SNES Hacking for Absolute Beginners
Patching and More
Releasing Patches:
The last step of your journey is very simple. You’ll want a patching software such as Lunar IPS but make sure you have a modified ROM and a vanilla ROM of the same game before you proceed. You will have to document if your hack is for a headered or unheadered ROM. As stated before, your ROMs will likely be unheadered these days but it doesn’t hurt to confirm this with a program like TUSH.
I made a folder and placed Lunar IPS in it with a vanilla ROM of Actraiser. I then copied the Actraiser ROM, edited random parts of it with 00s in HxD, and saved the copy just for this demonstration. The process is extremely straightforward. Just start by clicking Create IPS Patch.
After following the instructions in the file explorer, your folder will look like this.
Congratulations, you are now ready to release your patch file!
Here are a few more bonus sections to help you get a leg up. These won’t be highly detailed sections like the previous ones, but they should point you in the right direction.
Bonus 1: Music Swapping (No MSU-1)
Adding new music to a ROM is a bit complex, but swapping existing tracks isn’t necessarily tough. For example, Mega Man X has music data documented by xstuff.
What if we want to replace Central Highway’s music with Sigma’s 4th palace theme then?
There you go. Open Mega Man X in HxD, press CTRL+G to visit offset 308B0, and replace the value with 1D.
Bonus 2: Music and FMVs (MSU-1)
A huge portion of the SNES library has MSU-1 hacks available, meaning you can easily add new tracks (or possibly even FMVs) to your favourite games. Visit Zeldix for more information.
Tutorial 1
Tutorial 2
Bonus 3: FastROM + Registers
I won’t teach you how to create a FastROM hack here, but I will point out it’s pretty easy to check if a game is using FastROM. Simply open it up in MESEN-S, press CTRL+K, and check the section in this screenshot.
Now that you’ve taken your first step out the door, you can check here for more information if you wish. It’s not exactly beginner-friendly, however.
Bonus 4: Decompression and Recompression
A full lesson on decompression and recompression algorithms is outside this tutorial’s scope. However, to get an elementary understanding of the process, one can find some game-specific compression files. Click here for Mega Man X’s tool. Simply alter the bat files to target your specific folder and ROM, run the decompression tool, and notice a large number of bin files have now filled your MMX folder. These can be individually edited and saved with YY-CHR before being recompressed back into a complete ROM.
It’s always worth checking if a game you’re interested in hacking has utilities made specifically for it. For example, Mega Man X also has a level editor utility.
Outro:
I hope you appreciated these SNES hacking lessons for absolute beginners. Everybody has to start somewhere, and my main goal is to convince potential hackers that it’s not nearly as scary to start hacking SNES games as they believe. You can always feel free to leave me a comment about this tutorial if you’re in need of further answers. Thanks for reading!