Level up!
-Street Fighter EX plus Alpha HKO cracked-
I already had a look at the ROM dump of Street Fighter EX plus Alpha some years ago. This game is an HKO, an unlicensed beat 'em up based on a crappy engine using graphics ripped from a CPS 2 arcade game (My best guess would be Street Fighter Alpha 2 or 3). However, upon seeing that it used the same protection as Tekken 2 (which I had to obtain a cartridge of to be able to crack it), I gave up early. Thanks to Lord Azathoth, my interest in cracking this game was renewed and as it turns out, it was comparably easy to crack because the programmers were rather sloppy implementing the copy protection. In fact, they were so sloppy that they forgot to take out a debug protection override in one place, saving me some trouble. ;)
BS Excitebike
I've recently witnessed people talking about getting the Excitebike games released for the Super Famicom/SNES modem-addon Satellaview to run on SNES flashcarts such as the Powerpak.
These were Soundlink games, meaning that they were meant to be played live (hence the clock on the upper left) between 19:00 and 20:00 o'clock with music being streamed from the satellite uplink.
What I did as early as 2006 was patching one of the Satellaview Excitebike ROMs so that it behaves like a normal SNES game (and thus runs fine on the Powerpak) and making all the forced wait screens skippable by pressing start.
The game consists of qualifying sections (also skippable), followed by races against opponents, a bonus jump contest and finally the total results.
Have fun!
Ultra16 firmware V1.4 update
-please download again-
Sad but true, there were some issues with the latest Ultra16 firmware upgrade posted on december 24th. Affected cartridges were Super Gameboy V1.0, Star Ocean. Also fixed an issue with skin switching, improved handling of invalid cartridge headers and corrected a typo for good measure. Please download and run firmware V1.4 again, everybody. Sorry for the inconvenience caused!
Super Gameboy notes released
While developing the latest Ultra16 firmware, I also partly reverse-engineered the Super Gameboy. In order to not let the acquired information go to waste, I've hastily assembled a little document with everything noteworthy I came across.
Ultra16 firmware V1.4 is out!
-just in time for christmas, too-
This release adds more elaborate support for the Super GameBoy. I was almost successful in repressing the memory of a long-standing problem with one single GameBoy game: Space Invaders(E), but finally decided I had to do something about it. See, this one GameBoy game contains a complete Super Nintendo game that's only playable with the Super Gameboy. This SNES-game has a region protection built in, even though GameBoy games are region-free by default. The problem here is that the game is uploaded to the SNES at runtime, which means that I can't detect it during the Ultra16 boot sequence. After spending some time reverse-engineering the SGB, I was able to pull information from the inserted GameBoy cart and detect this game as a special case. What's really nice is that the cartridge info menu has been updated aswell and now lists title, hardware and GameBoy color/Super GameBoy features for GameBoy games! As always, use a flashcart/copier to run this upgrade on your Ultra16. For those of you that don't own such a device, I will be sending out upgrade cartridges. Have fun and merry christmas!
SNES retro flash software
-mirrored cause mash-mods.com is down-
Mash-mods.com, manufacturer of the retro flash SNES flashcart, seems to be down at the moment. I don't know if the site will come back up in the future, but I thought it might be a good idea to post the software and USB driver here, as I haven't found it mirrored anywhere else on the net. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.
SNES demo now available at github
-I might regret doing this-
I'm not really getting anywhere without proper art direction with this demo for the time being. As I said, I might regret making sourcecode of a work-in-progress project available to the public, but something useful might come out of it, eventually. We'll see... Please let me know if you find this useful!