What does it take to "mod or hack" and old game with sprites

[aldub516]

So this may or may not be a stupid question but I didn't know where else to start. For basics, even a general answer will help. I had an idea for a cool personal project and I want to know.. If you take an old snes/sega or even an arcade game like ghouls and ghosts. What would be the possibility for someone who's knowledgable, to create a single character set of sprites to replace the original character. Basically, would it ever be possible for someone to replace your character in ghouls and ghosts with a different character? I know a sprite or single character only has x amount of different movements and such. I know there's tons of super Mario world hacks amongst others.. So yea, what teller would I be barking up to research this?

[aldub516]

Ideally I would need the main character changed to another sprite/player.. And perhaps an opening title or screen changed. For all I know this is either really easy for someone, or incredibly intricate to program. I just figured I'd start digging.

[Howard_Casto]

Sprite hacking is just looking for the data (the sprites), extracting them, modifying them and putting them back.  A knowledge of hex editing is helpful, as well as the image format used for that particular game/system, but other than that....

But it sounds like you aren't ready to go that far down the rabbit hole.  Search for sprite editors.... there are a few out there.  Just search for the console in question if you can't find one for the specific game. 

[thatpurplestuff]

http://www.romhacking.net/documents/ is a good resource, although it's probably going to be overwhelming at first.

http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/958/ appears to be a utility that will work with snes, genesis, and a bunch of other systems.  It's been a long time since I've done anything in this realm, so I don't have any experience with this particular piece of software.  If editing sprites turns out to be fun for you, at some point you will want to learn about hex editing so you can actually manipulate where sprites are placed, but for now editing the current sprite layouts should keep you plenty busy.

[aldub516]

Im not one to shy away from learning and researching, but currently im learning everything from 3d modeling to raspberry pi programming lol. Id like to seek out someone to do this job for me, but i will look into all the links you posted, as i enjoy the education. Thank you so far! hopefully someone can come along and maybe take on this job.. ive never out sourced a project yet lol