Turning an Ancient Chinese Legend into a Mario Rom Hack 

The method you developed for switching the characters could be used to create a hack which finally gives Mario and Luigi separate sprites.

Came here because Kosmic said your video was about the technical, and I love your explanation of how you made this ‘rom hack’ recompile happen. Thank you!

Kosmic said it best- this video is indeed 'Sick'. Brilliant job! I love your other videos too!

The 8-bit music at 2:20 of 天竺少女 is giving me goosebumps omg

If you're using the mmc3 disassembly, you should have used GreatEd as your level editor, because it doesn't have the data limits hard coded into the editor like smb utility. They're dynamic. Then, you just use a level extractor python script to convert the hex data for the levels into assembly code, then paste it into your disassembly. It's much easier to make good levels in GreatEd because you can actually add and remove shit

I love it. Any creative ROM Hacks are so much better than sprite swaps.

This is so cool, it must've taken so much dedication to write out all of the level data line by line. How much experience in assembly would you recommend someone had before trying anything that involved messing with the actual code?

Well done - Just downloaded it, will play tomorrow, looks great :)

Also when you dropped this on Rhdn I can still remember the noise this generated in the dischord server for smb romhacking when I shared it, EdenGT immediately took interest, especially at the character swap mechanic.

哇，这个蛮好的！又是一个在我红白机游戏的收藏之一了。

How do u only have 2.5k subscribers. This is freakin awsome

What a journey to do all of this! I will check the rom in the future.

So cool the journey to the west is a great story and very fitting for a rom hack!

WOW!!! This must have been such an Endeavor! I don't know the story you based it on , but I've heard of it before. And in a cool coincidence there is a game I play on my phone called 'Archero' that is (like most mobile games) created in China. (and every once in a while the English text shows up as Chinese characters for some reason lol) The game has nothing to do with China or any stories from China, until recently... They added a couple of new characters and mini-games and extra "prizes" that are obviously Chinese with names like WuKong and Dragon Girl AND they even had a spring Festival a few months ago with all the players giving all the other player red Envelopes with coins and jewels in them lol... it's pretty cool actually because I've been learning a lot about China (and Japan) recently and wouldn't have known what the red envelopes were about or the ONE and ONLY holiday allowed under the CCP (it's really stupid IMO because EVERYONE is trying to travel back home AT THE SAME TIME and it's SUPER OVERCROWDED on Trains and Highways and people all go to tourist attractions at that time too so they are way too crowded and I even saw a story that everyone was trying to go up this mountain to see this historical attraction or something and pretty much EVERYONE was STUCK STANDING ON THE SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN PATH THE ENTIRE DAY AND DIDN'T MOVE ONCE!!!! 🤦‍♂ but I'll just leave it there) - Anyway.. about WuKong ... he's the Monkey King yea? and he uses the cudgel, right? Well I haven't collected enough WuKong tokens to play as him yet and same thing with his cudgel too... And I had no idea what these were from until I saw this video! so THANK YOU! I knew it was old story from China and that WuKong was a Monkey King or Monkey 'god' but no clue where it came from and even what a cudgel was... So thank you for opening my eyes to the truth :D

How does that video only have 4,313 views? This is awesome!

hey this is pretty cool, a shame this video isnt getting more views

Actually, there are only 81 trials, that is, 9 x 9 = 81 where in Chinese culture, 9 being the 'terminal' number for single digit, so 9x9 is consider a very serious and special value.

Lemme start by saying everything about this is super impressive. That said, I'm surprised you didn't base some of your sprites off existing Journey To The West-based NES games like SonSon or Super Monkey Daibouken. The sprites look great, I'm just saying there's existing visual references that could be played with. Also I wonder if this might be better served as a CNROM rather than MMC3, although it would lead to a lot of redundancy in the CHR graphics. It doesn't even require PRG bank-switching, right?

An 8 bit 光輝歲月？dang!

Amazing doc. And a great romhack.

here from Kosmic, love the hack, and the video! :)

lol when you jumped to SMB2 and I was forced to remember it ALREADY contains exactly 4 characters... Did you consider that game as a candidate?

This is a journey to chinese culture! So cool! Greetings from Argentina

Very interesting video. I hope everyone who watches Kosmic play the hack will come here after. It was well worth it.

Next you should do a rom hack of Super Monkey Daibouken to turn it into a Mario game.

People using assemblers to romhack _meanwhile me using the dissassembly as a reference, writing new code on paper, manually translating it to machine language and inserting it into the rom with a hex editor_ I'm dumb🤦‍♀️

Hi there. I have some experience with smw hacking and programming in general, but smb1 has been a new challenge for me. I've downloaded the decompiled and commented rom, and a compiler, but i've been having trouble compiling the small test changes I made. I was wondering if you had any tips? Thanks.

NES games based off JTTW are actually quite common in China and even Japan. Also, JTTW isn't really "ancient", while it is based on ancient Chinese mythology, the story was written in 1592.

Nice background music.... Isn't the song from Beyond 光輝歲月?

Looks great. I'm about to watch kosmic play it. Is the film Warriors of Heaven and Earth based on Journey to the West? I love that film. And this reminded me of it.

9:05 That’s a rather tragic and artificial source of tedium. There's absolutely no way you should have to manually transcribe hex values from one program to another. If the program is still being maintained, or if it's open-source, that kind of feature is trivial to add and would have made your life a lot easier.

No lives! So I can throw Piggy down a pit infinitely!

Hah, 西游记 as a rom hack? I love that!

It worths to mention than Sun Wukong inspired a lot of other characters in other stories and especially in Japanese cartoons. The most famous: Son Goku in Dragon ball.

I misread this as Ancient Cheese, like the Pizza Tower level 💀

12:09 Alright kids you have homework I guess but... This is homework you will love! Like... I dunno . The POKEMON CHARACTERS

what's the song that starts at 6:21?

But why aren't you running to the left i.e. west?

"while not as cool as hackers with there green on black screens" um rom hacks are actually a hell of alot cooler as they are real and make your favorite games into something new sometime for extreme awesomeness, sometimes for improvements to asspects that hinder enjoyability, and sometimes because a bored person has prejudicial views he feels a strong need to share with the romhacking community. Lets be honest, fastly clicking keys is just nerds trying to be edgy if we are being completely honest.

wow American who can knows assembly and Chinese, that's cool

"These are called Rom Hacks, and they're not just something Kosmic plays on Wednesday." So who's this _"Kosmic"_ person you speak of

这是了不起的艺术品

@1:00 "Editing the game code in high level assembly" I think this is the very first time I've ever heard of "assembly language" being called high level.

1:12

@InkboxSoftware Nintendo is a japanese company, not a chinese one.