Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection is an anthology of 13 TMNT games from the 8-bit/16-bit era that was released earlier for modern consoles. The collection is available for PS4, PS5, Switch, XBox, PC, and got a physical release which is awesome. The collection sits at a good metacritic score of 83% at the time of writing, and fans are enjoying every minute of it.

Run-of-the-mill gamers are not the only ones appreciating the Cowabunga collection: tinkerers have found that the game is actually a series of emulators running ROMS for older consoles, and some adventurous folks have found that it’s fairly easy to swap the roms in order to run other GameBoy, NES, SNES,… games.

Mogi_Codemasterv of the ps4homebrew reddit has shared multiple screenshots of his early successes modding the game.

Not only can different roms be loaded into the game, the backgrounds can be edited too, if you want, as shown in the Pokémon screenshot below.

(more screenshots at the source below)

Modding TMNT Cowabunga Collection – Because we can

The modder says “No injecting required. Right now you can just rename any sized rom to that of the game that exists already and replace that rom in the rom directory and it’s good to go. This game is 90% PNG and JPG”, so it’s reasonably easy to mod even for beginners… with a caveat of course. Modding games on modern consoles requires a hacked console. In this case, all the changes have required a dumped version of the game’s PS4 pkg files, which Mogi_Codemasterv has unpacked, modified, then repacked. The tools to do this are fairly easy to find, but you will need a Jailbroken PS4 to run the result.

No injecting required. Right now you can just rename any sized rom to that of the game that exists already and replace that rom in the rom directory and its good to go.

install the game, dump the game, replace the roms, build the fpkg

You could also just make update files with new roms in it that replace the old roms.

No doubt that something similar can be achieved on the Nintendo Switch as well.

Our most astute readers will point out that the usefulness of this endeavor is questionable: Emulators such as Retroarch already exist for hacked consoles, so why go through the trouble of modding a game to load the roms? First, because we can! Second, those are different emulators than the ones used by the scene, and might have different compatibility results. But, really, because we can.

Mogi_Codemasterv has provided a list of emulators running in this collection, as well as some of his findings:

• Same boy for dmg games. > if GBC is booted you are told the GB does not support GBC games
• Mame for Konami Arcade> have not tried swapping yet
• Genesis > not sure yet what emulator version is used, Can not play 32x games
• NES > not sure yet what emulator version is used, NES Rom hacks crash the game like Pokemon Yellow Port and FFVII Demake
• SNES > not sure yet what emulator version is used – Special chip games have compatibility issues like Kirby 3

Source: Mogi_Codemasterv on reddit