Download Super Pitfall 30th Anniversary Edition ROM Hack

Super Pitfall 30th Anniversary Edition
Release 1.0 - 05 Sept 2016
A hack by Nesrocks
New soundtrack by FCandChill
Pitfall II arrangements by rockman_x_2002

Copyright: DO NOT modify this hack in any way. Keep credits where credits are due.
The hack contains original artwork.
The unmodified game Super Pitfall is the property of Activision.
If you have questions contact me at [email protected]

http://nesrocks.com


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Description
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In celebration to 30 years of Super Pitfall I've created this hack which vastly
improves the original game while keeping the base game and level layout intact.
The idea was to modernize, fix and beautify the original game because I always
felt like the game's problems kept it from getting justice. There's a really
interesting adventure underneath it all, and I hope now people can finally appreciate it.

This hack changes the game's code, graphics and sounds in several ways.
Some of them include:

- Completely new graphics
- Completely new Soundtrack (thanks, FCandChill!)
- New menu screens
- Improved game design (no more hidden items, warps are now doors, new in-game HUD,
  improved game controls, small level design adjustments, etc!)
- Improved performance
- Seamless, fully automatic save feature (please hold reset while shutting down when
  playing on a repro cartridge to avoid save file corruption). This made possible by
  converting the rom to MMC3 (thanks, infidelity)
- Available languages: english and portuguese (choose one of the patches in the zip)
- Many more small improvements!


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Patching Information
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Patch format: ips

ROM to use:
No-Intro Name: Super Pitfall (USA)
(No-Intro version  20130731-235630)
File SHA-1: 2373E952FECC5F7507F99476E82C298CAB1F51CB
ROM SHA-1: B29F4BB5B0C30ED133AD82CA5A2134C31C003862

After patching (English):
File SHA-1: 4F1350B38477F11202D7CED4D3DBD2DED6FE9F0F
ROM SHA-1: 6C5C034D501EBF630D45A011EE0A375AC79FB8DA

After patching (Portuguese):
File SHA-1: C903055B505F43B8C57B7C918A9A1AA5360F0F0C
ROM SHA-1: 0327C69905363C3A80BCAA9398BB3CE5CE1434FA


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Special Thanks
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This was mostly a solo project, but in the middle of the process FCandChill showed up
and provided brand new songs and helped me understand the game's sound format, which
allowed me to fully replace the songs in the game with his creations. Two themes were
adapted from rockman_x_2002's arrangement of the atari 2600's Pitfall II's songs.
A song tester is included in the game, but there's also a nsf file in the zip with
the new songs (the original songs are present only on the sound tester).
Also, thanks to FCandChill a lot of my notes are now neatly presented on datacrystal
on the Super Pitfall page.

I want to thank Macbee for his infinite patience, wisdom and encouragement throughout
the whole project. I kept bugging him with every little update and he gave me invaluable
feedback and motivation. Thank you!

A big thank you to infidelity for this MMC3 patch notes which I used on this hack and
enabled me to have a save feature. And another thank you to NES wizard Disch for
pointing out why my save feature wasn't working on punes.

A special thanks to all of the romhacking.net community! Your support was incredible.
Please take a look at the forum thread to see all that happened in the making of the hack.
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,21768.0.html

I also have to thank the nesdev community for the wiki. The information there is golden.

Now, the tools used to make this hack possible:

- Fceux: Who wouldn't use this when hacking a NES game? As of this writing this is a
  hacking studio and should be a prime example of how to make a great debugging emulator.
- yychr and PrgEditor: Wow. yychr was my prefered graphics editor, and PrgEditor was
  simply amazing when editting nametables.
- Hex Workshop, XVI32 and Frhed: just some of the hex editors I used.
- Google Docs: I used its spreadsheet as the backbone of the project, where I kept track
  of information and tasks to do.
- MapEd Pro: After understanding how to use it and setting it up to work with my hack
  this was simply by far the best way to edit level layouts and metatiles. A bit sad that
  the author seem to have abandoned it, as it would be great to have it open source and
  adapt it even further to be a full fledged Super Pitfall editor.
  http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7111&sid=c71519e55ea188ca3afbe7ffbae1454a&start=60
- PPUSplit: This tool sped up the process in so many ways when working with MapEd Pro.
  Fantastic. http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/2080/glitchnes-02/
- NESHEAD: used to edit the header when implementing the save feature.
- Famitracker: used as the base to convert songs to Super Pitfall's format, which was done
  in a painful manual way.
- Punes: emulator used to verify the ROM's accuracy.
- Notepad++: what other text editor should be used?
- Lunar Ips: used for all ips related needs.
- ROM Hasher: used for... ROM hashing.

Aside from those tools, I used no asm compilers. I know, this is bad, I just kept looking
up opcodes and converting directly to fceux's hex editor, along with fceux's debugger for
real time deassembling help. This was my main source:
http://www.6502.org/tutorials/6502opcodes.html

A little about me:
My name is M?rio Azevedo, born in 1980 in Brazil. I go by the nesrocks alias and in the
past used the FODA alias when doing tool-assisted speedruns. I have over a decade of
full-time professional game development experience, but this was my first hack. I run a
website where you can see what projects I'm doing:
http://nesrocks.com or http://bitinkstudios.com

Thank you for reading and for playing! See you next project!