User:AtriusVH

Hello, I'm Josh "Atrius" VH, you can just call me Atrius. I often use that nickname wherever I go online, but don't be fooled, I'm not the only one.

My main hobby is programming, I've dabbled in ZZT, Megazeux, BASIC, Game Maker, Action Script 3, C++, and more. I spend a lot of time these days hacking Golden Sun: The Lost Age, and creating tools to make it easier for other people to do the same. I don't consider myself a hacker since Golden Sun is the only thing I've really ever hacked so no worries about me breaking into your computers, and stealing your data.

I'll spend more time creating tools that other people can use to gather information for Golden Sun Universe than I will be actually writing/editing articles myself. If you ever hear anyone talking about looking up something in an editor, just know that I deserve all the credit for their hard work, heh heh.

My Golden Sun Hacking History
I originally began hacking Golden Sun in the hopes of ripping it's sprites. It didn't take me too long to discover how to replace my sprite with a different character, I made a video playing around with it in the original Golden Sun (skip ahead to 5:45 if you don't want to watch the parts during cut scenes).

Eventually I found out how to locate the actual sprite data in the ROM, but my first attempts at dumping it directly from the game were only partially successful.

I kept working at it, and managed to crack the format, I was able to read sprites directly from the games data. Work on dumping all of the sprites was extremely slow at first since I had to locate each character manually, but eventually I located a table of data that allowed me to automate the process.

That's when I discovered this fellow. No doubt you've already heard about him being in the game, but now you know the story of his discovery. Here's a video playing as him just for fun.

I successfully achieved my goal of ripping all of the sprites from both Golden Sun games, you can download zip archives of them from here.

I continued working on hacking Golden Sun, I made a random video having fun with it. I eventually cracked item, enemy, map formats, and more. I even dumped the FULL world map (including areas outside where you can actually go), you can download that here (I recommend using right-click > save as, it's so large some browsers can't even display the image).

I'm currently working on an editor for The Lost Age using everything I've learned from hacking the games.

Atrius 20:26, 9 December 2008 (UTC)