It’s not so much a hack as a recompilation, but it’s distributed in patch form so I’m accepting it. A person identified as “Nintendo 64 Wizard” took the source code created by decompiling Super Mario 64, and, simply, did something that Nintendo didn’t do: compile the game with -O2 optimization turned on. The result is a much more consistent frame rate.
From the romhacking.net article, a scene from the star with Bowser’s Sub in it, which is notorious for causing the game to lag.
If optimizing Super Mario 64 is an appealing concept to you, you might be interested in some of the videos made by Youtuber Kaze Emanuar, that goes into why the game has lag, and his own efforts into improving it.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
When people think about NES games, they often think of pixel art. Big chunky pixels! It’s one of the defining aesthetics of our era. The NES occupies a niche between the truly blocky graphics of the Atari VCS era and the 16-bit consoles, which don’t have a much greater resolution than the NES (since the limitations of CRT displays were a big factor), but had a much greater color depth that could help smooth things out.
But it can be interesting, visually, to try to find a middle ground between the Atari and the NES. That is where the subject of this post comes in: The Legend of Zelda Chunky Edition, a graphics hack by Zero Meaning.
There are no words for how much I love this look!
Only the graphics have changed, and just to make them more blocky, instead of the prevailing trend for remakes, which is to make them less so. (Oh also, the bright cyan of Link’s Blue Ring tunic has been darkened a bit.)
For some reason, this look suits The Legend of Zelda a lot! The greatest challenge to making it, I think is figuring out how to represent letters and numbers. You can see from the title screen above that the S, R and numeral 8 posed particular challenges, as did the copyright symbol.
There’s not a lot more to say about this one! So here are a few screenshots of Zelda, chunky style.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Kirby’s first adventure was, famously, a Gameboy game. Since that system is black and white, it’s been heard that Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t know Kirby was supposed to be pink until his second major game, Kirby’s Adventure, was released as a swan song for the Famicom/NES. The last main world in Kirby’s Adventure, as a nod to its Gameboy roots, is monochrome.
Kirby games tend to have distinctive graphics, and Dream Land is no exception even if it is monochrome. But what would they look like if they were in color? Well we don’t have to wonder any longer, because of a romhack constructed by GreenAndACat. It ports the game to the Gameboy Color hardware, and it looks pretty darn great! They resisted the urge to make it too fancy, instead giving background elements broad swaths of primary color that look great when applied to the game’s simple yet iconic graphics. Have a look:
Green Greens is looking pretty sharp!
The water may look slightly glitchy, but its clarity is really appealing!
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
For a game notorious for its difficulty, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has a lot of romhacks, most of which up the challenge level still more. Amida’s Curse is more of a difficulty level in keeping with the original, which is nice, and has some interesting ideas in it.
The Zelda II bosses are used mostly without change, although their new environments throw in some wrinkles.
Due to controller issues (PowerA’s cheaper wired version of the Switch Pro Controller has decided to mess up in frustrating ways) I have yet to play through the whole thing, but what I’ve seen has some interesting decisions. Amida’s Curse throws out the wandering monster encounters completely; there is no reason I can see to not wander around the landscape wherever you want. In fact you definitely should try to wander around a fair bit, for the game has bunches of secret areas waiting to be found throughout the landscape, hiding heart and magic containers, experience gems (which are a reskinned version of the original game’s P-bags) and sometimes required things.
Fall off the elevator before descending to the ground and you might have to reset the room to go back up.
Amida’s Curse has a bit more terrain to cover than stock Zelda II. It’s got more towns (which are much smaller, a good change) and dungeons, and is split up more by item gating than before. In the first town you have to find a key, this lets you get the candle out of a cave, this lets you see in a cave leading to the next area, which has a dungeon with a Power Bracelet that lets you break blocks, that allows you to go through the next cave, and so on. It feels a bit like you’re being led by the nose, but that is often the style with these kinds of games, and it’s not like Zelda II itself didn’t have a fair amount of it.
If you find interesting spots in the overworld, it’s worth it to check them out!
The overworld map takes a cue from the Famicom Disk System version of the game and has animated tiles, but instead of just animating the water, most of the tiles in the overworld are animated now. Towns have smoke coming up from them, and grass blows around. The combat scene graphics have been upgraded a little bit too.
