Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Compiling higan v101 under Debian Stretch


While writing Super Turrican MSU i used a modded version of higan v094 back then. byuu was not sleeping and i'm pretty sure he doesn't uses Debian as higan v101 can't be compiled out of the box.  Change the following line of GNUmakefile.

flags += -I. -I.. -O3
to
flags += -I. -I.. -O3 -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0/ -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include/ -I/usr/include/pango-1.0/ -I/usr/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 -I/usr/include/atk-1.0/

higan should now compile but still not runnable as the manifest.bml is missing.

run make install once as a normal user. your home directory is set up.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Super Turrican MSU v0.3 now with NTSC support

Some people asked for the US NTSC version of Super Turrican MSU...

You people are crazy!
The game was made in germany. It has to be played in 50 Hz! D:
Factor 5 did a bad job on having both versions consistent in manner of speed. It almost feels like the only difference between them is that the US version has the SEIKA logo.
This is why i conclude here that the US version is a little bit more difficult but also more fast paced if you like that. On my TV set the 60 Hz video signal is more crisp but this is not the version i've grown up with...
I'll stick to PAL.

Anyway, you asked for it:

Download Super Turrican MSU v0.3

I will remove v0.2 in a few days or weeks from Dropbox as it won't be needed anymore. Version 0.3 contains the PAL version as well so don't bother loading the old one.


I only play tested the NTSC port once. I had to rewrite some of the code to get it right. The program code of Super Turrican is compressed on the cart. But hacking compressed code in an algorithm i don't know is tedious. I had to work around this time making the NTSC version behave different.
Especially the title screen is buggy as the cursor won't show up by itself. But apart from that the US version is fully playable and hasn't shown signs of failure during my playthrough.....

Please keep in mind that even the original version of Super Turrican can crash on 1chip SNES models and i'm not able to debug that. The SPC is prone to hang himself in this game.

Turrican Soundtrack Anthology:
The music in this game is an altered version of the Turrican Soundtrack Anthology made by Chris Hülsbeck. If you like the Soundtrack you can buy it from his bandcamp site in lossless FLAC and MP3. There are 4 albums to get, containing not only the arranged Soundtrack for Super Turrican but also for the other games as well. If you are confused by the sheer amounts of music Chris has made there is also website especially for the Turrican Soundtrack albums.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Super Turrican MSU V0.2 released!


>>>Update: Go check out this post for Version 0.3.

I'm happy to announce that my Super Turrican MSU Hack will now be released. Chris Hülsbeck gave me permission to publish the soundtrack with the hack which was the crucial part in the end.
You can download the hack here.

Download Super Turrican MSU Hack

Keep in mind that you need a sd2snes or the emulator higan to run this hack! Currently only the PAL version is supported!
 
The package only contains the soundtrack for the MSU chip and an .ips patch file. You need to get the ROM by yourself.
You are only allowed to apply this patch if you are in possession of the original.
For this you need the .sfc file of your game. Either read it back from the cartdrige or ….. help yourself in other ways.

Download JIPS or another ips patcher to apply the patch. It's very important you got the right ROM. To be sure the correct file has the md5sum of 90c9fe8386a7f69de475c58bb8de01f7.
If you patched your .sfc file put it together with the rest of the files inside the package into a directory on your sd2snes.

The package contains a README.txt which will explain the process in more detail.

That's all!


The music in this game is an altered version of the Turrican Soundtrack Anthology made by Chris Hülsbeck. If you like the Soundtrack you can buy it from his bandcamp site in lossless FLAC and MP3. There are 4 albums to get, containing not only the arranged Soundtrack for Super Turrican but also for the other games as well.


---> Very important note <---
The game has one major bug which was kinda amplified with my hack (at least i feel so). The usage of the blue laser weapon can lead to a hickup of the SPC on some SNES devices. If this happens you can hear a strange and loud noise that sounds like "frfrfrfr". At this point the game still runs but you are unable to get to the next level as the main CPU is not capable of talking to the SPC anymore.
Even a reset of the SNES doesn't restore a healthy state sometimes.
You need to cut the power of your SNES for seconds to make it runnable again.
I'm not yet sure how this happens and it kinda flaws the whole hack. The only bright side is that this flaw is actually part of the original game.

Please help me investigate. Test the game and report issues. This flaw never happened to me on the emulator higan i used to develop the hack which is a major fallback. I'm not capable of debug this issue at this state. Just try to stay away from the blue laser.

Sadly enough it's also possible to get this problem in more rare occassions with other weapons as well. I could only assume that the soundeffect playback routine has a bug that i still don't understand.

Now as it turns out this happens only on 1chip SNES and newer revisions. I will investigate!