Hello,

So I know this is not a hockey question but I know there are people here who have vast experience of ROM editing for the Genesis and have produced very enjoyable NHL rom hacks. I am trying to do update ATP Championship Tennis for the Genesis. I have located where the images sit on the ROM, but I do not know how to extract the palette information (offset for the palette via the hex editor) from the black and white image. I know EA used a similar concept for the NHL series and was looking for help. I know how to edit the text and player abilities but I would like to change some of the images. I would appreciate any assistance.

 

 

Hey dude, there is a great tool called Hive Pal that I use to help find palettes for images:

https://segaretro.org/HivePal

If you know the location of the image, the palette is usually located near that area.  Hive pal gives you a visual display of the ROM and you'll be able to spot palettes by noticing color strips (usually a length of 16). 

If it's anything like the NHL games, the palette will usually follow the image data.  Most images follow the pattern of

header
graphic/tile data
palette
size
tile layout
 

Now, the one place where this gets tricky in the NHL series is player cards.  The images are 8 color b/w, in a 3bpp linear codec format.  

The palette is found in the first player card data set, and each player card that follows shares the palette from the 1st card.  

Hope that helps, let us know how it goes.  

If you still get stuck, post the ROM and image offsets that you know.  I'd be happy to take a crack as well.

Hello:

I appreciate the quick reply. I attached the ROM to this message if you could please take a look
at the hex and TM, I would greatly appreciate it.

I can easily change text and player attributes, but I need to be able to update the small
black and images next to the player information. I am having trouble on how to do this.

Things I have found out:

By going through TM - hex offsets from 0012F600 to 0014BE00 produce items that I think are the images
but it is not in the correct palette. I have the codec displayed at 4bpp linear.
I am not sure if the images are compressed?



Additionally, tried to test if those offsets that I see in TM are the same offsets in the hex and
indeed there are, when I tried to change all the hex to zero, the images when running the game
in Kega Fusion, disappeared completely.

I have also figured out the hex code to correspond to each image:

For example:

Sampras = hex values 13 06 at offset 00028719
Stich   = hex values 13 10 at offset 000287B7
Edberg =  hex values 13 1A at offset 00028855



So if I change 13 10 to 13 06 , then Stich would be assigned Sampras' image.

I am guessing if I can display images somehow correctly in TM, then I could mimic the
image editing process that NHL 94 has and I update the images similarly. But I have not been
able to display the images correctly, nor I am sure of what size the actual player images are.

AtpTourChampionship.bin

The palette is decimal offset 80706:

 

The first player photo is hex offset 1306CC and the player cards are 8x10 tiles.  They are organized pretty nicely, doesn't look like any shared tiles, so it should be pretty easy to edit:

 

I found this through a visual search.  First, I used the VDP debugger in GENS to get the palette that is being displayed (I believe Fusion has this as well):

It looked like the 2nd palette was the player cards.  Now that I knew how the palette looked, I could try two things.  First was to do some quick eyeballing in Hive Pal, which worked.  I found this:

 

13B42 in hex is 80706 in decimal, which is what TM needs for palettes.  So that's where I stopped.  

If you were unable to eyeball in Hive Pal, the other method to try would be to replicate the first 4-6 colors in the palette in a test ROM in TM, copy the hex values and do a search for those hex values in the game.  It'll likely only show up once, which would be the location of your palette.  

Good luck!

 

Thanks a bunch! This really helped me out and also learned quite a bit. Very much appreciated and the new images work when re-sizing them to 64 x 80.

 

1 hour ago, Darrin said:

Thanks a bunch! This really helped me out and also learned quite a bit. Very much appreciated and the new images work when re-sizing them to 64 x 80.

 

That's a good point -- each tile is actually an 8x8 pixel image, so 8x10 tiles would be 64x80 pixels.  Glad I was able to help.