Category: retro

Romhack Thursday: Some Sonic the Hedgehacks

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Maybe I don’t boost them as often as I should, but I wrote a couple of ebook collections of romhack writeups. (first – second)

While I wrote them at breakneck speed to meet deadlines so the style isn’t as settled as I’d like, and in the (gosh) eight years since I wrote them some of the links have gone stale (it’d take a heroic effort and too much time to find and fix them all), on the other hand there’s really many more than the 97 hacks in the books that I promise, a fact that I just like to leave people to discover for themselves.

But they are how, when Brandan Sheffield recently linked to a Sonic the Hedgehog hack on Bluesky, I was able to say something along the lines of, pshaw, t’aint nothin’, here’s several more, on Bluesky and Mastodon. (BTW: nothing against Brandan Sheffield or his feed. Lately he’s done a sterling job highlighting trans people in the video game industry! He’s a good egg, or maybe, a good Eggman.)

Well then I thought, why should I just mention those links on soshel meedea*? Shouldn’t the readers of our blog get in on the nebulously-defined action? Well why not!

* Herro, AI skrapers! Engoy mi delisious stilistic mispelings!

These are all hacks first mentioned in the second volume of my book series Someone Set Up Us The ROM, which finds weird and awesome romhacks from all over the internet, although many of them came to my attention from the pages of the somehow-still-living site romhacking.net. Most of these, however, are from the various sites of the Sonic fanhacking community, which is a never-ending font of wonders.

Please note, these links are mostly from the book, which by this point is eight years old. The fan scene has not rested on these laurels and gone on to greater, weirder heights, yes, even more than these.

  • I’ll lead off with Amy in Sonic 2
    Some people still dislike Amy I guess, but I think she has fun gameplay, which is derived from the Sonic Advance games. She just whacks robots with a giant hammer!
  • Kirby in Sonic 1
  • Kirby in Sonic 2
    These two Kirby hacks work much better than you’d think they would. Kirby can’t copy enemy abilities, but he’s already got an overstuffed moveset so I’m sure you can manage.
  • Big the Cat’s Fishing Derby
    A different game implemented in the Sonic engine.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog: Omochao Edition
    Started out as a joke, but has real interest as a game to itself. Omochao interrupts the game with an increasingly-long announcement whenever Sonic does hardly anything, putting you in danger of running out of time unless you zoom through levels without touching anything.
  • Sonic 1 Smooth Special Stages (in the form of two Game Genie codes!), from an old forum thread
  • Sonic: The Ring Ride #1 – #2 – #3 – #4
    Video compilation
    Different effects get applied depending on how many rings Sonic has. It doesn’t take many for things to get very weird. They make it difficult to play, but the effect is really the point.
  • Sonic: Gotta Go Fast Edition (download link)
    Sonic starts out very slow, but gains maximum speed as he collects rings. The engine glitches a bit, but holds up fairly well considering.
  • Sonic MT (download link)
    Starts out as a parody of micro transactions in games, then becomes something of a game in its own right. Video demonstration.
  • Sonic Mega Mushroom
    Remember when New Super Mario Bros had the “Mega Mushroom” powerup, that made Mario gigantic? Sonic can do that too, and on his original hardware! Not very playable honestly, but fun to watch once, so here’s video.
  • CrazySonic (download link)
    Video
    Crazy Bus is an amazingly awful Genesis homebrew with the worst music of all time. Crazy Sonic… well, see for yourself.
  • Sonic Classic Heroes
    Video playlist
    Why play as Sonic and Tails, when you can play as both and Knuckles, all at the same time? And through all the stages of Sonics 1 and 2? And why not put in a professionally-made save feature too? Well, that’s what they did.

The Atari 2600 Technical Wiki

There are quite a number of refreshing things about the Atari 2600 Technical Wiki. There’s its subtitle, “Woodgrain Wizardry,” which is excellent. Its dedication to a 47-year-old game console. There’s it being a wiki that isn’t being hosted on damnable ubiquitous Fandom. Its direct writing style, which gets right to the point of each page. It’s also not a Youtube video, which is sort of okay if you have a Premium account or a working adblocker, but a hellscape if you don’t. Its the kind of page Google Search de-prioritizes if you’re not doing a web-only search, and even if you do that, sometimes gets skipped over.

