miscellaNEouS files

[lancuster]

I wonder if there is a MMC3 mapper haсk of the game San Guo Zhi 4 - Chi Bi Feng Yun?

[NewRisingSun]

No, and creating one would be difficult, as the game uses 8x16 sprites, which make the MMC3's scanline counter act near-inscrutably: "When using 8x16 sprites, PPU A12 must be explicitly tracked. The exact time and number of times the counter is clocked will depend on the specific set of sprites present on every scanline. Specific combinations of sprites could cause the counter to decrement up to four times, or the IRQ to be delayed or early by some multiple of 8 pixels."

[lancuster]

No, and creating one would be difficult, as the game uses 8x16 sprites, which make the MMC3's scanline counter act near-inscrutably: "When using 8x16 sprites, PPU A12 must be explicitly tracked. The exact time and number of times the counter is clocked will depend on the specific set of sprites present on every scanline. Specific combinations of sprites could cause the counter to decrement up to four times, or the IRQ to be delayed or early by some multiple of 8 pixels."

But after all, some of the Cony Soft games were successfully hacked to MMC3, so it's still possible.
Here's what I learned about the late ports from Cony Soft/Future Media:
"In Crayon Shin-Chan, MMC3 is possible due to the use of CHR banks in PPU $000-7FF and $800-FFF as whole, and in CPU $C000-DFFF banks with garbage and the code is similar at the beginning, so you can only transfer data and change the code. In San Guo Zhi 4 - Chi Bi Feng Yun, at the beginning of the game, CHR banks are also whole, but there are several banks in the CPU $C000-DFFF and they are more complicated, so it's more difficult."

[NewRisingSun]

I don't know that these games were "hacked"; I think Cony at some point recompiled the games themselves one they obtained access to an MMC3 clone that was more affordable than their own custom mapper.

In any case, VRC4 may be an easier target for hacking than MMC3.

[forgotusername]

A crappy little plug & play known as "Croaky Karaoke" was just added to MAME. In concept, the game is nothing more than a karaoke video played with some song covers played in that distinct "DDR Famiclone" style. Amusingly, four of the songs were licensed from Sony Music, leading to the console having a licensed NES cover of "Take On Me", of all things.

There's no microphone input or anything on this console, but the menu inexplicably uses a proprietary control setup; so I can't actually navigate the song selection screen in any emulator. As such, I attempted to extract the songs into individual ROMs; to my surprise, this worked perfectly for 13 out of 14 songs (the one exception being "Sing"). Each file has three songs built-in, running dominant as one of them (similar to the educational computer ROMs); however, zeroing out one or two sections of code will run the other song + video. The only caveat with the working files is that they do not emulate the sampled "clapping" sound effect, I am unsure if that's an emulation issue or an extraction issue. Download attached below.

[forgotusername]

Does anyone know if there's ever been a conversion of Armadillo/Mario IV to standard mapper 4 (or if one would even be feasible)? AFAIK all dumped multicarts containing the game use weird registers to "mimic" mapper 118 behavior, but aren't outright mapper 4 conversions.

[NewRisingSun]

There is none, and I doubt one can be made without rewriting major parts of the game. One-screen mirroring is such a different way of programming a scrolling routine that the original publisher would rather use different hardware (TLSROM rather than TLROM) instead of just adapting the game for more common hardware.

[lancuster]

This archive contains the original (unmodified) ROM image of the game Fighting Road and an abandoned half-ported to MMC3 mapper (fixed only PRG registers).