coding ....help.=/

Possible? Yes.

Easy? Honestly you'd have an easier time trying to remake a game from scratch and then modifying it, then you would trying to alter a rom file of any old game.

>>4227617
>is it possible to find old retro game code
yes, see this for example https://gist.github.com/1wErt3r/4048722
For most games up to and including 4th gen, you can just look at the ROM in a Hex editor and figure out what the OP-codes do. However, reading assembly is tedious and there won't be any handholding comments like in the example link

>learn how to edit it?
messing with variables is easy. it's basically what a game Genie does. Implementing entirely new funtions will require a thorough understanding of assembly.

>is it easy?
depends on what you want to achieve. generally speaking, "no".

>>4227617
check out the rom hacking thread

complete disassemblies have been done for a few games, like mario and some arcade stuff, but the pokemon games are the largest games i've ever seen disassembled (they even have the gba games)

6 months ago I knew nothing about programming and now I just released a character romhack for Mega Man 5.

It's possible but it takes time and dedication.
Start with a game that you like and which already has a lot documentation. Something like a Mario game on NES for instance.

With FCEU X's debugger you can directly read and edit the code of an NES game. You'll have to learn how to use those tools, but more importantly you'll have to learn 6502 assembly.
Don't start with a disassembly.
Start by reading documentation on the game, by learning basic 6502 ASM things, by learning to use the tools in FCEU X and alter a few things. Move your way up from there.

>>4227639
>I knew nothing about programming
>I just released a character romhack
>a character romhack

Apparently you still know nothing about programming, then.

How can a non-tripping Namefag be such a consistently bad poster?

>>4227617
Yes. Yes. Speaking for myself obviously, dunno about you.

>>4227623
>>4227629
>>4227634
>>4227639
>romhacks
lel

>>4227717
Well if it's a romhack that mainly modifies the games code at an assembly level it's definitely related to coding.
Then again posts like these >>4227639 are laughable.

>>4227617
What game do you have in mind OP ?

thanks fellas. I have some stuff to look up!

>>4228090
Go to reddit

Unless you're making a simple rom hack, it's actually really hard. You're better off just using Game Maker. It's what they use for tons of Indie games.

The original true source code of Space Funky B.O.B. has been released (SNES version)
Granted, you need a very specific development environment and shit but it's the honest-to-god source code, not a disassembly.

>>4227639
So assembly is the first language you learned? That's crazy man.

>>4228241
Crazy stupid if you have no prior programming experience.

>>4228293
i learned asm first too. like i said earlier, it's a way simpler conceptual model than c. you have one big array (memory) and one tiny array (registers), and instructions copy data back and forth and change it (add, subtract, boolean ops...). code is data, pointers are data, data is data. super simple. it's just verbose to do anything, but if you start with romhacking you're not writing anything from scratch, you literally have the game you've probably played solidly for over a decade to use as an example

>>4229690
Still, learning assembly first won't teach you about proper code architecture and structure, unless you read a LOT of disassembled, commented code, which is somewhat hard to come by. Would not recommend.

>>4229705
it's way easier to learn asm first and how to structure code once you move to a higher-level language than to start with a high-level lang and move to assembly

>>4229709
[citation needed]

>>4229778
personal experience

don't trust me? fine, go to any cs university and ask students if they understand pointers, or if they would know how to print text on a screen with no operating system

the benefits of code architecture are immediately obvious to any assembly programmer. it's a natural progression from machine code: labels are an abstraction to keep you from having to recalculate addresses all the time. with call and return instructions and a stack the advantages of creating functions start becoming obvious. calling conventions let you modularize your code further. high-level macro assemblers let you reduce unnecessary duplication and improve readability. introduce an operating system that can run multiple processes and give each program an independent address space. then start creating data structures with data hiding and so on

a competent low-level programmer will figure out the need for this stuff on his own, and when exposed to the features higher-level languages provide, will run with it. in contrast a high-level programmer will need a ton of handholding to understand low-level stuff.

>>4229705
>won't teach you about proper code architecture and structure
Yes, he just proved that with his post. kek.

>>4229808
And drops the mic on having no knowledge or experience with regards to coding except fucking around with a couple NES rom hacks.

>>4227617

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games_with_available_source_code

>>4229808

I went from high level languages to assembly (x86 and mips) and I picked it up extremely quickly. Once you've learned a high level language you have a pretty clear path to learning asm; you just think "how do I implement functions/loops/variables" and go from there. While a begginer asm programmer will have no intuition regarding how to
structure a program.

Also to imply that a CS graduate won't understand pointers is pretty absurb, as most
students will have to take a cpu architecture course, where they would learn asm
programming and cpu design in general (pipelining, caches etc).

That being said it's probably not too difficult to learn assembly first.

>>4227617
Making a hack is either incredibly easy or incredibly difficult depending on what you're trying to accomplish. If you actually want the source files and not binaries, you're going to be extremely limited. inb4 hurr it's all assembly, source files are very different from a binary that's been linked, assembler optimized, macros expanded, stripped of all comments and human readable labels, assembler directives carried out, binary data blobs inserted wherever, and a billion other things.

Most systems are fully documented. In fact, most of these systems have better documentation available today than AAA studios had to work with when the console were relevant. You can literally do whatever the fuck you want on any system that anyone cares about.

>>4229690
Megaman anon?

>>4229968
i was talking about undergrads. but frankly i haven't been impressed with cs grads' low-level coding skills too much either. the ones i've worked with were only really comfortable with haskell and python

>Also to imply that a CS graduate won't understand pointers is pretty absurb, as most
>students will have to take a cpu architecture course, where they would learn asm
>programming and cpu design in general (pipelining, caches etc).
"most" students get Bs and Cs in that class

anyway i never said learning hll first makes it impossible to learn asm. i said if you want to do rom hacking, you'll get there faster by teaching yourself asm first (which is not hard) compared to learning high-level languages and asm afterward. you saying that "once they've taken an upper-level cs course they understand it" kind of proves my point

also you were the one who jumped in with the "learning asm first cripples your ability to write sensible code in the future" bullshit

>Once you've learned a high level language you have a pretty clear path to learning asm; you just think "how do I implement functions/loops/variables" and go from there. While a begginer asm programmer will have no intuition regarding how to
>structure a program.
dude, listen to yourself

>>4231340
Not the anon you're replying to but you've already demonstrated that learning assembly to do ROM hacks first makes you retarded and unable to understand basic programming concepts and causes you to project this inadequacy on to others. You can proselytize all you want but you're not going to change anyone's mind because you've already shown us the results of your advice.