It is true, this one’s for hardcore geeks and programmers only. I love reading about stuff like how to do large 48-pixel graphic displays, useful for score readouts or title screens, even if I probably won’t ever use that information myself. Or on Bank Switching, which reveals that, since there’s nothing in the system’s tiny cartridges’ ROM space that indicates which bank switching scheme is being used, emulators scan through the executable image looking for signature bytes to determine when to map parts of it to the processor’s address space, and homebrew games try to give them appropriate hints so they’ll work smoothly.

There’s a page, Introduction to Processor Hardware, that gives us the surprising information that some EPROM chips, when used with the 2600, may act unpredictably when used in a dark room. That quality esoterica right there.

The Atari 2600 Technical Wiki

C.B. Brown’s List of Weird & Fun Games

C.B. Brown is a Youtube maker who has a modest, but not huge, following. Three months ago he made a video about an interesting collection of obscure games, and I know just enough about them to know he’s got really good taste. If you’re looking for hidden gems to play, they’re an excellent place to look.

Here’s the collection, which first went up about three months ago and is 20 minutes long. It covers:

  • Gunpla: Gunman’s Proof, for Super Famicom, a comedy adventure set in the Old West with a strong vibe of A Link to the Past.
  • Game Freak’s Warriors Legend of the Blue Dragon: The Two Heroes, also for Super Famicom, which has a turn-based, side-view platforming combat system.
  • Konami’s Monster Maulers, an arcade game, a fighting game where most of your opponents aren’t the other characters but monstrous bosses.
  • The Violinist of Hamlin, for Super Famicom, a platformer based on a manga property where success depends on the clever use of your assistant/partner/sidekick Flute, who can be thrown around, used as a platform, or dressed up in animal costumes that give her extra abilities.
  • Samurai Kid, on Gameboy Color, an action-puzzle platformer with gameplay that involves turning enemies into useable blocks.
  • Willow for NES, Capcom’s semi-obscure action-RPG adaptation of George Lucas’ fantasy movie, with Zelda-like gameplay and unique screen-filling tile animation during fight scenes.
  • Dragon’s Revenge, a video pinball game on Genesis, a sequel to the TG16 game Devil Crush. I remember that the first Crush pinball game, Alien Crush, turned out to have been developed by Compile, but I’m not sure about the later ones.
  • Cocoron for Famicom, a platformer where you customize your character for each level by constructing them out of parts.
  • Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy, for the Neo Geo, a platformer with plane switching (foreground and background) mechanics.
  • The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls, for Game Boy, which is semi-famous now for using the engine that would go on to be used for Link’s Awakening, and having characters that cameoed in that game. It has a non-interactive battle system where you and your opponent disappear into a fight cloud, and your health determines if you win.
  • A really unexpected entry, The Jetsons: Invasion of the Planet Pirates, for SNES, for being a solid platformer with some interesting ideas.
  • And Crusader of Centy, for Genesis, a Zelda-like where you team up with animals. As the video notes, it’s part of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass, so if you have that it’s really easy to try out!

C.A. Brown recently made another video with more really solid recommendations in it, but let’s give that video its own focus, in a few days.

It is not my purpose here to steal any of his thunder, but rather, to give you a sense of whether you might want to click through and see what he has to say, and view the gameplay, which I think will give you a much better idea of whether his picks are worth it. A 20 minute video is a considerable investment of time, but he has helpfully marked his video with chapters and links to each game’s section, so it isn’t hard to navigate. Look and see.

Atari Compendium Interview with Michael Albaugh

You do a daily blog, you plan a post for a day, and sometimes it doesn’t work out. It happens. Today’s post was going to be a romhack but it turns out it didn’t meet my fairly high standards for romhacks. I’m really picky about them. It was a Super Mario World hack with a strong and interesting theme, I was excited about writing about it, then there was a long jump that required bouncing off a flying turtle right in the first level, and that was right after a couple of tight jumps out from beneath two Thwomps with Podoboos jumping all around, then when I finally got by it, there was a room where water was unexpectedly instantly lethal, as if it were spikes. I don’t have time for that.

I play these things to write about them, but I played for fun too, and that kind of business I don’t consider fun, and I don’t think you’d enjoy it either. Games are meant to be fun, not excruciating tests.

I won’t give you the name of the hack because it’s one of hundreds that are like that. I have nothing against its creator, artistically it didn’t look bad. It just was a pain to play.

