Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Nostalgia Hack - Super UFO



This is a fairly useless hack - it simply makes the copier ROM playable on an emulator.

I did it for the nostalgia - the SNES unit my brother bought had a Super UFO. Needless to say, many summer nights were spent loading up games from this copier's menu.

What I did was basically NOP out instructions that were causing infinite loops, these were most likely disk access checks. I was also having trouble getting the sound to work until I discovered a routine that for some reason was copying the sound init code to non-existant memory (probably on-board custom RAM)

Strangely enough the code wasn't exactly self-modifying and could have been called from ROM instead, which is what I did.

The patched ROM doesn't play music initially for some reason - I might have NOPped out a bit more than needed - but the music can be set through the menu.

As I said, this is a fairly useless hack. If you never owned the Super UFO you probably won't appreciate this.

You nostalgic nerds can download the patch and ROM here.

UPDATE:

Found the problem why it wasn't working on Snes9xTYL for the PSP. Looks like there was a difference in what value was returned when reading from an undefined port in the different emulator versions.