ROM Hacking

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/emulation/p/1929722/a-look-at-dkcafe-a-donkey-kong-rom-hacks-frontend

Recently I stumbled on the DKcafe frontend. It is an emulation frontend for the original Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Donkey Kong 3,* but also for countless Donkey Kong ROM hacks. What makes this frontend unique is the gamified experience.

When you load the frontend, you end up in an interface that looks like a classic Donkey Kong level. You control Jumpman (Mario) and can jump and climb ladders. But in the background there are several arcade machines. (Initially only one to three, depending on the ROMs you have provided for games). And on the top of the level, Donkey Kong is standing, throwing barrels at you but also coins. By collecting the coins he is throwing, you can unlock more arcade cabinets that are ROM hack variations of the game.
Additionally, while playing the games or ROM Hacks and get a certain amount of score, and you can win trophies, and when you exit the game, you get rewarded with a large amount of coins, unlocking the coins faster.

DKCafe also includes an add-on that you can download separately from the project GitHub page or from inside the front end itself. This add-on includes ROMs and ROM hacks for the home computer versions of the first Donkey Kong game.

You do not need to provide an emulator for the frontend, it comes with its own emulator called DKWolf, which is based on WolfMame. I am not sure what exactly is different about WolfMame and regular Mame, its GitHub page does not provide an explanation. It just explains what Mame is. I assume it focuses on ROM hacks, but I am not sure. You can also replace it with your own emulator if you want to do that.
The emulator is in the DKWolf folder in the root directory and can be run on its own. It can be configured as a standard MAME, emulator cheats can also be enabled. They seem to work with many ROM hacks but not with all.

The frontend also includes additional features. Like a practice mode to improve your DK skills. The ability to continue and DKTV an alternative viewpoint of the game. Jumpman is fixed to the center of the screen as the camera follows his movements. The camera zooms in further on the action when Jumpman is jumping or hammering.

The ROMs go into the ROM folder in the root directory. You have to provide your own ROMs for the three arcade games. Though I did not manage to get Donkey Kong 3 running with it. The arcade cabinet for the game did not appear in the frontend. When I tried to run DKWolf from the command line with Dkong3 as a parameter, it informed me that all files were missing even though they were in the zip file. And it runs with regular MAME, so I am not sure what is going on there.

DKCafe runs on Windows and Raspberry Pi 4. It also provides instruction to compile it for Ubuntu Linux, but they are a bit complicated. Though it does run with Wine on Linux without any problems unless the Donkey Kong 3 issue is related to that.

In conclusion, I love this idea and would love to see it for other games like Pac-Man, for example.
I also would love if DKcafe would add ROM hacks for Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3. Also maybe for the Game Boy Donkey Kong game from 1994.

Link

Came across this post and wanted to share it here