The difficulty balancing is pretty good. Romhacks that resist the urge to make you fight through gauntlets of enemies every step of the way should be lauded. It’s not perfect, I would say, there are places like where you have to jump over a skeleton on a collapsing passage, or make a big jump while being harassed by birds. And there are places where the design could use a little more work: it’s easy to get stranded in some rooms by falling off an elevator, requiring you to reset it, or in one notable case purposely die, to get yourself unstuck. And if you’re jumping water or lava that comes right up to the landing platform, make sure you clear it by a fair margin, as the game loves to kill you if your foot even grazes the perilous liquid.
Usefully, extra lives found don’t give you a one-time extra try, but increase the number you start each session with, which is a handy little improvement. I think a non-obsessive player can make it through, or at least from what I’ve managed to see. I look forward to trying to get further into this, when my controller isn’t fighting me every step of the way.
I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this one is borrowed from JRPG Junkie’s article. I figure it should be okay, since I’m using it explicitly to promote said article!
JRPG Junkie looks at the Super Robot Wars series, the mostly-Japan-only giant fighting robots game series with over 70 entries and that crosses over everything (in various games) from Gundam to Full Metal Panic to Cowboy Bebop to Captain Harlock to Gunbuster to Giant Gorg to Evangelion to The Big O. The article, which is far far more knowledgeable about it than I am, is an excellent place to start with this extremely prolific series.
Some of the Switch versions of these games have English translations built-in, and because you can log onto any region’s store on the Switch, those particular versions can be enjoyed by English-speaking players the world over. But there are tons of these games, and many have fan translations, if you’re willing to jump through those particular mechanized, articulated hoops.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
The early days of JRPGs contain many games that are kind of difficult to play today. The genre was just getting formulated, and while there was a lot of ingenuity and interesting ideas being played with, there were also many games where difficulty, and grind, were the entire point. When a game as simple as Dragon Quest, known first in the US by its localized title Dragon Warrior, had to justify its sale price, it had to present players with an experience that would be as long as a challenging NES platformer, or longer, within its limited memory space, and it did so with grind, asking players to accept fighting hundreds of monsters one-on-one in a basic menu-based combat simulation as fun enough to make up for most of the game.
At the time, in Japan, it worked, but it’s telling that Dragon Quest II has much deeper combat, and many more kinds of monsters, than its predecessor had. Dragon Warrior had a tough time breaking into the US market because of its simple gameplay, enough so that eventually Nintendo, who published the game in North America, resorted to giving away copies as a subscription premium for Nintendo Power.
What was a tough sell to Western players even then is much more difficult to enjoy now. Compare it to the much deeper, not to mention longer and better animated, titles made later in the series. It’s mostly enjoyable only for nostalgia factor and historical interest.
I’m not going to claim it fixes everything the game, but this hack improves its play a lot by decreasing gold prices and experience requirements ten-fold. It decreases costs: changing the earn rate of these quantities would very quickly hit Dragon Warrior’s fairly low variable caps, since the game stores both in 16-bit values. You can take the 120 gold you get from the King’s chest, buy an 18 gold Copper Sword in Brecconary, then run to the north-west to Garinham and buy the sturdy Half Plate armor for 100! With these items, even at low levels, you should be able to vanquish all of the enemies in this section of the map, except perhaps Magicians, whose Hurt spells bypass armor. But it only takes defeating one Slime to reach Level 2, two more for Level 3, and two more than that for Level 4. Slimes won’t suffice for long, but by that point you can munch on much stronger foes. This greatly reduces the number of fights a player must win to complete the game, and makes it possible to finish in less than two hours.
You can very quickly rise to decent levels of power in the starting area! You’ll still be humbled if you try to rush late-game enemies, but you don’t have to spend long building your character at all.
This guy is the Magic Refill Wizard. Don’t pay those exorbitant Inn prices, use your Heal spell repeatedly and talk to him!
Preserving some modest amount of challenge, the gold costs of Inns are left the same, making them effectively ten times more expensive. Inns were never very expensive in the unmodified game, so this makes staying the night to restore your HP and MP more of a strategic choice. A tip: remember there’s a guy in Tantegel Castle who will restore all your MP for free!
If even a two-hour Dragon Warrior is too much effort for you, you could watch this playthrough of the hack on Youtube, which is about an hour and a half in length:
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Castlevania II is an infamous entry in the series. While it’s the first Castlevania game to use the “Metroidvania” structure that would be more solidly associated with it after Symphony of the Night, there were a lot of… controversial elements? Townsfolk often lied to the player (in all versions of the game), and sometimes their hints were badly translated. A few places required the player to do arbitrary things without much prompting to proceed. And there were the timed scene transitions, between day and night, which some people have (rather unfairly I think) fixated upon as a major flaw.
