Would it be possible to hack Contra japaneese (Gryzor) to use a MMC3 mapper instead of VRC4 and to be programmed on a TLROM card ?
Is there any accurate VRC4 doccuments ?
1. The Japanese release of Contra IS NOT GRYZOR - it is 魂斗羅, read as コントラ == KONTORA == Contra. Anyone who tells you that the Japanese version is named "Gryzor" is an idiot and/or a liar. (for the record, Cowering falls into the first category)
2. The Japanese version of Contra uses all eight 1KB CHR ROM banks to their fullest extent, so adapting it to MMC3 (which only has four 1KB banks and two 2KB banks) would require significant additional modifications.
What about RAMBO-1 or MMC5 or FME-7? Would it be straightforward to hack VRC4 games to run on those?
Quietust wrote:
1. The Japanese release of Contra IS NOT GRYZOR - it is 魂斗羅, read as コントラ == KONTORA == Contra. Anyone who tells you that the Japanese version is named "Gryzor" is an idiot and/or a liar. (for the record, Cowering falls into the first category)
Thanks for correcting/clarifyng. Gryzor is the name of the unoficial engish translation from the japaneese one, right ? I also seen that Gryzor was the name of the arcade counterpart of Contra. So I think they renamed it for that reason ? At least the responsable to name roms under goodnes standards did wrong here.
Scince the game looks to have a bunch of empty /repeating space in CHR block, I'll take a look about this possibility a bit more, even if some character dupling will be needed, thanks for figuring that out.
The mapper most defintely has undoccumented IRQs setup trough $6000.
Could they be converted to MMC3 IRQs ?
Oh, yeah, the game is VRC2, not VRC4.
However, the game uses lower pattern table for sprites, so the MMC3's IRQ won't work until both pattern tables are swapped. Because the game uses 8x16 sprites, that implies changing their tile numbers.... adittionally I think that it would be possible to split sprite banks in 2kb banks instead of 1kb, but I'm not sure.... I'm pretty much discouraged, now.
Bregalad wrote:
The mapper most defintely has undoccumented IRQs setup trough $6000.
Could they be converted to MMC3 IRQs ?
Oh, yeah, the game is VRC2, not VRC4.
Er, what are you talking about? 魂斗羅 does not use any IRQs at all, and it certainly doesn't have anything at $6000 - last I checked, my VRC2 mapper code did not emulate IRQs, yet the game runs just fine.
If you'd like I can send you a hacked (with "trainer") copy of the game. Probably wouldn't be much use as it requires 32K of CHR RAM to swap patterns in and out of, also it must turn off/on the screen to update the CHR RAM outside Vblank which creates distracting white flashes.
At least the game has some crazy writes and reads to $6000, and that register isn't doccumented.
This may let the game totally unaffected, who knows ?
I don't mean to state the obvious... but couldn't it be RAM? =P
I just tried Contra J after taking out RAM there and it never got to the title screen.
I'm sure it's not, because ONLY $6000 is acceded, and by the way, only the bit 0 of that register. There seems to be a little routine writing something to this register, then read it several times and do something with it between screens.
I now have a MMC3 rom, I hacked both PRG, and CHR/mirroring banking code, but only the PRG one seems to work fine, and the game has corrupted graphics.
I succeded, but now I'm unable to make the rom copatible with a PAL NES, after beating a stage where you got detailed portrait of the heroes, the games uses strange sprite zero hits and it don't work on PAL. Buh, I'm tried of this.
It's now 100% complete and usable for anyone who wants !!
http://jonathan.microclub.ch/contra
But unfortunatly, I couldn't test it on the real hardware yet because my EPROM programmer isn't getting working for a random reason.
It would've been nice if the game hadn't been erroneously renamed to "Gryzor" in the process...
That's fault of translators, not mine.
Actually, Gryzor is the name of the european arcade version, if I get things correctly.
I'm interested but the URL is timing out.
Timing out ??!? What are you talking about ?
Bregalad wrote:
That's fault of translators, not mine.
Or is it?
Hmm, I wonder how much work it would be to change the palette on the rest of the letters... ( Patch author complains that nobody came forward to produce a better title, and that the one person who did stopped contacting him at some point and suggested that he was probably going to give up on the project anyway. I <3 the scene. )
Huh ? From wich ROM did you shot this.
Contra Japanese, with MadHatter's contraj.ips applied. I assume you used his patch, how many others are there?
Oh, and I stab in Cowering's general direction for Gryzor naming in the database, and in the resulting pack of files that I have.
Quietust wrote:
1. The Japanese release of Contra IS NOT GRYZOR - it is 魂斗羅, read as コントラ == KONTORA == Contra.
What's next?
塊魂斗羅, read as "Clump soul volume net" == "Clump Contra"?
Bregalad wrote:
Timing out ??!? What are you talking about ?
Code:
C:\>ping jonathan.microclub.ch
Pinging www.scdi.org [66.92.187.206] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
That's what I mean, I also tried a proxy without results.
What I meant to say was, the pack includes both contraj.ips, which translates it that way, and then there's gryzor.ips, which has the other names and such, and the animated title.
I'll try this patch stuff later, if you guys absolutly want the original "Contra" name.
