When the game came out in Japan, it had a 4 players option in the Bean Ball mode. For the release on the NES, it was lowered to 2 players.

This hack restore the 4 players option. However, at this current version 1.0 it is not completely functional. The Japanese version of the game use a system named Famicom Expansion Port to allow the use of 4 controllers. The system is different for the NES. The NES use a different 4 Players Adapter. This hack restore the ability to play 4 players in game, that mean you see these options available in the game. But the hack doesn’t change the way the game detect your controllers. As a result, you can select 3 or 4 players mode, but the controllers will not work for these players because your NES will not recognize the 3rd and 4th players controllers, since the game want a Japanese Famicom Expansion Port to make these 2 extra controllers to work.

At the moment, it will not work on a real hardware for this reason. But, I still recommend using this hack if you play 3-4 players regularly, because it allow you to select the 3 and 4 players mode, and if you play on emulator, some emulators like fceux have the option to emulate a Famicom Expansion Port. And if you do activate this option, it will work!

What this patch is doing could be done with a simple game genie code, GEUOLZZA. But with this code, the options 3 and 4 players would be invisible (but still accessible). So this hack is more an aesthetic patch because these options are not invisible like it would be with the code. I think an update of this patch to make it work with the NES 4 Players Adapter, instead of the Famicom Expansion Port, would make this patch perfect and more useful. But i think it would be difficult to do this change.

Pro: It works, the 3-4 players mode are restored in the game, and it is well done, and you can select these options.

Cons: Doesn’t work on real hardware. On emulator you need to select Famicom Expansion Port. So it doesn’t work like it would do on a regular NES 4 players game. The game would need a 4 Player Adapter support instead of the Famicom Expansion Port support.