[RHDNBot]

Update By: Pennywise

After various trials and tribulations, the very first Knight Gundam game makes it way into English thanks to the efforts of aishsha and Pennywise.

The project was originally started by KingMike years back and was taken over by aishsha who did the lions share of hacking and translating the game and as usual Pennywise came along and polished everything up to what you see now. Special thanks to TheMajinZenki who reviewed all the names in the game and then some.

A special note about the translation. It is currently only playable in FCEUX and possibly a few others due to a ROM expansion that exceeds the mapper's limit. If you'd like to see other emulators support the translation, send the devs a message asking for them to support the translation.

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link

[aqualung]

Thanks a lot for this new release! I've played it a little in Nestopia 1.36(*) and it has worked fine so far (it has a few slowdowns here and there when navigating by some menu options (specially when closing them again), but I think it's because the game's made this way).

The gameplay is unforgiving, I'm at level 10 and from time to time some enemies from early in the game still kill some of my characters with a single blow. It's one of these old grindy games, hehehe. But I'm liking it so far, it's very Dragon Quest in every sense and it has a lot of (retro)charm.

(*) how strange, I tested the game again with a more recent version of Nestopia (1.40) and I only get a black screen (the original game boots up without any problem, though).

[mikeprado30]

Thanks a huge lot for this undertaking!  Hope to play it as soon as possible

[Sanedan56]

Thank you. I have been waiting a long time for this.

[OMorty]

Congrats on the release! I'm happy to have contributed.

[Lord Igniz]

I'd like to request the devs please make this playable on actual hardware- I don't play on emulators so would appreciate support on an Everdrive, thanks.

[Pennywise]

I'd like to request the devs please make this playable on actual hardware- I don't play on emulators so would appreciate support on an Everdrive, thanks.

That's impossible because the mapper isn't supported by flashcarts. It's because it uses what is known as EEPROM.

[Griever_GF]

The more turn-based JRPGs are translated, the better!

Чем больше пошаговых JRPG переведено, тем лучше!

[stahl]

Wonder if this will work on the NES Classic.

[Ice Man]

Doubt it. No emulator supports oversized mapper 159 yet (except 1-2 maybe).

Real hardware might work with a few tweaks but I'm not sure if the LZ93D50 has PRG A18 control, otherwise one would have to add it with custom logic.

[KingMike]

Congratulations on the release!

Going by the title screenshot, does that mean at least FCEUX has since added support for EEPROM saves? It didn't last I played the game, years ago.

[Pennywise]

Well, I never noticed any problems with saves as I pretty much tested loading from saves and everything worked no problem. So I'm assuming support was added years back.

Anyhow, the patch has been updated for a minor technical fix.

Someone mentioned that I should consider porting the game to use the MMC5 mapper, but I don't know just how feasible that is and nor am I interested in spending the time trying to make it happen. That would be the only way to truly play the game on hardware because flashcarts do not support the mapper because of the EEPROM or perhaps someone can modify the original cart to expand the PRG-ROM as well and make the translation work.

[torha]

https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Bandai_FCG_board
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/INES_Mapper_159
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/INES_Mapper_016

Is serial EEPROM for save data? Then a mapper with battery-backed WRAM and similar banking could be used as replacement?


MMC5
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/INES_Mapper_005

[Special]

Somethings borked with the latest 1.01 patch, either you goofed with the patch, or you are using something that is not the no-intro dumps, because those CRC's don't match on the RHDN project page.

No-Intro:
SD Gundam Gaiden - Knight Gundam Monogatari (Japan).nes  -  A6D80B60
SD Gundam Gaiden - Knight Gundam Monogatari (Japan) (Rev 1).nes  -  B6CAFB31

RHDN project page:
File CRC32: 5D210DB6

[Pennywise]

It was brought to my attention that the header for the base ROM incorrectly set the mapper to 16 when it should've been 159. That's why the CRC is different.

[Special]

Well now Beat gives an error.

[Pennywise]

I've corrected the patch. You will need to make sure you have the latest no-intro ROM that lists the mapper as 159 instead of 16.

[Special]

v1.01a

[Pennywise]

With FLIPS and a ROM from the latest no-intro set, everything patches fine.

I also tested the patch with RHDN's very own online patcher and it worked without a hitch. First time I've used it in fact. I should probably start including that in the readme for folks going forward. Nifty tool.

The header for folks who don't have the ROM with the correct header.

4E 45 53 1A 10 10 F0 98 00 00 0A 09 00 00 00 00

[Retroplay]

Revised patch wont apply here either.

I added mapper 159 to header, but I end up with a different crc required by the patch.


This is crc of the rom after I changed to mapper 159.

Code: [Select]

Name: SD Gundam Gaiden - Knight Gundam Monogatari (Japan).nes
Size: 393232
CRC32: 70d07c5f
MD5: 39cf042339f48bb24552aa1ac6e87f59
SHA1: f05f2d80cb8688822e8a28412f6506f70d1c13b3
Would it be possible to add mapper hex info to readme file ?
It would make it a whole lot easier, especially when dealing with bps patches and NES.

[edit]
Xdelta patch works, with checksum validation enabled.