover

[glurk]

Just to be clear - I can't edit my above post now - by trying to hack the graphics inside that "packed" XEX file, it's like trying to edit a ZIPPED text file without unzipping it first to get the original text file back out.  You are just making things 100's of times more difficult for yourself!!!

 

The game was made originally as a 16K cart.  So to edit it, you want a nice virgin pristine unaltered image of that cartridge.  Not some whacky broken-up XEX monstrosity like the above.  For heaven's sake, my man...  "Packed" XEX files - I DESPISE THAT CRAP - break the file up into tiny pieces, disrupt the fonts, and the player/missile data, the code, the text, everything.

 

Maybe - maybe - those XEX packer things made sense back in the days of slow modem file transfers.  But today they are worthless nuisances.

[_The Doctor__]

what's crazy wild is that people can and are finding and unscrambling the packed stuff in situ making all of the updates and enhancements... and they manage to do that and make it work... they need jobs helping the country with crypto... recognition of the patterns at work in real time or short time with the ability to affect changes is in demand.

[TIX]

45 minutes ago, glurk said:

.

You are just making things 100's of times more difficult for yourself!!!

.

?

The truth is I know exactly nothing about programming..

I'm sure there are easier ways to do it but my "illustrious" career in hacking consists pretty much in:

 

opening a game in hackomatic and omnivore,

scrolling down and

when/if I spot something recognizable

edit it

run the game and see what I broke !!

 

I'll check the .car you provided, thanks.

 

 

[+MrFish]

Just now, TIX said:

I'll check the .car you provided, thanks.

 

Don't try to hack a CAR file. It contains a checksum that won't match the file once you change anything in it.

 

You need to work with a ROM -- which is a headerless dump of the cartridge with no checksum.

 

[+DjayBee]

I ran TIX' XEX-file through vitoco's xex-filter.pl and made it a continuous file.

 

This should make @glurk happy because he now can edit the file.

And it should make @TIX happy because he can work like before with the added bonus that due to the added zero-bytes and the missing block headers he might find some more data.

 

Have fun.

peace

sh-continuous.xex

 

Btw.: Adding only the starting address at 2E0-2E1 to the bin-file did not work because it probably has some copy protection to make sure that it is run from ROM.

Edited December 3, 2021 by DjayBee

[glurk]

I think that in order to "hack" games (efficiently) you NEED to know at least a little programming.  TIX - In Omnivore, just click up top SEGMENT -> VIEW SEGMENT.  If you see like hundreds of them, then that file is "XEX packed" and not a good candidate to use.  Always use the cleanest source.

 

Mr Fish - I didn't actually give him a CAR file, I just called it that.  I wasn't being pedantic enough.  I actually gave him a BIN (or ROM) version.  I only add the CAR header to something when it's done and ready to distribute, so it will detect cart type automatically.

 

NOW... Should I add my shield-hack to the above continuous XEX, or are we all good now?  I don't mind to do it, but it seems like every time I try to do some little thing to help someone out, it turns into a big mess.  Makes me want to stop trying to be helpful, LOL.  Not angry, just sayin....

 

EDIT: sh-continuous-glk.xex

Edited December 3, 2021 by glurk
added it

[_The Doctor__]

don't let it get ya glurk, it happens all the time. I sometimes do it as well. (as in I am on either side of that fence/net at times). It can become a real mess and then no one knows what's happening. It takes time to go back and sort out or glean what is useful or not and you'd have to actively look at all code/rombin/car etc materials to know if something is mislabeled or not.  I know what I meant or sent is correct but I put the wrong extender in the filename etc. The conversation turns on you quickly with all manner of rabbit holes opening around and under us. Been there done that and had it done to me... such is the life of real time communications where we all proceed at different speeds but the send of the that data is almost instantaneous.

 

I try to edit my posts before the window to do so closes but that can lead to folks being upset about the correction as well

Edited December 3, 2021 by _The Doctor__

[TheNameOfTheGame]

 

On 12/3/2021 at 12:56 PM, TIX said:

?

The truth is I know exactly nothing about programming..

 

Wow, your makeovers are even more impressive considering that.   

Edited December 16, 2021 by TheNameOfTheGame

[tjlazer]

On 12/3/2021 at 10:39 AM, glurk said:

NOW... Should I add my shield-hack to the above continuous XEX, or are we all good now?  I don't mind to do it, but it seems like every time I try to do some little thing to help someone out, it turns into a big mess.  Makes me want to stop trying to be helpful, LOL.  Not angry, just sayin....

 

EDIT: sh-continuous-glk.xex

What is the shield hack you speak of?

[glurk]

I did a little hack to help TIX with his graphics update.  The shield in the game is 9 pixels wide, and he was having trouble changing one side of it.  It turns out, it was done in machine code, so I hacked the game to make changes on the left side of the shield reflect to the right.

[www.atarimania.com]

Would it be possible to have the update for the clean version of the game with proper copyright and not the stupid cracked edition "FROM DUSTY"?

[Bill Loguidice]

Great to see and much-needed. I'm a Satan's Hollow superfan. This, along with Pooyan, is one of my two absolute favorite relatively obscure arcade games. I played countless hours of the brilliant (especially by early 1984 standards) C-64 Satan's Hollow port, and never got to try the Atari 8-bit version until maybe 15 years or so ago. Needless to say, I was extremely underwhelmed and don't think even if it was actually released it would have been much different.

Anyway, I would love to see what a non-limited Atari 8-bit port could be, but I suspect that someone would have to start from scratch to really make a difference.

[tjlazer]

9 hours ago, www.atarimania.com said:

Would it be possible to have the update for the clean version of the game with proper copyright and not the stupid cracked edition "FROM DUSTY"?

HEX editor can fix that easily.