Hacking "Wheel of Fortune."

IceSage

IceSage

New member
While I haven't even attempted to mess around with it at the moment, I was wondering if anyone has created a tool, or knows, how to hack the NES version of "Wheel of Fortune" to create custom puzzles, or to remove puzzles from the game, leaving only 1 puzzle for the game to choose from.

I know it's a longshot, but I was just curious if anyone could give me some help / advice, or point me in the right direction on this.

Thank you very much for your time!
 
Oh, my apologies. The one just titled "Wheel of Fortune." Not family, or jr, or the Vanna White editions, etc.

To elaborate, I want to play a joke on a friend of mine, and start the game with my custom puzzle, freaking him out as he begins to solve it.
 
I don't know that you would have to delete them. I assume there's a random number generator that decides which puzzle to use. Find that in a debugger and change it to always return the # of the hacked puzzle and you should be good to go.

Edit:

It's definitely possible to hack the puzzles. They're stored in regular ASCII, for the most part. The last character in a line has 80h added to it, the last two characters of a puzzle have 80h added to them. I haven't did much more experimentation than that, but I may look at it some more since I have an idea regarding how to use a Wheel of Fortune hack as an educational tool for ROM hacking.

Edit 2:

You can also shorten/lengthen puzzles. I tried cutting off the puzzle I was on early by using the double +80h and it worked fine. Tried lengthening it by moving the double +80h into the next puzzle, that also worked. Not sure how it affects the next puzzle in the cue, though, as I haven't tried figuring out how to trigger a specific puzzle yet. (There appears to be a pointer table directly above the puzzle text, so I suppose I'll look there.)

Incidentally, if you make a save state when the game first says ROUND 1 (white text, on a gray block), you can hack the puzzle and then load the hacked puzzle via that save state.

Edit 3:

That WAS a pointer block above the puzzles. It would be EXTREMELY easy to pull off the hack that IceSageX wants to do. All you have to do is hack a puzzle of your choice and then convert all of the pointers to the value of that puzzle. The only thing I need to figure out now is how the clue (Person, Place, etc.) is determined. The puzzles are grouped by category (for instance, all of the PLACES are listed first, just need to see where it's determined what the label is for a particular group in case the size needs to be expanded for a particular category. (I suppose I should mention that the pointers are in standard NES format. Flip the order of the last two bytes of the location, subtract 10h from the first value and 80h for the second.)

Edit 4: Attached to this post, you will find a zip file containing a proof of concept hack that meets the criteria set forth by the original poster.
 
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Hey, what editor did you use? I've been out of the loop with rom hacking for the longest time, so this is weird to me. Haha, I'm even using HEXposure to attempt to look at the file. I have no idea what tools and utilities people even use anymore, it's what I get for being out of the loop for about 10 years.

I appreciate your help though!
 
I used WindHex to do all of the hacking and then used Corrupster to change all of the pointers to the same address. (And if any graphics hacking becomes necessary, I'll use Tile Molester for that.)
 
Even when looking at your modified version, it seems like the puzzles are missing letters at the end of some words. (When I look at it in a HEX editor, and even do relative searches.) Are the missing letters somewhere along a different point?
 
Look at Edit #1 in my earlier post. The last letter of each line has 80h added to it to signify a line break. The last two letters of each puzzle have 80h added to signify a section break.

In order to see them in the hex editor, you'll need to create a table file that has the regular ASCII values as well as C1-DA assigned to A-Z.
 
I figured it out actually. I fully understand how to modify (this) one puzzle! (And all puzzles, rather.) I understand it now.

Thanks everyone for all your help!

I'm surprised nobody's made a "Wheel of Fortune" puzzle editor yet. Haha.
 
wofhack.png

Oh har har...


also...

wofhack2.png

lol...
​
 
So, I showed the puzzle to my friend while we were playing it. He had no clue I modified the ROM.

At first he was like, "WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN? I DON'T GET IT, IT MAKES NO SENSE" especially when the category was "Place." Then he thought about it for a couple of seconds, and said, "Whoa, wait.. You dick!"

puzzle1.jpg


It's based off of some creepypasta he recently read and watched, which creeped him out so much he refuses to play Majora's Mask.

http://inuscreepystuff.blogspot.com/2010/09/majora.html
 
Incidentally, I've found at least two typos in the game. 'THING' appears twice as a category. I assume the second one should be 'THINGS' since all of the puzzles in that category are plural. And Halloween is misspelled as 'HOLLOWEEN'. Unless there's an event named Holloween of which I'm unaware.
 
I made him play Majora's Mask. We got up to the part where you go back in time for the first time and saved.

Of course, the Wheel of Fortune puzzle, plus the fact that the game crashed and made a loud noise when he finished playing the "Song of Time," didn't help much. Hahaha. The moment he's about to save, it crashes. Wow... just, wow.
 
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