ROM Hack Mario & Luigi Rom Hacking: Why hasn't it gone anywhere?

[Deleted member 491016]

The Mario & Luigi games, (since this is in the ds section, pit and bis) would be perfect games for rom hacking! Imagine custom enemies, items, story, areas, e.t.c. I know there are some simple tools, but I'm just wondering how easy it would be to do create a proper application to create rom hacks. m64ds, mkds, nsmb and others are large in terms of rom hacks with mpds even being in the mix now, so how come the M&L games haven't been explored much in terms of rom hacking?

I know very little when it comes to all this, but when I made my mpds post, I found out a few months after that some development had been done! (To clarify, I am NOT saying my post was responsible.) So maybe the same outcome could come from this.

I just think it would be awesome to see people work on hacks for these games, heck, maybe even stretch this to the other games in the series.

 

[FAST6191]

From where I sit nobody really cares about the Mario RPG/Mario and Luigi franchise as a long term thing.

All those pokemon, final fantasy (plus spinoffs, see tactics for one), dragon quest, chrono trigger, [insert other list of square enix titles], mario platform, mario kart, sonic, advance wars... that get all the nice GUI driven tools have a massive life in speedrunning, general play, challenge play, video, multiplayer type scenarios that bleeds over into ROM hacking or inevitably ends up there.

Even the Mario Party thing seems to enjoy something of a continued life and fanbase way after the initial 6 month new game window.

A few determined types can do things -- while I mentioned advance wars above then most of it is a few individuals in the end, and there is also the fire pro wrestling thing (almost a footnote in gaming for most but never the less enjoys one of the most comprehensive hacking scenes out there).

You can also be the change you want to see
You need no create things like https://www.dragonflycave.com/mechanics/gen-i-capturing (though such things will certainly not hurt) but matching file names to what they hold, finding where text is, finding what levels are even if you don't reverse engineer them, finding the inventory in memory (quite nice for challenge runs and can be found by making cheats, and distributed as a savestate/save).

Even as a start tell us why we should not dismiss the Mario RPG/Mario and Luigi franchise as not just another lame cash in on a popular franchise that is best ignored?

 

[Deleted member 491016]

Honestly, I'm not really sure. I just think there's so much potential if we figure out how to work with it.

 

[FAST6191]

Potential for what?

Is Mario and Luigi a great series that we could see expanded, does it have just a few bugs that hackers could fix and make it great, is the engine something that we could lose all the Mario themed stuff from and use to make our own great fun game?
I mean I might not care much about Mario Kart, Mario platform or Pokemon but I can at least see why people want to play with the engines, make their own levels and whatever else. Final Fantasy games are often some of the best on a system but usually have a few iffy choices in script or bugs holding them back, or maybe just some balance issues, which hackers can then fix. Is this a particularly good candidate for anything like that?

Likewise pulling DS games apart is not hard
https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-can-you-extract-and-rebuild-ds-games.586120/
Doing that you can start to see all the files that make the game up. While a skilled hacker can learn more a normal everyday person that can click around a file system to find files can still tell us lots about the game (and that is before you swap files around and rebuild to see what happens in the main game). Have you done any of that for this game yet?

 

[spxdeblu]

i saw this thread and i just had to interject

Some of the potential could be fan extensions of the franchise, giving a whole new door to newer locales, and thus more character interactions that could only serve in the M&L series, different minigames and small tidbits that could satisfy desires that the base game didn't, like adding new party members instaed of just Mario and Luigi, like they did with Paper Jam (Geno, Mallow, Peach, Bowser, the possibilities are endless!)