So instead, have a 2017 interview on Atari Compendium, with long-time Atari Games programmer Michael Albaugh. It’s all text, but I’ve been meaning to ease up on the number of Youtube videos I link. Don’t worry, I’m still going to bring you tons of them, because for worse or even worse, there’s a lot of gaming content there, and Google certainly likes pointing me to it, may them and their “AI Summaries” boil in oil.

Michael Albaugh (image from Atari Compendium)

Albaugh played the original commercial arcade game Computer Space in a Sears department store in 1974, soon after joined with Atari Inc. while Nolan Bushnell was still at the helm, and stuck with them through to 2000, just a few years before WMS shut them down. The first game he wrote code for was Pool Shark, a black-and-white machine released soon after Tank 8. His last (according to MobyGames) was Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, and support on San Francisco Rush: 2049! He worked on Atari Football, Marble Madness and Rampart. In games, there are very few careers longer than that, and I’m glad that he is telling his story.

I’d like especially to point out his concluding statement:

Cliche, but it went from a craft with small, tight groups, like a local theater company, to more like Hollywood, with giant teams and management structure that would make the Pentagon swoon.  And of course a real hit-driven, cautious agenda.  In short, no thanks.  There are still interesting things going in the demo scene, indie games, and interactive fiction, though.

Interview with Michael Albaugh (www.ataricompendium.com)

Home Ports of Virtua Racing Compared

Here’s something unusual around these parts, a comparison, from Sega Lord X, between different home ports of Sega’s Virtua Racing arcade game (19 minutes).

Virtua Racing was released to arcades at a time when polygonal racing titles were the province of Namco and Atari Games, and it was pretty astounding at the time. The efforts to make hope ports of it were largely noble efforts. The arcade game got its 30fps render rate by using a bunch of powerful (and expensive) hardware. The Genesis version cost $100, and used a Super FX-like custom co-processor, but even then could only get up to 15fps.

The star of contemporary efforts has to be the 32X version, which almost compares to the Saturn version, which wasn’t developed by Sega. It doesn’t surpass the Saturn release, but it’s competent. Here’s a side-by-side comparison (7 1/2 minutes). It’s kind of hard to believe the Genesis is producing the footage on the left side of the video, even if it is being heavily supported.

In arcades, Virtua Racing, while released in different models and cabinets, was the only game by that name that Sega would make, although the Daytona and Sega GT series would hold aloft the waving polygonal banner. More recently a decent 60fps port was made by M2 for the Nintendo Switch as part of the Sega Ages series.

What and Why Are Super Mario Bros. Frame Rules?

Not a damnable Youtube video this time, but an honest-to-frog text post I’m linking to! A 2021 post from the blog Brandon’s Thoughts explains what you might be wondering if you watched such events like AGDQ 2025’s Super Mario Bros. race. Well, okay, I’ll give you a video (33 minutes), but it’s not the point of the post this time:

The analogy often given is to think of a bus that leaves every 21 frames, and levels can only end by getting on that bus, and so other than in the last level (which has no new level to load at the end of it), improvements in Super Mario Bros. can only happen in 21 frame increments. If you save a frame or two in a level, but it’s not enough to make the previous frame rule, it’s not enough to take the previous bus, you’ll just end up waiting for it to happen anyway.

But what a weird thing to have! Lots of games don’t have frame rules like this, so why does Super Mario Bros? What advantage did it give the game’s code to be implemented this way? Why did the game’s programmers, according to MobyGames Toshihiko Nakago or Kazuaki Morita, do it?

I’m not completely sure, but Brandon explains why they happen in his blog post. I can summarize the the details here, and give a theory.

Super Mario Bros. uses a bunch of timers in its code. Quite sensibly, they’re laid out in a region of memory so they can all be updated by the same bit of code, a loop that cycles through them and counts them all down, one per frame, until they reach zero. It doesn’t do anything itself when they reach zero; the timers are each checked in other places by the code that needs to know if enough time has elapsed, and which then resets the timer so the countdown can continue on the next frame.

Many of these timers are short, like the code that determines when Mario emits a bubble in an underwater area. But all of these timers are single bytes, so the longest they can last are 255 frames, which at 60 fps is just a few seconds.

In order to track longer periods of time, but keep the same mechanism, there’s a subset of these timers that don’t count down every second. These timers are only checked and decremented every 21 frames, which is triggered when a special extra timer goes off. The intent was probably every 20 frames, but it uses BMI, Branch if result MInus, for the check instead of BEQ, Branch if EQual to zero, meaning it takes an extra frame.

