ROM Hack Will visual basic knowledge help me learn how to edit roms?

[Trulen]

Hi there. Senior CIS major in college over here.

I'm in a Java development class right now, and I'm actually pretty good at it. I don't have a hard time wrapping my head around code at all, which is surprising.
But, it's moreso basic coding right now. So, I'll try not to get ahead of myself.


One thing I'd love to do with Pokemon Roms is edit the wild pokemans to fix the main problem I have with the game: Not enough variety in wild pokemon you meet early in game. I usually quit playing pokemon games because I get tired of seeing the same 9 wild pokemon in the first 10 hours of the game, maybe 1 of which is useful!


But, I come in humble (maybe), and maybe different than most. I've been watching this board and many come in saying "I don't any programming but I can learn" and you never hear from them again.

What I want to know is would I be able to take my knowledge of visual basic when I'm done and apply it to rom hacking, or if it'd be a far stretch from what I'd know.
I know VB is a bit primitive compared to C+, C++, and C#, so this is why I'm asking.

 

[twiztidsinz]

I could very well be wrong as I am not a romhacker myself, but I don't believe that any of the Visual languages will help you with romhacking. I think most of the rom hacking deals with assembly.
Coding homebrew is usually done in C (and possibly C++?) and custom libraries.


Pokemon is, no pun intended, an all together different beast. Because of it's popularity and similarity between games(?) there are tools that take care of a lot of the hacking -- or so I've heard.

 

[nryn99]

AFAIK you need to know about hex codes and stuff. which is also partly required in programming
there's a guide here in the temp: http://gbatemp.net/t73394-gbatemp-rom-hack...ion-project-wip you can use programming in making tools to make hacking easier.

 

[Trulen]

Alright. Thanks.

I don't have enough free time to learn something new, so I'll just leave it to the pros.

 

[Poryhack]

You seem to have resigned already but I thought I'd throw this in to clarify.

The only thing that is gonna directly help you while ROM hacking is a solid understanding of ARM assembly and a good ability to puzzle out uncharted file structures/compressions. That said said many ROM hackers do find higher level programming skills helpful (beyond just giving you a programmer's point of view on things) when it comes to actually writing tools that can do the ROM hacking for them. In some cases it is just not practical to do things with a hex editor (although that's usually how it starts) and it is of course nice to be able to produce a tool that other people can use to make their own hacks.

EDIT: To clarify one thing ARM assembly knowledge is not required by any means, I have done a fair bit of hacking without really any knowledge of it. There are some things that you just can't change without it though so it's definitely nice. And I imagine it makes the "easier" stuff even easier as well because you can figure out file formats and stuff just by looking at the code that parses them.