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Game Hack War in the Gulf mapper hack project preview

Jun 21, 2015 at 6:06:31 PM
Lincoln (138)
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(Frank W. Doom) < Bowser >
Posts: 5980 - Joined: 12/19/2008
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War in the Gulf was sold in Brazil, parts of Europe and famicom territories from what I understand, but not in the USA. The original carts use a pirate original mapper chip with no common donor. Earlier this year I learned how to do mapper hacks and this is one of my first projects. As far as I can tell it's finished. I cheated my way through a full run on a powerpak and everything seemed correct. The game is frickin hard though, so doing an unassited playthough is a challenge. 

I plan on doing a limited sale in a couple months then releasing a patch later. 

 
 

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ebay auctionsrunning FS thread famiROM thread for .nes info and splitting / rom hacks link/discussion


Edited: 06/27/2015 at 01:40 PM by NintendoAge Moderator

Jun 21, 2015 at 6:09:03 PM
JaxsBox (102)
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(( NFR )) < Bowser >
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In on one!

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Jun 21, 2015 at 11:25:53 PM
goldendark007 (76)
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(Grodacious ) < Meka Chicken >
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Are you planning to release the mapper hack? Also, is mapper hacking difficult? I see so many popping up now I am curious if it is simple enough that someone like I could learn?

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Originally posted by: Guntz

I must say though, it's almost movie-like that a repro collector gives his green horns a try at soldering a repro cartridge.
http://teamchris.org
 

Jun 21, 2015 at 11:48:32 PM
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MrWunderful (289)
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(Corey ) < Wiz's Mom >
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Ill be in on that too for sure

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Jun 22, 2015 at 12:45:14 AM
Lincoln (138)
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(Frank W. Doom) < Bowser >
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Originally posted by: goldendark007

Are you planning to release the mapper hack? Also, is mapper hacking difficult? I see so many popping up now I am curious if it is simple enough that someone like I could learn?


yeah, after I do a small run for sale. I want to use retroscribe's new shells which I think he said will be a few months out yet.

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ebay auctionsrunning FS thread famiROM thread for .nes info and splitting / rom hacks link/discussion

Jun 22, 2015 at 7:55:09 AM
hybrid (45)
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(jeff .) < Lolo Lord >
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Nice what codes you use?
Didn't I pay to get this dumped

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Jun 22, 2015 at 12:15:30 PM
Lincoln (138)
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(Frank W. Doom) < Bowser >
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Originally posted by: hybrid

Nice what codes you use?
Didn't I pay to get this dumped

I wrote new bankswitching routines, code to load that into memory, and swapped out all the old bankswitching calls.
I don't know the source, I just pulled it out of the goodnes set.

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ebay auctionsrunning FS thread famiROM thread for .nes info and splitting / rom hacks link/discussion

Jun 23, 2015 at 8:19:00 PM
Guntz (115)
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< Master Higgins >
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Why MMC6? Or is it actually an MMC3 game and you only had a StarTropics cart for testing?

Jun 24, 2015 at 2:54:20 PM
Lincoln (138)
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(Frank W. Doom) < Bowser >
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Originally posted by: Guntz

Why MMC6? Or is it actually an MMC3 game and you only had a StarTropics cart for testing?


The mmc6 is interesting to me with the ram built into the mapper chip. mmc3 and mmc6 are very similar but there are incompatibilities in the registers. I used this project as a test to see if there was enough common ground to get the same rom to run on either board.

I found 512 bytes of ram space that can be enabled on both boards with a single register command, and that's enough to hold the new bankswitching routines, so it did work out for this case. I have this running on my socketed mmc3 cart for a while, so I knew that was fine. I had this loose mmc6 board from somewhere so it served as my proof of concept. 

I think you could probably make use of the other common 512 bytes by writing to that area twice, setting the register appropriately for each board once. I didn't need it for this project so I didn't go down that route.

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ebay auctionsrunning FS thread famiROM thread for .nes info and splitting / rom hacks link/discussion