What Mapper Did Gradius II Repro Use?
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1. NO BLATANT PIRACY. This includes reproducing homebrew less than 10 years old, with the exception of free software.
2. No advertising your reproductions, with the exception of free software.
3. Be nice. See RFC 1855 if you aren't sure what this means.
- Jedi QuestMaster
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What Mapper Did Gradius II Repro Use?
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?
Was there ever a Gradius II repro, & if so, what mapper did it use?
Re: What Mapper Did Gradius II Repro Use?
A takedown order from Konami was likely, especially given that Konami might be preparing it for a release on Virtual Console.Jedi QuestMaster wrote:Both repro sites don't even have this reproduction available anymore (or am I just hallucinating?).
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.
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Re: What Mapper Did Gradius II Repro Use?
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.
Did you make your own mapper config file or was support added recently? Last I checked there was no official support. ='(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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.