[Fcoughlin]

Hi all,

So I decided today to work on a rom hack for Zelda Ii on NES, in which the dungeons are all placed in a row and only bosses are available (allowing you to just fight the bosses/decide on your experience). I had good success on emulator (FCEUX).

However, a few friends loaded their copies onto emulator, and the graphics in levels 4/5/7 were messed up notably as seen in this playthrough:  https://youtu.be/xcis0bmVZyo. Specifically, 4's background was very off, Gooma clearly had the wrong Sprite set loaded, as did most stuff in the Great Palace. Of course, it's annoying because I loaded it on my emulator, and it still works ok.

So my question: has anyone encountered this before (ideally with this game), and if so, do you have any suggestions on how to fix? I am half wondering if there is some uninitialized memory stuff going on, and hitting a pointer that in FCEUX works ok, but fails in the powerpak.

It could also (in the case of level 4) have to do with the fact that I tried to move it to West Hyrule (instead of Maze Island). Again, it was conveniently working on my emulator so who knows?

Either way, I figured I'd ask, hoping someone has seen something similar before. Thanks in advance for any help you may have!

[Sliver X]

I would highly recommend testing your hack under puNES as it's probably the most accurate NES emulator at this point in time.

If the problem doesn't exist there: Doesn't the PowerPak do software emulation of MMCs? The problem might lie there. Hopefully they would periodically update that if flashing the firmware in the unit is possible?

[SunGodPortal]

I have a Powerpak and have played Zelda II about 3/4 of the way through. I never had these problems so I doubt it's a mapper emulation issue (unless the user in question is using outdated versions of the mapper files, which CAN be updated as they are stored on the CF card).

If you've got problems on real hardware that aren't seen on an emulator I'd bet that it's due to many emulators being more tolerant of errors, whereas real hardware is just like "DOES NOT COMPUTE".

Did you send your friends the ROM or patches? Could be a patching issue as well.