Megaman 1 and 2 for PC-Engine upgrade/hack

[tomaitheous]

So I was able to simulate the hack with mednafen and medgui. Some comments so far :
1) The music doesn't stop when it's supposed to when you die

For that short period, for the megaman dieing sound? I didn't bother muting the CD track, 'cause I didn't think it was such a big deal. But I'll put that on the list. That, and all system bios calls (for handling CD audio) pause the emulation. That would be very annoying. I'll have to see how I can replicate that specific bios function, inside the game code.

2) Similarly, the music doesn't stop when it's supposed to when a boss dies

Same as above. I'll put it on the list of things to do.

3) This is purely a matter of opinion, but I think it'd be nice if some of the short songs, such as "boss selected", "game over" and "victory" were still chiptune.

I can add that function to the options menu; pick which is played for song # - cdda or psg. Though one could just easily make PSG tracks for that in wave format.

4) Is this based on the PAL version ? There is a low pitched noise after the shooting sound effect.

No. It's NTSC. Sweep emulation isn't.. emulated yet. From what I've read, even though MM doesn't setup those regs, it doesn't initialize them either. I suspect it's from that, because from everything else I've checked - all period values fall exactly inline with what they're supposed to be.

I'll be converting the sound FX into a VGM style format (time based period/reg updates) pretty soon, and get rid of ~all~ APU emulation (replaced with custom PCE sound driver). That'll be the first thing I'll clip (that trailing sound from the weapon fire). 

5) The "stage select" music was SOOOO much better in the old version. Why change it ? This one is VERY lame, and is wrong
6) Even though the Wily stage music got replaced, Wily stage 2 music is wrong (it's from Mega Man 3), and anyways both sounds way too much heavy metal to me. So my comments about Teck's versions still apply.

I personally think MM music as rock/metal sounds good to me. It fits for me, but there aren't enough cover tracks to fit. The game is distributed into two separate parts; CUE/ISO and Music pack. I was never happy with all the tracks, rock/metal or not, so it's up to the individual to replace the tracks with whatever they want. They're wave files; easy enough to do.

7) Is there a way to make the music loop more elegantly than fading out, stop, and fade in again ?

Edit the wave files. All the fading and space between looping is in the wave file itself. If you use absolute start/end of the wave file, you'll get tight looping.

8 ) I really hate hate Ice man's stage. Oops this is not related to this hack, sorry ^^ This'd be the easiest game of the series if this weren't for Ice Man's stage.

The flying platform part? Just get the beam/platform item from Elecman's stage; it makes Iceman's stage a breeze. The only hard parts in the game, IMO, are the Blob boss and the MM clone boss (relative to the rest of the game).



MM update: Cutman's enemy sprites are now all converted over - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i48xMQX7NI
Still tweaking the MM animation (running frames need more tweaking).

[Bregalad]

The only hard parts in the game, IMO, are the Blob boss and the MM clone boss (relative to the rest of the game).

I haven't fought him for a long while but as far as I can remember, you could kill the doppel ganger just by staying still (no jumping) and spamming the B button. Of course if you didn't try this trick he was hard.

And the "blob" boss (I used to call him mud man) is definitely incredibly hard without the select button trick. I'd definitely need single frame advance to dodge his attack.

[Thanatos-Zero]

Tomaitheous, I recommend you to contact Jimmy52905. He is widely known for his composing skills and his SMW hacks, but he also has decent programming skills. You both together would certainly able to create something truly outstanding, if you were to join forces.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Jimmy52905/videos

This video here shows what he can do with Megaman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShExbxCkVo4

I wish you good luck for your future endeavours.

[tomaitheous]

Thanatos-Zero: Thanks for the info. I'll try to get in contact with him.


Update:


Did a new power meter system. Gone is the old two columns of sprites, replaced with a single 16pixel wide column. For regular weapon, the bar represent all health, but when any other weapon selected - then the bar is split (the transparency mesh, behind the bar, helps you see it better). It's all direct pixel work, with some acceleration (tables). It takes one full scanline to draw it and transfer it to vram (455 cpu cycles), so fairly lite on the cpu. Cuts down on the number of sprites in the table, as well as the horizontal sprite bandwidth. There's going to be an icon at the bottom of the bar, to show which weapon is selected. The colors and graphics for the bar aren't final; that's just a WIP place holder.

I'm working on upgrading the tilemap routine as well. Originally, I was going to do straight 8x8 pixel maps for the rooms with no 32x32 metablocks, but that bumps up the space from 64bytes to 2048bytes per room/segment. Not a big deal for cart (hucard version), but space can get pretty limited for 256k of the CDROM (I'll probably end up doing level loading anyway).

I'm thinking I might just extend the 32x32 meta tile map format to 16bit entries. I figured, I can do a 16k decode table that will give me sixteen 8x8 tiles ~all~ with unique subpalette tags. That's enough for about ~630 32x32 decode blocks. Each 8x8 tile in the decode block would be 9bit (512 tiles to access) and subpalette will be 4bit (16 subpalettes to access) - all bitpacked to cram it into the 16k block. Each level will have its own 16k decode table. And the room map will only increase in size from 64bytes to 128byts. The downside, is creating a converter app for this :/

[Drakon]

This is truly epic.  I'd much prefer the focus going into megaman 2 as that's my personal favourite megaman game.  Of course it's your work so you decide.

[pemdawg]

Every time I look, this gets cooler. Its impressive to see how far this project has come, and it will be very exciting to see what you come up with after MM is complete.

Sadly, my Duo has decided to stop working, and now must go in for another round of surgery Rest assured, when it comes back, Megaman Deluxe will be high on the list of games to play!

[tomaitheous]

Right now, we are a team of 2 people working on this. A bit more stuff needs to be finished on the ASM side (it's getting close though), and once that's done - we'll be entering into phase 2.

The second part will be to actually remake/re-imagine the game. Not just a re-skinned game, but a new version of MM1. When I get to this point, I'm probably gonna need to bring some more people in, on the team. I have a pretty good vision of the direction that I want this game to go, but the devil is always in the details - and so I'll need help tweaking the design and balancing the gameplay, etc.

[burn_654]

Tomaitheous I am always in awe of your work. This is really frickin' cool, I can't wait to play with your updates! As if porting all of these nes games wasn't enough!

I always thought the turbo should've had a 16 bit megaman...and waddya know, it's happening! 

[Drakon]

I think the best romhacks are ones that the author keeps taking it further and further.

[NES Boy]

The second part will be to actually remake/re-imagine the game. Not just a re-skinned game, but a new version of MM1.

Interesting! Will there be influences from Powered Up? Maybe the spotlight will shine on... Bond Man?

[omega_rugal]

where do i get this cool thing?