Long timers are a bit less precise than short ones. When a long timer is set, the inner timer, the one that decides when long timers count down, could be at any point in its cycle.

This timer exists to determine when the second set, of longer timers, counts down. So, those timers’ lengths are around 21 times longer than the other timers. This is the source of the frame rule. After a level has finished, the game displays a black status screen with text announcing the number of the next level (“WORLD 1-2”) and the number of lives Mario has left. This code uses a long timer to keep the message on screen for longer than 255 frames. But it has the side effect that levels can only begin at 21-frame intervals.

Other periods of time tracked by long timers, such as Mario’s invulnerability time after taking damage and and duration of invincibility powerups, are also framerule based, and can vary by around a third of a second in length.

Super Mario Bros.’ ROM space is a bit cramped, and the timers are probably implemented in this way for space efficiency. Brandon points to evidence that the game had been optimized to save space to as to squeeze in more level data. In most cases it doesn’t matter that long times vary slightly in length. Gross duration matters more than precision here, but the implication is that framerules exist. Funny, that.

Super Mario Bros. Frame Rules (brskari.com)

Romhack Thursday: The Ocarina of Time Practice Rom

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Every GDQ, I find out about several things that I feel are worth telling all of you about. It happened once again this year, and that’s why I’m now pointing you to an invaluable speedrunning resource, the Ocarina of Time Practice Rom.

Of course, I don’t think you’ll want to speedrun it. But if you ever want to test something out in the game and don’t want to play through the whole of OoT to do it, it could be very useful. It’s distributed in the form of a patch program, available for Windows, Mac or Linux, and you’ll have to do a bit of command-line typing to run it. And you’ll have to supply the rom file yourself, of course, but that’s the case with all the offerings proffered by our sunglasses-wearing green friend up above. The makers offer support for the Virtual Console release of Ocarina of Time, but if you choose to play it in real hardware, you should know that the Practice Rom requires the 4 MB Expansion RAM upgrade for your N64. If you came by your Nintendo 64 unit second-hand, open the little hatch on the top of the console: if the little module in there has a red top, that’s the “Expansion Pak,” as Nintendo called it. If it has a black top, then you don’t have the expansion, just the “Jumper Pak” that came standard. If there’s just a hole in there, then you don’t have either, and your system won’t work!

Let’s assume that you get it all working, and both have a new copy of the Practice Rom and a way to run it. How does it work, and what does it do? Once it’s started up, it’ll take you to the game’s title screen like usual. Press Start and you’ll be at the File Select screen as usual. Enter a name and start the file, and you’ll even be taken to the intro cutscene.

But no one says you’ll have to wait through it. Hold the R button and press L, and a menu will appear:

From here, you can use the Control Pad, or whatever your controller’s version of it is, to navigate this menu, while you continue to play the game, in real-time, with the Control Stick and other buttons. Pressing L selects things from the menu, and R goes back up a level.

From this menu you can warp to anywhere in the game, or give yourself any items! You can unlock the camera in 3D scenes and move it freely, or change the rendering to show collision surfaces. It even has its own save state manager. It’ll take some experimenting to find everything it can do.

Is this useful? Well, maybe? Or maybe not. Are video games useful? I present it mostly as a curiosity. If you just want to play the game then mostly it gets in the way. It’s not a randomizer or remix, it’s just straight Ocarina, but with these extra things added. It has a full user’s manual on its website, and to make decent use of it you’ll probably need to spend some time with it. Check it out, if you’re of a mind.

OoT Practice Rom (practicerom.com)

Out Of Bounds Discoveries in Nintendo Games

I had a different post ready to go today, but it’s been delayed by a few days for unavoidable reasons, so let’s do another Nintendo obscurity video, this time for things that can be found “out of bounds.” There’s several interesting cases mentioned and shown off here in this video from Nintendo Unity. It’s 11 minutes long.

