I knew eventually hacks would appear for this! Seems about 75% complete!

I'd say about 30-35% completed. There's no real enemies in most levels, ASM needs work, graphics, level design, etc. Great start, but not 75%.

30-35% is better than 0%.  And he's made great progress, so I really see this finally getting done.

I'm interested to know why MM3 was picked for the game and not a later title like MM6. I'd think a later release NES game would leave a little more room to work in trying to copycat the effect of the downloadable nes wannabe that is MM9. It looks like a nice start but who knows where it'll go since the guy quit on it once already.

The biggest issue with MM9 would have to deal with certain liberties the designers took.  For example, you can't actually download stuff from the internet to the NES, maybe it could just be a literal store.  Some graphics might flicker a lot due to how large they are and how many there are/how they are placed.  Colors might not be accurate fade out transitions are too smooth (which honestly looks ugly compared to the standard NES transitions), and so on.  It's more about some minor details that happen to be in large quantities that gives it a problem to be a 1:1 port.  At best, I'd say that MM9 could be 95% accurate if it were to be ported.

So far, the hacker would rather use a standard mapper instead of an MMC5, so some background graphics would have to be cut.  So this cuts our percentile down a bit, but hopefully he also releases some notes for future programmers to hack the rest back in.

From Reply #17

"Out of popular demand, I decided I will continue to work on this project to the full extent of my capabilities."

There's actually two guys working on it now. Hopefully they can finish.

This will get done eventually. I'm sure of it.

Yep looks like it's going to get done.

It's a glorified hack that tries to recreate the Mega Man 9 game itself, but it's definitely closest you're gonna get for an actual MM9 NES experience.

I saw reply #17 but I have seen so many failed projects with emulators in the 90s and 00s to game hacks I take the wait and see if it releases approach.

The conversion will likely not be entirely accurate as MM9 uses more than 256 tiles for background graphics in certain stages. It's doable by upping it to MMC5, but he stated he doesn't want to go that route.

Yeah I'm not a techie at all when it comes to NES games but I still find how hackers get around problems interesting.

Like I said earlier it'll still be closest thing to an "port" for the NES that can be done without completely rewriting the code from the ground up.

Was there a reason he gave? Or is it just that much more difficult to implement with MMC5?  

I don't know much about MMC5, but would a conversion from his mapper to MMC5 be difficult for anyone trying to do a 100% port down the line?

MMC5 allows for a larger color palette and more colors, 4x the color/detail allowed in the same pixel space of older mappers and it has a 8mbit memory footprint too. I imagine using it would allow it to be a lot more closer, but outright accurate that's not for me to guess as I'm not a programmer.

The most likely explanation is that they are a rom hacker so it is massively easier to cope with the mapper that matches the game you are hacking than attempting to change the mapper...

MMC5 to my knowledge doesn't increase color count. Among other things, it can lower the background palette assignment from 16x16 space to a single 8x8 tile. It can also load up 16,000 BG tiles at once, as opposed to 256. His reasoning was that he "would rather work with the 256 block limit, increasing the amount would be a pain to add and at the end would consume way too much space in the ROM". Basically, it can be assumed that MMC5 would be alien territory.

Any updates on this? I really would like to see MM9 and 10 on the nes.

That MM 7 & 8 look fucking awesome.

Yeah. Me too.