And, if you don't have a fair conexion, I can do nothing for you :
Code:
Envoi d'une requête 'ping' sur www.scdi.org [66.92.187.206] avec 32 octets de données :
Réponse de 66.92.187.206ÿ: octets=32 temps=382 ms TTL=56
Réponse de 66.92.187.206ÿ: octets=32 temps=204 ms TTL=56
Réponse de 66.92.187.206ÿ: octets=32 temps=202 ms TTL=56
Réponse de 66.92.187.206ÿ: octets=32 temps=206 ms TTL=56
Bregalad, wonderful work on the conversion. I played it completely through with FCE Ultra and had no problems.
Bregalad wrote:
And, if you don't have a fair conexion, I can do nothing for you :
http://www.yousendit.com/ and clones perhaps?
Great Hierophant wrote:
Bregalad, wonderful work on the conversion. I played it completely through with FCE Ultra and had no problems.
Yes, great work. It's working nice here too. That is, after I insert a temporary hack to ignore writes to 0xa001 (or mirrors), since the game writes 0 to it, which disables WRAM, which crashes the game. Howcome this works on a real MMC3 ?
I just checked in my emulator (including disabling the WRAM write routine completely) and it works fine. It is writing 0 to $A001 as you say. Kode54 found that Bregalad had silently updated the data files on his site; perhaps you have the old versions? Here are the checksums on the ROM I constructed from them (and unlike GoodNES, this includes the header!):
73d819d0490b9a35dbfe764c71d6d3ea
d0e831474aeeed9a55edb01512cf4cb780ee7ffa ?SHA1
e45075f7 ?CRC-32
I used these bytes for the iNES header:
4E 45 53 1A 08 10 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Uh, yes, I had the old versions indeed. It's working ok now.
I just "forgot" to change the last of those $6000 reads/writes to nops. Actually, I replaced the first time by a code disabling MMC3's IRQs and disabling SRAM. Afterwards, I forgot to check other ones. Emulators emulate the thing with SRAM, and that will luckily let the strange $6000 read/writes work fine, but if the first version would run on a card without SRAM, the game will probably crash. The second version is okay. I tested it on hardware, the PRG is working fine but... the screen is messed up. I probably did wrong with CHR /CE rewiring, so the chip interferes with name table reading.... I'm not sure, trough. The sprites are partially good, and partially messed up.
I have to make better description about rewiring on my site, because when I wrote it I hadn't do it yet.
My problem was that I forgot to cut pin 22 of CHR from GND, and it was still be tied to GND... so I got my output always enable. That's horrible, because I had the choise of desoldering ALL 32 pins without damage the chips, disolver all my wires, cut the track, and resolder everything, but I eventually bent up the pin to solver the wire direcly to it. I had trouble to be able to close the cart with the bent pin, and the pin is pretty much damaged, but I had no choise.
However, graphics are still messed up. I think A10 or A11 is tied to GND, because it's just an adressing problem now. I don't have any idea why, because both pins aren't getting altered by the rewiring at all. I hate soldering and dissoldering.
Now, the thing is confirmed to work 100% fine on real hardware !! Ha-yaaa !
And
my page have more precision on rewiring for beginers.
I just cut track to pin 23 instead of 22 and that was why I was getting so much problems before.
I am afraid that unfortunately is a problem in multiplayer mode, game hangs after the completion of energy zone (after introducing the animation). Tested on real hardware (Famicom and NES)
hi there, does anyone have a copy of the patch because i can't access the download page.
thanks in advance
I uploaded both the patches I have here:
[removed]
Unfortunately, the MMC3 conversion was made against the version of the translation that used that silly Gryzor title instead of Contra. This prompted me to add VRC2 support to QuickNES.
kode54, could you please remove this link ?
This guy is likelygoing to sell bootleged carts based on my hack, which of course I don't want him to.
That being said, this hack was a stupidity I did back in 2005, long before the PowerPak was released. It has absolutely no value other than for bootlegs.
Today anyone can play the original Gryzor/Contra or whathever hacked/translation of it on their PowerPak.
Bregalad wrote:
This guy is likelygoing to sell bootleged carts based on my hack
Well, let him. Someone said that there's a bug, so eventually his customers are going to notice and start complaining about it, and hopefully learn the downside of buying such products.
i don't know why you are saying i'm trying to build bootlegs to sell them
i never wanted to do something like this and i don't understand why you claim i would do something like this
i like contra have played through it a hundred times and then i found this version with some neat video sequences in it and wanted to play this version on real hardware.
just some stupid celler kids who do such things and think i could harm their business
Well, I didn't think of that. Removed, but he probably already got it.
Quote:
i like contra have played through it a hundred times and then i found this version with some neat video sequences in it and wanted to play this version on real hardware
Sure this is possible using a
PowerPak from RetroZone. (which didn't exist back when I made the patch).
Bregalad wrote:
Emulators emulate the thing with SRAM, and that will luckily let the strange $6000 read/writes work fine, but if the first version would run on a card without SRAM, the game will probably crash.
Epilogue: They tracked that down. See
topic 8274,
topic 8569, and
the wiki. It looks like a half-done interface for a Microwire EEPROM chip.