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modifying vintage games

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garybdmd

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Jul 29, 2011
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Hello, any help appreciated.
I havent't fooled with programming for a while, 20+ years i suppose. I was telling my son how my friends and I used to fool around coding and pranking each other with code when we were younger. My son who is 8 years old is interested in modifying some games to make them personalized. For example I'd like to take a space invaders game or whatever and change the sprites or pics to make something different for fun. I can do this right now with a c64 game if I wanted but I was looking for a more up to date way to do things. I did computational programming in college but not any kind of gaming stuff. I used to program the c64 during my youth and other than that took fortran/c/c++ etc stuff in college when I was a physics major. I'd basically like to find some source code and modify it slightly to have some fun. Any guidance or direction appreciated. Thanks ahead of time. Gary
 
Basically, every program is different from the other in terms of memory layout, program structure, data use etc. Therefore in order to modify an existing binary, you need some skills in the programming language and platform used. Often this is assembly language, but could in rare cases be a higher level language in an interpreting environment.

Now you ask for source code to modify. Most of what you'll find probably are tutorials of various kinds which can be entertaining and educating to study and modify. When you mention more up to date ways, are you aiming for a somewhat modern X86 PC platform? DOS, Windows, Linux, other?

Perhaps there are some freeware games built with the SDL graphics library etc that come with source code for you to study and make changes to. It could be worthwhile to look for SDL games, which though would require you to have a suitable compiler and development environment as specified in the built instructions for respective game. Fortunately gcc is pretty allround and commonly used with those projects.
 
Depending on how deep you're wanting to go you could use something like reshack if it's a Windows application to export and possibly replace the picture files (not 100% and could end up with some odd bugs), or for text manipulation obviously just a hex editor and a heads up to keep the words the same length so the size of the file doesn't change.

I'm sure there's some demo source out there for different systems. What architecture/OS are you looking for? If it's a vintage system then there's probably lots of basic text files out there which you could modify the data lines to change the pictures. Maybe even teach him how to draw using data and see what he can come up with.

For more current wintel machines you could play with code written for allegro and djgpp to get some quick graphical game demos up.
 
One of the easiest things to do is get a game with a level editor, like Quake. Of course, Quake isn't suitable for an 8 year old out of the box, but you could create a "zoo" level, with all of the monsters down in pits or behind bars, an 8 year old might like that. :)
 
I was thinking the same also. Unreal does have some less scary things you can put in an area like a shark or cow. A friend made an aquarium in a level that he built (it was kinda a playground trying to figure out what could be done). But yes a level editor is somewhat common in games today and does let one run with their imagination assuming the editor isn't too complex.
 
Thanks all for the comments, they were extremely helpful since I haven't done this sort of thing for a very long time. The games in the SDL graphics library look perfect, lots of source code and cool games. I'm going to look through 5 or 10 games until I find some source code which is not too laborious to start off with. I'm using windows so the gcc compiler may be a little tricky. I think I'm going to look for something coded in C++ so I'll find a compiler after a little while. We will probably do a few silly things, an anti-sister popup, maybe a pacman with green teeth ... to continue press 1 if you're stinky or 2 if you're smelly, those sorts of things. It would be nice if I find a game where i can modify the pics just by replacing icons or bmps too. Thanks to everyone again I'll post my project as it develops.
 
Go over and ask at Atariage, but first read a few posts by people who have made a lot of games.

Another system you may want to look at is the Dreamcast, there are lots of good games to be worked with, and it's practically an open source console already--
Sega dropped support and they appear not to care about who makes what for it dealing with whatever program. Also the Genesis is a good one, with free emulators and even a BASIC to get working on it.
 
Thanks for commenting your comments are very informative and helpful for me.For a game editor it is necessary that he
should provide tutorials about it and make it better.

Tower Defence Games
 
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