Software

• Huge shoutout to Paul Goes with DonkeyKongHacks.com for the guides on

  • How to set up a DOS emulator

  • How to read a hexadecimal table

  • How to identify necessary addresses in RAM

  • and modern day LLM’s for tranlsating his pdf’s from Dutch → English

• Additional shoutout to the likely deeply autistic developer who built Turaco (a sprite edittor allegeldy named after his favorite bird)

• Last but not least, the team behind the entire deassembly of the DK source code

• Seen below is an example workflow that was followed to edit the DK Hacks Anniversary edition sign DK sign from 40 to 39. This consisted of whiteboarding the current image as is, 4 pieces together sprites, then sizing up all available sprites in memory to find which addresses correspond with the image.

• Eventually, the final custom ROM was finished with:

  • Custom sprites for Conagra products in place of hammers, balloons, etc

  • Redesigned backgrounds, sighs, etc.

  • A level-two killscreen that forces a ‘Works Over’ cutscene, complete with jimmy buffet 8-bit background (done via lua script that watchpoints for change to level 3 and readdresses memeory to zero lives)

Front End

• There is a hidden block in the DK 1981 source code that says ‘if you find this call for a job, sincerly Nintendo HQ’ I called and it’s now some public utility line

• If you copyright/name part of the DK splash screen your game will crash 100% of the time as this is apparently an intentionally load bearing checksum

• 100% of this would have been way faster without a custom rom if I instead rolled a lua script but I’m infinitely more glad with what I learned the other way