So I'm pretty new to DS hacking, and I'm making a mkds custom track. I've been scouring the internet for solutions , but nothing seems to work.
For Mario Kart DS (as a tip maybe spell the full name out at least once for those not necessarily in the know) then there is the MK DS course modifier, which gained other abilities beyond just Mario Kart but still had some considerable options.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/mkds-course-modifier.299444/
More generally there are all sorts of tools people use for different things.
1) ndstool family tools.
ndstool is part of devkitpro but many used it for pulling apart and rebuilding ROMs. Command line only but has frontends in dsbuff and dslazy.
Versions also available for Linux and OSX.
2) nitroexplorer 2.? was a fork by a different user to the original 1.2 and earlier line. Has some more respect for certain things certain ROMs did that ndstool might fail to work properly with and thus gained a bit of a fanbase among certain games.
3) Crystaltile2.
A very powerful hacking program.
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/818/
Has both the option to export individual files (open a DS ROM in it, click the little DS icon on the right hand side of the top toolbar and it will pop up a window with the DS ROM contents) and more generally unpack and repack whole ROMs (one of the dropdown menus) in addition to being a great tile editor, DS format aware viewer of many things, pretty decent text editor/viewer, disassembler, handling compression and much more besides.
4) In place stuff.
Here tools like ndsts
https://no-intro.org/tools.htm
and ndshv
These can export files from inside the ROM, and import them too if they match the sizes. If you have the same size file or smaller and pad it out then you can often then make some nice hacks and very small patches that rebuilding tools might see be made larger, or fail to work properly for some reason.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/mkds-course-modifier.299444/
More generally there are all sorts of tools people use for different things.
1) ndstool family tools.
ndstool is part of devkitpro but many used it for pulling apart and rebuilding ROMs. Command line only but has frontends in dsbuff and dslazy.
Versions also available for Linux and OSX.
2) nitroexplorer 2.? was a fork by a different user to the original 1.2 and earlier line. Has some more respect for certain things certain ROMs did that ndstool might fail to work properly with and thus gained a bit of a fanbase among certain games.
3) Crystaltile2.
A very powerful hacking program.
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/818/
Has both the option to export individual files (open a DS ROM in it, click the little DS icon on the right hand side of the top toolbar and it will pop up a window with the DS ROM contents) and more generally unpack and repack whole ROMs (one of the dropdown menus) in addition to being a great tile editor, DS format aware viewer of many things, pretty decent text editor/viewer, disassembler, handling compression and much more besides.
4) In place stuff.
Here tools like ndsts
https://no-intro.org/tools.htm
and ndshv
These can export files from inside the ROM, and import them too if they match the sizes. If you have the same size file or smaller and pad it out then you can often then make some nice hacks and very small patches that rebuilding tools might see be made larger, or fail to work properly for some reason.
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