There’s more. The Japanese version of the game came with a map of the countryside that was left out of the U.S. release, meaning, some locations in the game were not even given names that a player could discover in the game, which in a couple of places required them to guess which location was meant by a clue.
Part of the new prologue
To the rescue of a player trying to appreciate this game now comes Bisqwit, a.k.a. Joel Yliluoma, and his Castlevania II Retranslation project. It doesn’t remove the townspeople telling incorrect things (which was intended by the developers-why should a random villager happen to know for certain anything to do with destroying Dracula?), but it does make their hints more comprehensible, remove the reliance on guidebooks and FAQs that have interfered with the efforts of many to enjoy the game, and it greatly speeds the transitions between day and night. It even offers an animated prologue (wait from the title screen) and an in-game map, based on the one in the Japanese manual, to lend context to the player’s explorations.
The map. Pretty nice!
There are plenty of other new features too, such as an end-game report that gives your win time and SRAM-based (battery-backed) save games. Some of the new features require better hardware than the original game had, which may limit what devices can run it, so Bisqwit thoughtfully provides a website that allows the player to customize the modification to their liking. Go there, choose the options you want (which includes language – if the site isn’t in English click the button to the left) then click the Download button to get a version with features set to your requirements and/or liking.
Towns get more helpful signposts!
Lots of romhacks seem superfluous relative to the original game, but Bisqwit’s translation patches substantively improve upon the original game in many ways. It really is the best way to experience Castlevania II. If you’ve played it before you should give it a try; if you haven’t, I strongly suggest playing this version, instead of having to suffering through the original’s quirks. At the very least you it’ll mean won’t end up having to resort hunting up a thirty-five-year-old FAQ before the end.
And if you like the patch, why not have a look at Bisqwit’s Youtube channel, which has a lot of interesting technical content on it, much of it unrelated to video games?
The hidden clubeooks get more useful advice, and you can even enable a hint viewer that records the books you’ve found during the game!
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
People who got the expensive Deluxe Set in the early days of the NES received two so-so games instead of Super Mario Bros, both designed around the peripherals included in the set. Their compensation for not being able to bop around the Mushroom Kingdom, and paying a premium besides, was Duck Hunt, which was okay, and Gyromite, which was absurd.
As a bonus, the title screen has been changed from “Robot Gyro” too.
Gyromite, or “Robot Gyro” according to its title screen (it didn’t get localized from Japan at all!) puts you in the shoes of Professor Hector, who has to collect all the bombs in his lab. Sadly, he’s left all these monsters wandering around. Fortunately, there are these red and blue pillars that block the monsters, but they also block Hector.
The pillars can be moved, but not directly by Hector. Instead, you use the A and B buttons on the controller. But, not the first player controller: the second player controller is used. And the player isn’t supposed to manipulate them themself. They were supposed to put the controller into a contraption involving levers, spinning weights, and the “R.O.B.,” or Robotic Operating Buddy, another peripheral included in the Deluxe Set.
The intended process was:
The player uses their own controller to give commands.
The screen flashes in response to those commands.
Photoresistors in R.O.B.’s eyes read these flashes.
Depending on the flash, R.O.B. moves opens or closes its claws, lifts them up or down, or rotates.
Through these means, the player is supposed to manipulate R.O.B. to pick up the spinning, top-like gyro weights and place it in a motorized holder, which begins rapidly spinning it.
The player sends more signals, to cause R.O.B. to transfer it, still spinning, onto a platform.
The platform serves as a lever, so the weight presses down on the platform, which causes it to press the button on Player 2’s controller.
The signals control R.O.B.’s motions, not the controller’s. They result in it lifting or lowering his claws, or opening or closing them, or rotating. What if a weight runs out of spin and falls over? Well, it’s up to the player then to manually pick the weight up and put it back into its holder, during the game, as R.O.B. has not the facility to do that itself.
Above, Youtube user zoclates demonstrates this process in an advanced level of Gyromite. Here is a direct link, it’s about six minutes long. Surely, kids who got the Deluxe Set enjoyed this far more than they would playing Super Mario Bros.
These days R.O.B. has retired to serve as one of the weirder characters in the Smash Bros. series. But there’s actually a kind of fun game there in Gyromite, beneath the involute process intended to control it. You can play it without R.O.B. at all, just by directly pressing the buttons on the second controller yourself, but this is both a bit unwieldy, and makes the game too easy.
