Hacking the ST rom

acid trip, thats how UC rolls

On Blanka’s stage, there’s a hash mark at the far right, way up at the roof of the hut, just before and above the big fish on the wall. Any idea what it’s marking…?

Where is it? BTW, I had never noticed they changed where the fish was, from WW to ST. It was probably at SSF2, that they did it. The fish used to be to the left, and the hut was not mirrored or whatever: you could only see the left side of it. I also noticed some P and V signs, which I supposed were to be used as round-win markers, where - most likely - P would stand for “perfect”. I’ve also seen where B2SPD found the “hidden” flame images that can not be seen in the recovery of his Fierce SRK. There’s lots of trash in the ROM.

can u share those trash pics to the rest of us? maybe as some Miscellaneous?

I can. But there’s some issue with getting appropriate pics: the game has several possible palette-swaps for every image. Thus, after getting to each image, finding the correct combination can take quite some time. A much easier alternative would be that I post the addresses which you have to reach from the menus. There are 4 menu options in “8 CHARACTER”, which are
[LIST=1]
[]OBJECT
[
]SCROLL1
[]SCROLL2
[
]SCROLL3
[/LIST]
Each has several images for playable characters, NPCs, scenarios, menus, etc. For instance, there’s one of the pics of a developer around 45D0 in the OBJECT menu. There, stage=06 and color=10 show the surrounding Ryu images with the color which is used for Ken - they just paste Ken’s hear over them. With stage=07 and color=1E, you get WW/Jab-SSF2/ST-old Ryu’s colors. But, with like 5 minutes of searching, I could not find a combination that shows that developer’s picture in color.

Edit: some flags and NPC faces are around 7EC0. WW’s 2P cursor image (which overrides 1P, unlike CE and onward, which can both be seen while selecting the same character) is around 8360, and Ken’s SSF2/ST SRK flames are around E790. Stage=19, color=0F shows these in color, but I ain’t sure it’s the correct combination.

Edit: the round icons I talked about are around C750.

While we’re on the subject of unused stuff in the ROM, there seem to be quite a few graphics intended for a networked cabinet tournament variant much like regular SSF2 had. After all the character sprites that were newly added for ST, you can see messages like “Ranking”, “Results”, lots of big numbers, a “The League Battle” subtitle, and even what appears to be a short explanation of the tournament rules in Japanese.

Screw that, if you are going to bother you may aswell do the best job you can. I say go for broke. Don’t turn it into HDRR, ST is 90% perfect as it is.

Buff Dictator’s devil reverse (already done)
Nerf balrog’s head butt + throw loop
Nerf Chun Li’s throw
Slightly buff E.Honda’s super
Quicker recovery on Fei’s light kick chicken wing
Nerf Honda’s command grab
Nerf Claw’s wall dive
Nerf Dhalsim’s throw loop
Delete O.sagat…

I already posted a lot of that. Most of the programming is still there for it.
Edit: More Pictures of it

Just wondering if the only change was the fei long n cammy motions were changed to a qcf, or dp motion, u know his weird chicken wing motion for example, would this change make fei n cammy going up in tiers? I can see cammy going trough FBs on reaction, same goes with fei, unlike messing up the special n eating the projectile

Anything that wouldn’t require specials to end in some up-direction, however it happens, would benefit them, though I doubt that alone will send any characters skyrocketing in tier placement. Sirlin used quarter-circles; others have suggested half-circles so that the input time wouldn’t really change. So long as they couldn’t accidentally jump at the end of the motion, it’s all good.

Thing is, who here actually knows how to change either command motions, or what is assigned to a given input?

Even though HDR players hate to admit it but it did sky rocket Gief’s tier placement by having SPD a half circle. As for the motions you have to learn to use mame’s debugger. Figure out what writes it in the memory you have the memory locations how to do the moves from a lua script Pasky made.

“sky rocket”? No. Not even remotely. People can say it a thousand more times, and it still won’t make this true. Of all of the changes he received, this one is the least responsible for any possible movement in the tiers he had in HDR. It helps newer players compete faster and feel less frustrated when they accidentally jump instead of getting an SPD. Vets don’t worry about it because they can hit it nearly every time due to the healthy number of pre-jump frames (and plenty of practice).

Sure, once in a great while, you’ll even see the greats screw it up. It’s obvious, because they end up in the air after a tick or the like. With the new motion, it’s still possible to screw up; you just don’t usually notice as obviously. Even if that new motion helps even the best go from like a 95% success rate to a 97%, it still doesn’t change how he uses it in a match.

Better lariats, hops, normals, running grabs, and banishing flat…those might change where he stands. Not the new SPD motion.

Been working with the MAME debugger and hex-editing from scratch for around a month now. Learned plenty, with much more to follow. I know I can dig through it and figure it out, as you’ve pointed out, but it would be an immense time-saver if someone who had worked it before had that knowledge to share.

You have to put in the time for something you want. The thing is i haven’t touched ST hacking wise till earlier to get more of those Tournament Battle screen shots.

I’ve been messing with Vsav
[media=youtube]1O9ASy25epY[/media]
[media=youtube]olaqpQm3g1s[/media]

And making a gif showing off the priority engine in 3s.

So I took a closer look at those tournament rules in ST’s graphics, and it seems to describe a round robin-style tournament. Which is interesting, because the Tournament Battle variant of SSF2 used a single elimination format.

Jedpossum posted an image of a bracket and it looks single elimination…

Looks very similar to tournament battle for ssf2 snes. Which also had a battle to settle all ties in a bracket, so it isnt really pure single elimination

So breaking out my snes cartridge now (times like his im so happy i have 2 rj 45s for my snes so i can use my sticks). theres a preliminary round, then theres a losers bracket ( not really how we think of it, like i said, its to settle ties) then semi finals, (8 players per tourney, empty spaces are filled by cpus) then a match to decide 3rd place, 5th place and 7th place then finally, finals… Each mstch is not best of 3 but best of 1.

I dont know how well this mirrors arcade ssf2(was this tourney mode released…?) or arcade ST tourney which was never released but it may provide sone insight

The screenshots he’s posted are of the leftover SSF2 tournament battle mode. What I’m referring to are graphics that were added in ST, and seem to be intended for a new tournament mode that was planned but never actually made.

felineki is not going crazy. I saw some crosses and circles which were to be used in this ST mode while browsing through the game’s character menus. There were also images for the tables where they would be used.

Is there anything usable in that tournament mode data? There was mention of random versus stages before; that would be really nice.

We’ve had a lot of good luck while playing with this regarding character tweaks. If anyone wants to see what I mean, shoot me a PM. Still very early in messing around and learning some nuances of the game’s engine.

Has anyone used PALMOD or other palette-editing tools to mess with ST?

I’m going to mess around and see if I can give Akuma more than two colors…

EDIT: Not without screwing up the game (or reworking the code to allow him to actually have more colors, which would take much more work).

EDIT 2: A few palette mods:

Bricktator

Mango Bison

Shin Akuma

Note that much more work needs to be done to complete any palette swaps, since ST uses separate sprites for certain parts of moves. For example, any move that has “psycho power” of Dic’s, or Akuma’s teleport, which must all be manually changed as well.