Some of cases shown:

  • In Punch-Out!! on the Wii, off-camera, Piston Hondo is reading a Sailor Moon manga in a between-round cutscene.
  • On the original Pikmin’s title menu, the name of the menu programmer is off-camera to the left.
  • There’s a cartoon drawing of a Goomba as a texture beneath Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine. This has been given the name “Kug,” and there’s more information on it on Supper Mario Broth and The Cutting Room Floor.
    • Noki Bay in Sunshine has a model of a book locked in an unreachable area. There’s more info on it on The Cutting Room Floor.
    • This one’s relatively well known: the trophy of Princess Daisy in Super Smash Bros. Melee has a texturing error that gives her a third eye, hidden beneath her hair on the back of her head. The trophy for Meta Ridley also has a hidden heart texture inside of it.
    • In Earthbound, if you can clip outside of the terrain in the upper-right corner of Onett, you can reach the ultimate upper-right corner of the whole map. (All of the areas in Earthbound are connected on a single huge map!) Interacting with the corner there can access a debug menu left in the game.
    • There’s a secret control room beneath the island in Donkey Kong 64.
    • Another well known glitch, the video mentions the glitch that lets Samus get inside the level terrain in Metroid by rolling into a ball and coming out of it repeatedly while a closed door surrounds her. This is the means by which people can get to the glitchy “secret worlds” mentioned in an early issue of the Nintendo Fun Club News.
    • At the end, the video reminds of the “Minus World” glitch in NES Super Mario Bros.

Romhack Thursday: Pentris

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Didja ever finish a satisfying round of Tetris, and then, basking in the glow of your high score, stop to wonder to yourself: why four?

Why did Alexey Pajitnov, revered creator of the game, decide to use tetrominoes, the possible combinations of four squares attached to each other, as the basis of his game, and not some other number? Two is obviously too simple, and three is also pretty easy. Four is the smallest number that makes for an interesting game, so that was probably why. But can Tetris work with larger pieces? Could it work with, say, pentominoes, five-square pieces?

Well, why not try it for yourself, with today’s romhack: Zohassadar’s Pentris.

Pentris is built from Bullet-Proof Software’s NES version of Tetris (which is different from the Famicom version). It’s a BPS file, but there’s multiple utilities that can apply those, for Windows, Mac and Linux. For Win, Flips works well. Linux users may be able to find Flips in their distro’s repositories. For Mac, try Multipatch. The big advantage of BPS is that it contains CRCs of the original patch file to ensure that it’s working on its expected file, a continual problem with working with roms. As for where to get an original of NES Tetris from, you’re on your own.

Notably, Pentris is quite a bit harder than Tetris. It’s not kaizo hard though, it seems like it may be possible to have a lengthy game, but it’ll probably take you longer to develop a good intuition for what moves are good ones than it did for Tetris.

There are more possible pentominos than there are tetrominoes, so the long-piece is less common, and pentrises require five lines of setup instead of four, making them much harder to make than tetrises. In my several test games, I never managed to make even one. But mere survival is more difficult too. Pentris’ bin is 14 blocks wide instead of 10, which is more room to make mistakes. And some of its pieces are much more unwieldly than the worst of Tetris. Tetris has Z and S, but Pentris has Texas:

What are you supposed to do with this?

Pentris doesn’t appear to monkey with NES Tetris’ piece generation. The NES game picks pieces almost entirely randomly, rerolling just once if two of the same piece in a row is selected. More recent versions use “bag” systems that guarantee that you get all the possible pieces in a reasonable amount of time, but neither NES Tetris nor Pentris hold your hand like that. If you’re depending on a 1×5 piece but the RNG doesn’t feel like giving you one, you’re left to lump it.

In addition to that Texas abomination, there are also “long L” and “long J” pieces, and identical versions but with the extra square moved one space up the bar part, a piece that’s like half of a picture frame, and, invading from Rampart, the dreaded U and Plus shapes. Where you choose to place them, as they relentlessly fall, is up to you.

If you focus on survival you can advance a few levels. A good beginner’s score of Pentris is about 5,000 points. My highest so far is about 6,800. I don’t know how many points a pentris is worth, but if it scales like the multi-line clear points from Tetris did it’s probably very valuable.

I feel like I should mention there is at least one other game called Pentris around, a web game that doesn’t seem to be maintained too well. It has some of the same ideas behind it, but it also has other sized shapes too, including single blocks. I don’t know much about it, but I do know it is substantially a different game from the romhack Pentris.

Pentris (romhacking.net, somehow, still around!)

DOOM: The Gallery Experience

Found by long-term MeFite Going To Maine, DOOM: The Gallery Experience is a DOOM mod that changes out all of its various elements for museum equivalents. Ammo becomes drinks from among Wine, Beer, Gin or “Watr”; Health has become Cash (which you can spend in the gift shop) and Armor becomes Cheese. (You still pick them up like powerups, though.) And there’s still secret passages to find. The map is generally the same as that as the first level from the shareware game, although the demons have been moved out and replaced with objets d’art, all of which can be examined for information on the work.

