shmups.system11.org

The following changes have been made to the base game:

More bomb drops
Higher bomb capacity
1up items will spawn and will award actual 1ups no matter how many lives you have
The order of item drops is reset after each death, continue or new game.
Weapon power levels are at least at Truxton 2 Normal first loop levels across all regions, difficulty settings and loops. In addition:

The main shot and red weapon are buffed at low levels
The green weapon is buffed all around
The blue weapon is buffed all around
High score screen copyright text now includes "NEW VERSION"

Bugs:

If either player dies during double play the item order resets

Too lazy to fix this right now... If you notice any other weirdness lemme know.

Special thanks to smc for guidance and finding nearly all the values modified to make these changes in the first place

Get the ips patch here
or here
Patch to 'tp024_1.bin'

Very nice! I'll have to burn this to a new eeprom and give it a try.

Very cool hack, myco! Once I get that loop clear of the vanilla game, I'm going to have to really delve into this one.

Awesome idea myco; I can't wait to try this one out. Someone wire the boys at M2

Hey Myco. Neat thing you've done here! Will you be streaming this version so I know to check the vods?

funnily enough i was actually thinking about streaming it right before i saw this message

obs is now freezing my entire computer when i attempt to stream so...maybe some other time

I love you. I've been keen for something like this ever since reading your review.

As for the bug, maybe you don't need to reset item order on death now that you made the base shot stronger?

I like that feature too much to get rid of it for double play, and who plays that anyway. It wouldn't even be game breaking behavior, players just might not see a bomb for a while if one of them keeps dying lol

I have updated the ips patch in the OP (or click here). The romhacking.net page should be updated within a day or so. Long story short I used the Easy difficulty of Truxton II as the base weapon damage by accident and ended up making the game overall a little bit easier than I had intended, so I went back and rebalanced the weapon power. Your main shot and red weapon no longer exceed the max power from Truxton II Normal but remain stronger at low levels, and I left blue alone and even buffed green just a little bit more.

Please use this updated version for the best possible experience, thank you.

Just as a quick question, I need to unzip the tatsou rom, patch the bin, and recompress the file, right?

yep, apply the patch to tp024_1.bin and put it back in the zip

I ended up doing one more little tweak because there wasn't much incentive to power up blue beyond level 3 or so besides not wanting to dodge powerups/lose points, so I nerfed it a little on the lower levels. It's still good though. I also buffed green yet again. Sorry if you're actually playing this, this is the last one for real this time. Get it here

Maybe you should do a one-off build of MAME that supports only your modified hack? It'll probably end up in HBMAME eventually anyway (and possibly regular MAME if it gets any traction in actual arcades in Japan)..

Why? Not to be rude, I just don't understand the reason

The stock MAME will choke on the replaced file, and it'll probably be in HBMAME at the end of March (if the author is aware of it, anyway) so those who are interested in trying it out before burning a chip will probably find it easiest to emulate for trial that way.

You can also run the game through the command line or through a batch file. MAME will still complain that the checksum doesn't match what it expects, but it'll still allow you to run the game that way.

oh yeah I forgot if you try to run hacked roms thru the GUI or something it'll complain and won't run....but yeah if you run "mame truxton2" it'll just warn you about the checksum and run

I was aware of that workaround, but you'd be surprised how many MAME users struggle with the command line (or perhaps not surprised)...

Well, I'm not going to push the point either way; it was just a suggestion.

Very cool. I had an idea to do something similar for Truxton (make every P magenta / level up shot) with MAME cheats, but this is way cooler. KUDOS.

yeah I understand. its sadly a bit beyond my knowledge/abilities to build Windows binaries right now and it kinda sounds like a pain lol. If anyone wants to play this and doesn't know how just ask and I can help. it would be cool if it was added to hbmame. even cooler if it were added to MAME but idk if jp players would bother putting it in a cab. I know of at least one really good Tatsujin Ou player who played the original easier version, looped it five times and deemed it had "no future"