darkSpyro

I've been thinking about this for a while, but only got around to posting it now. I have a fairly large collection of Skylanders, and with their growing age, I grow more concerned about my ability to play with them. Just today, while playing Swap Force, I had my Buckler half stop working, right in the middle of gameplay. I thankfully had a spare, and while this is the only one so far to kick the bucket, I wonder how long it will be before the others follow.

So here's my thought: would it be possible to make a digital-only mod for the Skylanders games? As in, mod the games so that we can simply press a button to enter the Portal screen, then from there, swap the current active Skylander? Similar to what the Switch version of Imaginators did?

I have some coding experience and am willing to learn what needs to be done to make this possible, but in the circumstance that it isn't, is there some way to copy the data of a Skylander to another tag? Pyrofer's tool allows for raw dumps of the Skylanders, so if we had a similar tag and dump it, it ought to be possible, right? And if it is, how would Swap Force Skylanders work?

I know these are a lot of questions that I have no idea will even be answered, considering the state of the board. But I want to enjoy these games long into the future, and even introduce them to my future children, if there is nothing like it then. Plus, it's a matter of preservation and accessibility. Many figures are difficult and expensive to acquire, and through this mod, this can at least make the option available to others to play with them.

Honestly I'm just hoping for a series of toyless remakes. But even if that happens I doubt all titles would get this treatment. (I'm looking at you 3DS versions and Racing.)

I know nothing about this myself, but I remember back when Giants figures were still being released and Swap Force was just around the corner, there were post showing scrapped/unfinished characters gameplay. Such as someone switching to and controlling a Sniper Troll who had little to no animation. And as that's a character who clearly has no figure, I see it as entirely possible.

If we're not going to get remakes (and if some games would get ignored altogether) I'd love for this essentially a ROM hack (ISO hack?) to become a reality. Maybe if it happened, more people would give the series a chance. Without having to hunt down hundreds of dollars of figures, which aren't even easy to find anymore.

One thing I could see is modifying the Wii U versions and using a modified touchscreen menu to change out the Skylanders, and keeping the raw dumps of the tags as part of the save data. Beyond that, you'd have to make a program to spoof the Portal and redirect tge game to the tag dumps. It might be possible, but I don't have enough knowledge of game modding specifically to know.

I'd expect that the intimate connection with the portal is what makes pausing the code problematic; that's the main factor that differentiates this series from the others. I guess you could test with Disney Infinity to see if that remains consistent, and I'd need to test it myself to see if I experience that.