The Gyromite No-Robot patch localizes these functions on one controller. Since the unmodified game’s timer for each level is extremely long to allow for the time it takes for R.O.B.’s mechanics to function and for the tops to spin up, it also shortens the time limit to preserve some element of challenge. It turns a game that requires expensive and rare hardware to play it as intended, or at least remapping the Player 2 controller in an emulator, and making it much more enjoyable.
Edit the Frog would like you to know that he has no relationship with that meme frog going around.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting items from the world of game modifications.
We’re starting another weekly feature on Set Side B, where we try to regularly bring you news on new romhacks and romhack-related items. Big websites sometimes seem like they try to appease publishers, whose good graces they rely upon for news and review copies, by not mentioning hacks too prominently, at least if they’re of console games. Whether this happens, or if it merely seems like it may happen, we don’t ask big publishers for review copies so we don’t have to avoid talking about them, and are free to tell you about the most interesting of these game edits that we can find.
To start us out though, something you’ll find you’ll need if you make heavy use of hacks, are good rom patchers. To shield themselves from legal liability, hack authors usually distribute their modifications through the use of patches, which are in essence lists of modifications that can be applied in an automated way to a source rom file, which you’ll have to source by some other means.
Two good such utilities are Floating IPS, which can apply IPS patches, and (the sadly departed) Near’s beat, which can apply BPS patch files. IPS is the most commonly-used utility, and functions mostly as a kind of binary diff, but it’s limited to source files of a maximum size of 16 megabytes, and doesn’t offer any error detection features, so if the file you’re patching isn’t exactly what the patch expects (which happens frequently, as bad dumps or headerless roms often turn up), not only will you end up with a corrupted file, but you won’t even have any indication something has gone wrong-in most cases, you’ll still be told the file patched successfully. BPS is a more intelligently-designed system, and has some error detection built-in.
A new utility that can be of use is “Advanced NES Rom Utility,” a program that can not only apply both IPS and BPS patches but several other types as well, and can also fix many common problems with NES dumps in particular, including fixing checksums and metadata. But patches are usually source platform agnostic, so you might get some use out of it even if NES romhacks are not interesting to you.
Live A Live is currently the toast of the Switch, with over 500,000 in sales since it was released. Not bad at all for a remake of a Super Famicom game from Square’s classic era that had never made it out of Japan until now.
AustinSV on Youtube presents a video that goes into some detail about what was changed between the versions. If you’ve played the original (I’ve played a fair bit of it through the popular fan translation from Aeon Genesis), you’ll know a few things were definitely tweaked. I remember the Prehistory, by far the funniest chapter, being rather more risque in its humor, although the fart jokes and poop flinging were left mostly intact. Some of the changes are really interesting; they translated the whole Middle Ages chapter in iambic pentameter!
The last “major” F-Zero game released was back in the Gamecube, the sterling, yet extraordinarily challenging, F-Zero GX. What tends to be less remembered was it was a dual release. At around the same time, Sega released on Nintendo’s TRIFORCE hardware an arcade version called F-Zero AX. In the US arcades were pretty moribund around that time, so it tends to be a lot less recognized on these shores. The AX machine bore a Gamecube memory card slot so that players could take their save files to the arcade unit and use their custom vehicles there, and take data from that version back home. The AX version also has tracks and vehicles not in the GX version.
What tends to be even less well known is that nearly the entire arcade version of F-Zero AX is right there on the Gamecube disk! Back in 2021, Romhacker Elfor constructed a patch for the Gamecube version that, if played in an emulator or somehow made readable by GC hardware, can boot directly into that version of the game.
There are some differences from the arcade version in this revealed version of game, many of them related to music tracks left off the disk. More recently, Anthony Ryuki made a patch to restore those tracks, and bring the Gamecube AX version even closer to the arcade experience.
Here at Set Side B our purview is “Indie, Retro, Niche,” and we consider romhacks, of the niche, to be among the the nicheist. (Nietzsche-est?) But there are lots of romhacks, with more every day, and most just aren’t that newsworthy.
The linked hack, for Data East’s Famicom McDonalds tie-in game Donald Land, is an attempt by Garrett Gilchrist and Brooklyn Williams to simulate what a Raggedy Ann game from the NES era would have been like, using graphics and characters from different iterations. Here’s a scene with The Greedy, from the feature cartoon, that once inspired many a nightmare:
Pretty cool, and rather more ambitious than your standard pedestrian graphics swap!
