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What Mapper Did Gradius II Repro Use?

Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2007 12:47 am
by Jedi QuestMaster
Sorry if this has been covered somewhere, but I can't seem to find this information anywhere. Both repro sites don't even have this reproduction available anymore (or am I just hallucinating?).

Was there ever a Gradius II repro, & if so, what mapper did it use?

Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2007 1:48 am
by Celius
You could try finding the ROM and seeing with an emulator which mapper it uses. It's just an idea...

Re: What Mapper Did Gradius II Repro Use?

Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2007 5:06 am
by tepples
Jedi QuestMaster wrote:Both repro sites don't even have this reproduction available anymore (or am I just hallucinating?).
A takedown order from Konami was likely, especially given that Konami might be preparing it for a release on Virtual Console.

Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2007 11:29 am
by bunnyboy
Gradius 2 (jp) is iNES 25, which is a VRC 4 version. With 8x 1KB chr swapping its not likely someone has put it on a USA mapper like MMC3.

As far as I know, no companies have contacted the repro makers. You would think Nintendo would to protect their IP like Zelda (Outlands) and Mario (SMB2j).

Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2007 12:06 pm
by kyuusaku
Lots of 8 x 1K mapper games swap in 4K or even 8K chunks however, so it may be possible.

Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2007 12:55 pm
by bunnyboy
After taking a very quick look at it playing, I think the 1KB swapping is happening only at banks 5 and 6 ($1400/$1800) so hacking for mmc3 looks possible. The rest is 4 or 8KB swapping. Theres 128KB chr so expanding to 256 and duplicating some banks could get around other swapping problems. I would guess the background half doesn't get swapped in sections.

Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 6:12 pm
by Jedi QuestMaster
Okay, thanks. I thought there must've been a reproduction made since I saw a custom label (was it Jeremy Red?); I can't find the site anymore.

Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 2:55 pm
by Computolio
I've never been able to find a working ROM (much less the original IPS patch) of this hack. It honestly might be an aborted project.

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 3:32 pm
by rbudrick
You could certainly get the FC board and put it in a Gyromite style adapter and put it in a NES case with a fancy label. ;)

-Rob

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 1:36 pm
by MottZilla
It'd be neat to see a MMC3 hack of it since the PowerPAK doesn't do VRC games. Is there anywhere that details any of these hacks that change what mapper games use? I know there have been other games that were hacked like that EarthWorm Jim pirate.

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 4:30 pm
by kyuusaku
My PowerPak does VRC games albeit I still had to hack them since bus-capacitance gets eaten on the PowerPak setting off copy-protection.

Re: What Mapper Did Gradius II Repro Use?

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 4:40 pm
by Necrosaro420
Jedi QuestMaster wrote:Sorry if this has been covered somewhere, but I can't seem to find this information anywhere. Both repro sites don't even have this reproduction available anymore (or am I just hallucinating?).

Was there ever a Gradius II repro, & if so, what mapper did it use?

I run GameReproductions.com .... I have never had this game for sale....I dont remember offhand, but I think it used a fami only mapper from what I remember.


And correct, Jeremy Red made a label for it.

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2008 12:29 pm
by MottZilla
kyuusaku wrote:My PowerPak does VRC games albeit I still had to hack them since bus-capacitance gets eaten on the PowerPak setting off copy-protection.
Did you make your own mapper config file or was support added recently? Last I checked there was no official support. ='(

By the way, I found a Gradius II hack that runs with MMC3. The game plays, but graphics are messed up. Pretty much all sprites are wrong, the windowing of the ship background on the title is wrong, etc. Not exactly repro worthy. ;p

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2008 1:05 pm
by Bregalad
I bet it's possible to hack it to MMC3 quite easily in fact. It shouldn't be too complicated. Maybe doubling CHR to 256 KB is needed, but there is chances that it's not.
If you want to still have it being 128/128 and use a U.S. mapper one could have it hacked to FME-7, which has supperior banking abilities than any VRC mapper I know. There isn't many FME-7 carts available however.

EDIT : I could try to do it if someone wants a MMC3 version but I'd need proper VRC4 doccumentation somewhere, and I cannot find any. It seems like Gradius 2 relies on CPU clock IRQs, which wouldn't be very easy (but still possible) to turn into MMC3 IRQs.

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2008 3:45 pm
by MottZilla
I forgot to mention, the Gradius 2 hack I found uses a Trainer so for real hardware it's probably worthless unless you put it in a save file to load with the rom on a powerpak maybe.

If you need VRC info, go here: http://nesdevwiki.org/

Getting the game to "run" is probably easy, but I'm guessing any IRQ or CHR banking will take a bit more effort. But I agree I think a MMC3 conversion is possible and I think that would be pretty sweet. Ofcourse I'd also love to see a Contra (J) conversion to MMC3, because the VRC2b version kicked the ass of the UNROM version.