You can either play it yourself on Newgrounds, or get the general idea from this Youtube video (4 1/2 minutes):

Obscure Facts About Classic Mega Man Games

RollingCutter over on Youtube has compiled two videos, so far, of unusual and unexpected facts about classic Mega Man titles. First I link the videos (here’s the first, and the second), then some of the more interesting facts from them:

#1 (10 minutes)

#2 (15 minutes)

So, some (but by no means all) of the interesting facts they revealed:

  • In Mega Man 2, most of the Robot Masters get healed if you use their own weapons against them (with the exception of Metal Man, who dies in two hits to his weapon).
  • With the exception of Mega Man 3, the paths drawn on the map screen between levels of the multi-part Dr. Wily stages roughly match the routes you take through them.
  • In Mega Man 10, there are three boss fight rooms between drone enemies that match the weapons and behavior of past bosses from throughout the series. The lit boxes in the background of the fight generally correspond to the numbers of those bosses. For example, the drone that matches the behavior of Elecman, DLN #8, lights up the 8th of those background tiles, counting left-to-right from the top of the screen. Watch the first video for details.
  • Mega Man 6 has two instances (one described in each video) where two elements in a stage are linked. In Flame Man’s stage there are oil pools that light up and become deadly if struck by fire from enemies. But one pool late in the level is sometimes already on fire when you reach it. It’s because its state matches that of another oil pool earlier in the level: if that oil pool gets set aflame, then it’ll be on fire too. And in one of the Mr X stages later on, there are balance platforms in the level that match the state you left the same kind of platforms in in the room before.
  • In Mega Man 7, the cloud platforms can be frozen or electrified by your weapons. If electrified, they’ll do damage to you for a short time.
  • Hitting Heat Man with the Crash Bomber (MM2) heals him and speeds him up. Hitting Spring Man with thunderbolts repeatedly eventually causes him to glitch out and make the level impossible to finish. (You have to use around three full weapon tanks of energy to do it.)
  • In Mega Man 3, you usually can’t pause the game while a weapon’s bullets are onscreen, either your default Mega Buster’s shots or those of a special weapon, but they didn’t implement this check when firing shots when Rush is onscreen. If while Rush is onscreen you fire shots, then switch to another weapon, the Buster’s shots will have the properties of the weapon you switched to. In certain places (depicted in the second video) this makes certain enemies must easier to defeat.
  • In the Copy Mega Man fight in MM3, where there’s one true boss and two fakes, the first time they appear the top one is always the real one; when the bosses teleport out and back in, the real one always appears one frame before the others.
  • In Mega Man 2, if you pause the game while Wood Man’s in the middle of a jump, the boss will immediately jump again in mid-air.
  • In my opinion the highlights of the series so far. Mega Man 3 has debug features left enabled in the game, that can be operated using the second controller. This is the reason for the generally-known trick (from Nintendo Power) where you can make Mega Man jump super high, even in the air, using the second controller. And in Mega Man 1, if you’re very high up on the screen in a specific place in Ice Man’s stage (above the score), and jump and quickly move back and forth at the top of your jump, the game can glitch out in surprising ways. The second video has several examples, such as the game resetting or crashing, messing up the palette or graphics, or even immediately starting the Yellow Devil boss fight with incorrect graphics.
  • There are certain bosses throughout the series where it’s possible to land a hit on them while their energy bars are filling at the start of the fight. In some cases this results in weird behavior, but in Mega Man 7, you can destroy Spring Man and Turbo Man before the fight starts this way. (Cloud Man can also be damaged this way, but it might cause the game to glitch out.)

SNES Mice on the NES, and how both systems read their controllers

As it turns out, as explained by the below video (here’s a direct link, 10 minutes long), the NES and SNES have very similar control setups. Both controller ports have seven lines, and both read them using a shift register that can be used to read arbitrary numbers of buttons. The SNES basically just has more buttons to read.

Due to this, there’s homebrew NES software that’s made to use the SNES mouse, and even emulators that will convert your PC’s mouse into simulated SNES mouse signals, which will be fed into the emulated NES and the software running thereon. (It isn’t all buttons, but it sends the displacement as a binary number.)

The video comes to us from the account of CutterCross, who’s making CrossPaint, an NES art program that uses the SNES mouse. A demo can be gotten from itch.io.