Thanks to felineki’s old research on how hitboxes and frame data is stored in the SF2:HF rom (and some stuff i figured by myself) I was able to do some minor hacks to the ST rom, since the format is pretty much the same, but located at different addresses in the rom. I mainly messed with Zangief and Dictator, I changed hitboxes of some moves and changed the startup of others, just for fun. For instance, i gave Zangief his Crouching Fierce from HDR and Dic his devil reverse from HDR. Both working exactly like they are in HDR.
I am able to edit any hitbox and edit most stuff related to frame data, excluding certain stuff like by how much frames Honda travels the screen during his headbutt, for example. I dont have 100% control over the animation data though, for example: if a move has 2 animation frames for startup, both with 3 frames of duration (total of 6 frames of startup), i am not able to make that move have a 1 frame of startup, because that would need me to “delete” an animation frame, which i have no idea how to do, at least for now. The fastest i could make that move is 2 frames of startup, by giving each part 1 frame of duration. I do everything in a hex editor. I am not able to change the damage and stun data yet but i think these will not be hard to discover.
I wont post a download of my hack right now because I dont think its a good idea, its too unfinished and i dont think its a good idea to have several versions of hacked ST on the internet. OSBR is the only one who i sent the hack and he was impressed by it and said that i should post about it here so i am now doing it, almost a month later, cuz i have been real busy.
Here’s a video as a proof and to show some of the stuff i changed in action (read the description for the list of changes showed):
[media=youtube]uqW-IF_X8QA[/media]
I was planning to just give up on the idea of hacking ST because something really pissed me off: when i finally found the location of the throwboxes in the rom, i went ahead and buffed Zangief’s Range on his super, which IMO is too bad in ST and should have RH Suplex range. And I was successful in it (as shown in the video), but later i noticed that both Zangief’s Super and Sim’s Noogie uses the same throwbox… So this means no buffed Super for gief. I’m 100% sure that this is actually a mistake from the programmer. Thanks capcom. In that case i believe i would need to hack the actual code, and i have no idea how to do it. I may discover how to do it, but messing with mame debugger is real boring and im also very lazy for that kind of stuff…
Anyway, I am creating this topic to know if the community is interested in a hack for ST. If people is not interested in it at all then i will just give up on the idea and will not release anything. I dont want to damage the ST revival, if thats actually possible. I dont plan to work on something retarded like a ST rainbow edition though. Only a rebalance hack would be worth IMO. Not saying that a hack would replace original ST, that obviously will never happen and i actually dont want to see something like that happening. ST is immortal. But if the majority of people think its fine then we can do something cool, we (community) can attempt to rebalance this game. I will not be a “Sirlin 2” and dictate what should be done and what shouldnt. I can even do a little tutorial on how to hack ST so i have no control over it. But this will only happen if people here say its not a bad idea.
So… what you people think about this? Should we do this or better not?
