Hacking Into Retro Games.

What we will be doing today is extremely simple.

Admit it! we all love retro games, especially super mario bros will be our all time favorite and it tops the list.

There are also many other nes games like kirby or the legend of zelda or mario bros 3 and I can keep going.

What we will be doing today is hacking into the files of these games and modifying it in such a way that we can customize the whole game in any way we want, we can even add in modern effects! how cool is that?

You can even turn it into black and white so that it look like something from stone age (joke intended).

What we can do is alter the graphics, audio, and the whole file in fact if you have extreme retro coding skills.

As we always start off, we shall gather the materials.

we need only softwares for this project. and they are listed below and I have also given links for all of them.

You can just copy and paste the url on your new tab as the links don't seem to appear blue for my projects.

1) Any kind of .nes file, It could be any sort of game, for this project, I have used the classic super mario bros .nes file, The link is given.

Mario - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EZovJ0TyGyDiqJmqPEmnpf1SCJUlPafT/view?usp=sharing

2) The second thing you will need here is an emulator for our trial and errors, you can also download or run any emulator you have, but just in case, I'll drop it here too.

You will have to extract it and only run the application file in the first folder after extracting.

Emulator - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1scqLzGO047-IMRjtoa-l4ZIpSbxvipRU/view?usp=sharing

3) The third software you will need is the main one, The software in which all of us are going to show are artistic skills to alter mario into a whole new level.

Software for altering mario's code: https://drive.google.com/file/d/124hSxWykveyPj222oQ3oQG-rl6q_uQjz/view?usp=sharing

This is all you will need for this instructable, you will also just need a bit of determination to sit and work on your system for a few hours.

Just so you know, having all the softwares ready and running really helps get things easier.

Before we start, you can also refresh your memories before you actually change the code of the game.

The gdrive file labelled fceux64 is our emulator, we can get it set up by first extracting it, then opening the extracted folder, then just running the application called fceux64, it is the fourth file from the bottom.

After running it, we download our mario.nes file which is just 40kb and it send shivers down my spine thinking of how such a masterpiece fits in a space so small.

After downloading it, we go to the open file, and browse our file with the open option from our computer.

Now our emulator is all set up.

This process is mostly the same as the emulator, except setting it up is even easier.

You will have to download the file from drive.

You will need to extract the .zip folder then open the first file which is in application format.

Then comes the fun part, go to the file tab and open up our mario.nes file.

At this point, you will just have to make sure every step is perfect and ask me in the comments if you have any sort of doubt with it.

As you can already see on the editor app, you can't wait to get your hands on it, you must've probably even made something out of it already, it is sure exiting to bring back old memories of retro games, especially making it more fun by adding your own custom set of rules or graphics to it, Forgot to mention, but you can even take you face to replace mario's face, more on that in the next steps.

Excuse me for the bad handwriting.

now you can take whatever artistic thing that comes to your mind and put that into work, be it changing the game's color or putting yourself in instead of mario, or even turning mario into a whole different game, though that wouldn't make sense. But make sure, in this software only touch the part highlighted with a circle in the picture if you know how to code the actual retro games.

Or if you do not know that, don't worry, just scroll down to the bottom as in the picture and get yourself a place to tinker with, all the sprites, the colors, the numbers and everything that makes up the visual part of the game is present here, you can modify any of it or even, put in your face image after converting it to the appropriate file format and create yourself experiencing the magnificent world of mario.

I seriously have no artistic skills whatsoever, I failed so badly in creating something new out of mario that I'm worried that I may offend the mario lovers out there, nevertheless here is what I made.

Now I know, everyone is like : SERIOUSLY?

I reversed the body sprites and the digit graphics of mario and that seriously needs some improvement, but I can truly say that all of you are not like me, you could come up with even better ideas of how to change this game.

We have finally brought back classic retro games back to life, but this time, even better filled with all of our imagination, it could even be the start of something big, And after the edits, the project will probably go no more than a 100kb which is extremely efficient.

The files for importing our own graphics are suggested to be in .emp format and it has to be of lower pixel quality because of obvious reasons. (these kind of files can be made or edited with photoshop).

And after having these done, we have our own new concept of how we can create something unique out of retro.

Thanks for reading through folks, this is aslam and I'll catch you all in the next one.