The third project is
an extension of the second project.
I decided to take
Splatter House further and ported it to Nintendo MMC-3. The reason for
this was because when building a reproduction cartridge, FME-7 is only
in one game. That is Batman Return of the Joker. Too good of a game to
sacrifice in my opinion. Also, if you have an emulator that doesn't
support FME-7 it is much more likely to support MMC-3. And above all,
MMC-3 is cheap and in alot of games.
Everything plays just fine
in the MMC-3 port. However the ROM had to be expanded to compensate for
the inferior graphics banking abilities of the MMC-3. I'd like to know why
Nintendo designed the MMC-3 with the strange CHR-ROM banking
limitations. They were so close to being on par with japanese mappers
of the same time but instead you have to wait for MMC-5 and FME-7 for
that. Splatter House also required alot of time and effort trying
to reverse engineer how the game handled alot of graphics related
things and making alot of changes to it. Really this was a much bigger
project than the last two by alot. It was my favorite project though.
Because this patch changes massive amounts of data a simple IPS patch
is not practical. Instead there is a Win32 patcher program. The patcher
was coded in C++.
It will handle the whole patching process. All you have to do is tell
it the filename of your Splatter House ROM file.
For building a reproduction you will need one of these boards: TKROM,
TLROM, or TSROM. These are the only boards that support 256Kb of
CHR-ROM. This port is also handy if you emulator does not support Namco
106 as most emulators make a point of supporting major mappers like
MMC-3. Enjoy.
Important Note: It was brought
to my attention much later that this hack had a bug in it causing
graphics problems. Use Game Genie patch code EZLVAZ to fix this. Or Hex Edit the file at $1E248 and change $C0 to $A0. This hack will get
it to behave properly. If I ever make a version 1.3 it will incorperate
this fix.
Download Splatter House - Wanpaku Graffiti (J)
[MMC3] Patch v1.2
