• Help Wanted

  • Looking for Information on Tecmo Secret of the Stars

I have a graphical improvement/spoof hack of Tecmo's Secret of the Stars in the works, and I was wondering if anyone has happened to come across any technical information about the game over the years.

I've tried searching myself a handful of times over the past few months, but I've yet to find much of anything on my own. Data Crystal is devoid of any info, as is RHDN'S main site.

While I'd be happy with anything (I love reading about the inner workings of old games in general), there are certain things I eventually want to track down, such as experience/gold drops and encounter rates.

It's perfectly fine if no such info currently exists, this game wasn't exactly Final Fantasy levels of popular back in the day lmao. After I wrap up a few projects I plan on relearning how to work a debugger so I can start tracking down some things myself (my first goal when I do is changing the default speed during battle).

Thanks for taking the time to read this! Here's a little peak of what I've started.

Hey cool, I didn't know that you were working on this game. Despite many of its issues, I remember having a lot of fun playing this one back in the day. I look forward to playing your hack/spoof when it's done. Hopefully someday, someone will also release a proper re-translation of this game, along with Robotrek, which could also use one as well.

Anyway, I wasn't able to find much info on this game, expect for this one thread on RHDN where someone was working on an improvement mod. I'm not sure if it will be of any help to you or not, but here it is:
https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=17818.0

Edit: If you look at the third post in that thread by KingMike, he did list some technical info which might be useful.

Would be cool to hear what you found yourself so far. For example finding palettes is not too hard. Some sprites can be viewed. Tools like TM here does let you save your graphic and palette findings.

Or would you like to code something? Text could be addressed with script tools and for this you would need to know about pointers for them.

If you like to work more with a game I found that a dissasembly is a really nice way to keep track of stuff. Might sound like a lot but a lot can be done with just playing the game along running diztinguish. And then you can name the things you find intressting to edit. When you copy things over to patch with asar it is nice to keep track of things and also nice for step by step learning.

Would be cool to hear what ideas you have for the hack to get a picture of what you need to know or have to learn to make it possible.