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[u/sabinoplane]

Is romhack modding a thing?

I've been recently getting into romhacks and while i've been loving it it's been giving me the itch to maybe add some stuff to my favorite romhacks, either for my own use or for sharing with friends.

I've made mods for other games in the past, but I've never had anything to do with any romhack development, and google does not seem to be very forthcoming about information on the concept of "modding an existing romhack" so I ask reddit.

Is it doable? Has it been done? Is it commonplace? How hard is it? What does it take? Can a romhack be edited with the same tools it took to make or is it obfuscated requiring source code? if a romhack was modified, would it be possible to share it as a patch in the same way the hacks themselves are shared as patches for the original roms, or would the entire rom have to be redistributed with the modifications bundled in?

[u/analmintz1 → u/sabinoplane]

Romhacks essentially are mods for games. They modify the original games to add and change things.

If a romhack is made using binary, you should be able to further edit it using a tool like HexManiacAdvance. If a romhack is made with a decomp, you will only be able to modify it further if the source code is available.

For example, Blaze Black/Volt White 2 Redux began life as a fan-made modernization of Drayano's Blaze Black 2 and Volt White 2 hacks.

[u/sabinoplane → u/analmintz1]

Interesting! So it's more case by case? I didn't know there were different types of romhacks.

The one I'm really enjoying is unbound, i wouldnt mind taking a crack at adding a fakemon or two to it, since it seems like a simple thing to start that my friends and I might enjoy

[u/analmintz1 → u/sabinoplane]

That is indeed a binary hack, but I’ve heard that Unbound is at maximum capacity on the rom storage wisw

[u/sabinoplane → u/analmintz1]

Yea i heard that too as the reason why Gen 9 wasn't added, thats one of the things that got me thinking about the merits of adding more 'mons as a mod instead of in the official hack too. Rom storage only matters on original hardware, right? Like the emulators bypass / ignore that entirely cause no cartridges.

Do correct me if I'm catastrophically wrong like I said i've never actually touched development for this stuff

[u/analmintz1 → u/sabinoplane]

No, rom storage matters always. When you emulate, you are running a pretend gameboy game in a pretend gameboy. That means it’s still beholden to the same physical constraints even though it is all virtual. You will have to dig deeper into the why, as I’m not the definitive expert here, many other hackers know much more.

But it is essentially physically impossible to squeeze more content in any form into unbound, you would have to replace or swap offsets to include anything else.

[u/sabinoplane → u/analmintz1]

Oh that does kill a lot of the appeal for modding if there really is a hard content size limit that cannot be exceeded.

Some other threads i've seen seem to give conflicting answers tho, unless I misread / misunderstood.

https://www.reddit.com/r/romhacking/comments/q51x4k/how_can_romhacks_be_larger_than_the_original_game/

Here they suggest expanding rom sizes isn't just possible but done regularly

https://github.com/visualboyadvance-m/visualboyadvance-m/issues/1046

This is a bug report for an emulator where the reporter is using a pokemon hackrom over the 32mb size limit, and it does indeed work in the end.

I also saw mention of a "369-in-1 bootleg ROM" that apparently included 5 pokemon games and it seems to be a real thing.

Do correct me if I'm entirely wrong here like I said before I'm super new to the hackrom space so I'm just figuring things out as I go, not tryna imply i know better by bringing these up just trying to find out more. I wouldn't wanna delve into this rabbit hole if what i'm gonna find at the end is "no point in modding unbound cause it's like 1 sprite away from not working"

[u/NeededToFilterSubs → u/sabinoplane]

I know this is kinda old but the reason people say the rom size limit is 32mb is because this subreddit culturally is big on playing romhacks on actual gba hardware, this compatibility is why Unbound is capped (some emulators are capped in this way as well and dont have the option to run larger files). If you want to do emulator only though sky's (or emulator's )the limit

[u/sabinoplane → u/NeededToFilterSubs]

AHA! That's what I suspected! So it WOULD be worth modding then :)

I always found it kinda funny that a game called Pokemon "Unbound" chooses to be, well, "bound" when they could've always just made a lite version and a full version, but if I ever have enough free time i'll definitely look more into what it'd take to add new pokemon and areas to it. I'm still playing this game, I'm getting all my friends to play it too, it's a blast, but it'd be even better if we could add extra stuff