Homebrew A Quick Question

[LightyKD]

This question applies to DS homebrew apps as well as retail roms. Are the games stuck at their pre determined sizes? For instance, if someone wanted to make a DS homebrew app that was at the least one gig, is that possible? Better yet, if someone wanted to add extra audio to a retail game but it would increase the size of the rom, would the DS still be able to run said rom from a flash cart. I'm asking because I wonder if it would be possible to add voice clips from Dragonball Z into the Dragonball Kai game that was just released. Dragonball Kai aside I always wondered exactly how big can homebrew apps can be.

 

[jurassicplayer]

There are ROM trimmers BECAUSE there is sometime empty spots that just fill up space. For the most part, commercial ROMs are filled with blank until the next closest size (the nice ones like 8, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512...you get the picture). Homebrew generally doesn't get super large because there isn't a need to add blank space (because that is stupid).

 

[DeMoN]

No they are not. Lots of hacks/translations increase the size of the ROM.
However, you cannot add anything to a retail cartridge since they are read-only.

 

[twiztidsinz]

I'm asking because I wonder if it would be possible to add voice clips from Dragonball Z into the Dragonball Kai game that was just released. Dragonball Kai aside I always wondered exactly how big can homebrew apps can be.

Pretty much anything is possible... It's a matter of "how much work do you want to put into it?".

You'd have to figure out what kind of compression/codec the game uses, decompress/decrypt the sound files to individual parts(?), replace the audio you want, recompress the audio to what the game uses and then fix the pointers since the sounds will be different (otherwise you'll most likely run into problems where the sound doesn't play, doesn't play fully, plays parts of two sounds or plays the wrong sound).

I'm not a hacker so some/most/all of this could be incorrect, but this is the general 'feel' for what audio replacement entails.