880_1315739177.pngPrevious crack crashed the game when looking down, so here's the fix.
975_1309089482.pngI believe there's still some confusion(even if it's only on my part) regarding the Super Famicom Box ROM-dumps out there.
In a nutshell, I dumped a couple of ROMs, but not all of them.
ROMs inside Super Famicom Box:
351_1308511161.pngThanks to eagle-eyed Evan G of snescentral.com, I learned that I was in possession of a still undumped version of Starfox which was never used in retail cartridges, but only in a special cartridge for the Super Famicom Box hotel unit. I had hoped that Nintendo at one point fixed the issues Starfox was having with running on a Super FX in 21Mhz mode, but apparently they never did... The Super Famicom Box version still uses the same old Mario Chip Super FX in 10Mhz mode. No public release this time, as this ROM is only of archival interest, anyway.
997_1307572388.pngI'm almost too ashamed to admit it, but I've created a romhack again.
A romhack of Super Mario World, of all things.
Yes, the Super Mario World that has been hacked to death a bazillion times.
But bear with me as this at least brings a couple of new things: Gone are overworld, titlescreen and game selection.
This game dumps you right into one of three specially-crafted time-attack stages repeated in an infinite loop after selecting them via a (admittedly poor) main menu.
You don't have lives, score or coins anymore.
All that counts is the time it takes you to complete a stage and this time is displayed on-screen with single-frame precision.
This was created for a local Nintendo convention called NCON and took over 70 hours to develop in total, including working for almost 3 days straight without catching any sleep. Like ever so often, it's a pretty rough hack job under the hood.
It was really enjoyable to see people getting hooked to this, trying to beat each others record by the millisecond for hours.
I created 3 cartridges of this game and people were constantly occupying them, all the way through the night and the next day.
On a not-so-fortunate sidenote, I've decided to drop all future support of any kind for NCON and related events.
The reason being that I have not once in my life met such ungratefulness for supporting an event by one of the organizers, having been treated downright disrespectful.
All I got from him was constant bitching and whining over non-issues.
Best part about this is that I even sent him a preview version the week before, so he could have easily checked it out and made suggestions about the parts he didn't like while I was developing it.
Needless to say, he didn't even bother to try it out beforehand.
I just don't get the arrogance and stupidity of people, sometimes...
Release includes sourcecode.
253_1305939424.pngYeah, so I hacked the Sega Saturn Bios and removed regional lockout and CD authenticity checks. Obviously, that was the reason I was dying to get a Saturn a couple of days earlier. Thanks to an unnamed individual, I've got one now and promptly installed that modified Bios.
Good news first: regional lockout bypass works just fine on real hardware.
Install this Bios in your Saturn and play any authentic game in any video mode you like, no need for clunky switches or cartridges anymore.
The bad news: Although the CD authenticity checks in the Bios have been removed, CD-R copies still don't boot.
I basically have zero debugging capabilities on real hardware, so I can't really tell what the exact problem is, but credible sources suggest that the CD interface has to be unlocked by initializing with a genuine Saturn disc before being able to boot a game disc. This is rather unsatisfying, but I'm releasing this anyway, it's better than nothing.
I'll be getting a modchip for now and will have a look at this again once Dr. Decapitator has dumped the CD interface program ROM.
I could imagine that there's a debug command hidden somewhere that lets you boot CD-Rs without authenticating first. We'll see...
Also, if you plan on installing this Bios in your Saturn, keep in mind that the pinout of the original Bios maskROM is similar to the 27c800 and don't forget to byteswap the ROM before copying it to a 16bit Eprom. Btw, this hack is based on the japanese 1.01 Bios.
Guys - I totally need a Sega Saturn, and fast! This is an emergency!! A matter of life and death!!! Humanity is at stake!!!!!!11 Ok, not really, but I'm dying to get one and they're rare as fuck here - so, if you're living around Cologne, Germany and happen to have one(working or not) for sale, contact me at info@dforce3000.de and I'll pick it up immediately. Thanks!
985_1304723948.pngYet again thanks to Lord Azathoth for supplying the cartridge. This game was previously undumped, so I've included both the unaltered dump and a cracked version. Protection-wise, it's still the same stupid crap DVS has been using since Pocket Monsters.
900_1301824489.pngHere's a cracked Genesis game for a change. Thanks again to Lord Azathoth for pointing me in the right direction. Unfortunately, there seems to be some confusion regarding these copy protected pirate games on the genesis. Some newer emulators emulate these protections, but a couple of cracked ROMs already exist aswell, although it's not always obvious which versions are cracked and which aren't. Anyway, this game actually looks rather nice compared to its SNES counterparts, gone is the jerky framerate and the graphics look rather clean. Let me know if you have problems.
