Kent Hansen: SnowBro

JANDAR:

How did you first become interested in emulation?

SNOWBRO:

The first emulator I tried was VGB-DOS I think; I found it one time I was looking through the incoming dir of a local BBS. Prior to that point I hadn't even heard the word emulation, so I thought it was a hoax at first, but when I realized it wasn't, I was amazed. Game Boy emulation had progressed pretty far at that time (I believe it was around mid-'96), but my main interest was NES emulation, because I had many fond memories from that system. When I got on the internet, I started following the development of various console
emulators more closely; my dream was that a "perfect" NES emulator would eventually appear. That dream came true with the initial release of NESticle: even though the first version was far from the quality of the later versions, it was still a major breakthrough in emulation - and it inspired others, including myself, to start developing their own NES emulators. In my case, I didn't know any programming languages at the time, so it took a while until I was able to contribute to the emulation community myself.

JANDAR:

It seems that at one point you made a transition from things such as NESemu and Hexposure to level editors. What got you started on the level editor 'craze'?

SNOWBRO:

It started when I was hacking Kid Icarus. I was curious as to how the game worked; specifically, how the level data was stored. And so, through some effort, I was able to figure out the internal data formats. Naturally, the best way to put my discoveries to use was to make a level editor for the game! I had seen the level editors from _Demo_ and EFX (Mario Improvement and Zelda Improvement), and thought they were cool, so I thought I'd do something similar with Kid Icarus.
      Well, after I had finished the Kid Icarus editor, I sorta got hooked on making level editors for a while. It was fun because I learned a lot from hacking the various games' data formats. But lately I haven't made any new level editors: I'll probably focus on improving the ones I've already done (implementing enemy editing, for example), instead of making new ones.

JANDAR:

How do you determine which games you will create level editors for? Which is your personal favorite?

SNOWBRO:

I started hacking Kid Icarus because that is one of my favourite NES games. Same goes for Metroid, and most of the other games I've picked actually. Some I picked just because they were so easy to hack; Ghosts'n'Goblins comes to mind.
I'm most proud of the Kid Icarus and Metroid editors, because those two games have a pretty complex level data format compared to the other games, and it took a lot of work to figure everything out, and then translating that into an actual level editor.

JANDAR:

How do you make use of the programs you create? Do you spend time on any ROM hacking projects that involve use of them?

SNOWBRO:

I do use the programs I've created, but I've never been involved in any "official" ROM hacking projects; I usually just fool around on my own, hacking data formats and stuff. All my programs are the result of my will to learn, to create something for myself, not because someone else wants me to. I want to improve my programming skills, as well as achieve knowledge of console hardware, and if the result of my work makes the life of ROM hackers easier, then I'm glad.

JANDAR:

Generally Tile Layer is the suggested utility for graphics editing whenever people come asking for ROM hacking help. How do you feel about its growing popularity? Why did you decide to create it in the first place?

SNOWBRO:

I'm glad that people like the program. It's nice to know that my program has played a major part in someone's ROM hacking project. Perhaps the reason why people like it so much is because one of my initial goals for Tile Layer was reached: it should be EASY to use. No disrespect to the other tile editors around at the time, but I had my own idea of how it should be done, so I went ahead and did it.

JANDAR:

What plans do you have in store for Tile Layer in the future?

SNOWBRO:

Well, if you check my homepage (http://home.sol.no/~kenhanse/nes/), you can see some screenshots from the upcoming version, which adds Virtual Boy, SNES, and SMS support. I guess I could release it right now, but I want the babies who've been crying for SNES support to suffer a bit more. :P Some people don't seem to realize that whining to me has no effect - in fact it will discourage me from updating my programs. It puzzles me that these individuals think I'm a coding factory just sitting here waiting for them to give me assignments. Once again, I'm mostly doing these programs for myself; however, I'd be glad to help out people who behave in a civilized manner.

JANDAR:

As time passes utilities such as Tile Layer and many others make ROM hacking far easier than it has ever been before. What effect do you think this is having on the ROM hacking/translation community?

SNOWBRO:

In one way it's good, because it opens up for new possibilities, and makes many things which were previously very tedious easier to do (anyone still remember what it was like when there were no programs which could load font table files??? That's my primary reason for doing Hexposure). My favourite feature in Tile Layer is the ability to copy graphics from one file to another, and even from one tile format to another. This makes it easy to make interesting "cross-platform" hacks. :) The upcoming version of Tile Layer will allow people to mix NES, Game Boy, Virtual Boy, SNES and SMS graphics with eachother, which I hope people will play around with.
      The bad part is that we're flooded with cheap 5-minute Mario hacks. In the good ol' days - uhm, let me rephrase that: in the early days of ROM hacking, you had to possess some special skills to even pull off a simple (by today's standards) graphics hack. That's why I respect EFX, who made some of the first (if not THE first??) Mario and Zelda hacks way back when I was still wearing diapers. However, I don't really like the latest generation of ROM hackers, because they THINK they are special, even though many of them aren't contributing in a positive way. It's easy to tell whether a person has worked hard and long on something, and most of today's ROM hacks don't give me that impression.

JANDAR:

What plans do you have for the future with regards to upcoming utilities?

SNOWBRO:

Well, as I said I'm adding the final touches to a new version of Tile Layer. I also want to do a new version of Hexposure, a program which I feel is a bit outdated. Lately I've been learning Win9X programming, so it's possible that most of my future programs will be Windows programs (partly because I'm getting tired of people who don't know how to run programs from the DOS prompt... :P ). Perhaps Tile Layer will become a Windows program in the future.