Practice Mode/Convenience Hacks by trap15

[trap15]

I'll be posting (and indexing) any practice modes or other convenience patches I finish here. You can always check what I've recently done by popping open http://dodonpachi.daifukkat.su/hacks/.

Battle Garegga Convenience (Updated 2013/04/20)


Thunder Dragon Practice Mode (Updated 2013/04/18)


Thunder Dragon 2 Practice Mode (Updated 2013/04/11)





In the pipeline:
YGW Raizing Series (Bakraid -> Batrider -> Garegga?)
Psikyo (S1999 -> S1945II -> S1945 -> others?)

[EllertMichael]

In the pipeline:
Thunder Dragon 1

YES!

I've got this in my Egret II and it's all I've been playing lately.
I haven't passed stage 4 boss, yet
I'm not normally a save-state player, but this I'm excited for.

[trap15]

RAHjer

Fantastically bad game, that one is. Can't get enough of it I will probably add a setting for turning off the wobbly bullets too.

[jepjepjep]

This is great news trap15.

I wasn't sure if you are aware, but Garegga has a stage select built into the debug/special mode (hold ABC on bootup).

[Udderdude]

Cool stuff.

[trap15]

I wasn't sure if you are aware, but Garegga has a stage select built into the debug/special mode (hold ABC on bootup).

I am aware of that (Bakraid and Batrider have it as well), however it doesn't let you control rank or anything aside from the starting stage, so it's not all that useful for practice.

[EllertMichael]

RAHjer

Fantastically bad game, that one is. Can't get enough of it I will probably add a setting for turning off the wobbly bullets too.

but... but... that would fix the game...

[blackoak]

Awesome, looks really nice. You're doing a great service for TD2 pcb owners (all 5 of them?). Also a convenient alternative to savestates, and a cool way to see rank in effect at unnatural parts of the game.

While its true that the Yagawa raizing pcbs have more features than most, they'd still benefit greatly from a more intelligent practice menu that allows rank (and preferrably medal level) to be adjusted along with the stage itself. Being able to practice the individual bosses would be nice too. Batrider's boss select is practically useless because it lets you play through each boss twice, once at 0 rank and once at max rank... both effectively pointless for learning the patterns.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

EEEEEE HUURRRRRRR

[Hagane]

Great stuff, trap. If you ever manage to do a hack to select stage order in Psikyo games (so one can do .inps of runs instead of having to do .avis), I'd build you a temple and do sacrifices in your honor.

[zakk]

Stage order is always the same at initial power on.

Shift-F3 instead of F3 (also re-starts the INP recording)

Great stuff, trap. If you ever manage to do a hack to select stage order in Psikyo games (so one can do .inps of runs instead of having to do .avis), I'd build you a temple and do sacrifices in your honor.

[trap15]

That's a pretty shitty solution for PCB owners, which is who these hacks are primarily targeted to

Anyways, Thunder Dragon 1 practice mode is complete I'll update the OP now.

[moh]

I envy your skill, trap.

[Hagane]

Stage order is always the same at initial power on.

Shift-F3 instead of F3 (also re-starts the INP recording)

Default stage order is generally not optimal for scoring.

[EllertMichael]

Thunder Dragon (Updated 2013/04/13)

NMK Forever!

Is there anyone willing to burn this rom for me to be able to play on my PCB?

[trap15]

Just released a convenience patch for Battle Garegga.

Adds a whole ton of handy things for PCB owners, and some that are handy for MAME players too. Check it out!

EDIT: Additionally, I think my next modification will be for either Strikers 1945 II or 1999. May just start with a stage order select, but who knows. It'll be nice to mess with something that's not 68000-based for once

[Chaos Phoenixma]

stage order select for Psikyo games would be awesome, especially Dragon Blaze.

Stuff like Darius Gaiden's Extra version for other games where you wouldn't see all stages in a run normally would be cool too.

Most of the stuff I'd play generally would be savestatable easily though.

[trap15]

The point of these modifications is for people playing on PCBs where you can't possibly do savestates without extensive hardware modification.

I like how you think though

[Hagane]

I think the Psikyo games that would most benefit from stage select are the ones with 3 random stages out of 4 possible picks (Gunbird 2, Sengoku Ace/Blade), and Dragon Blaze (where you get the Sand stage makes a really big difference in scoring).

Thanks for the Garegga patch, BTW!

EDIT: in S1945 getting the Gunbird train in the first stage is important too.

[moh]

you're doing some cool stuff, trap. keep it up.

[wnka]

Burned EPROMs for my Garegga, works great! Super awesome stuff. One thing I noticed is that reboot is ABC, not Start+ABC as stated in the docs. Intended?

[THE]

Awesome!

How is the rank behavior after game over? does it reset like in Zakk's ROMs?
If not, please add. Needing to turn off/on the PCB after each run is disturbing...

Or does start+ABC do this?

[Cagar]

Now if you only made practice-hack for DOJ black label.
It has quite dynamic rank, and requires lots and lots of memorizing the stages.
(and why not ddp too)
Possible?

[trap15]

Burned EPROMs for my Garegga, works great! Super awesome stuff. One thing I noticed is that reboot is ABC, not Start+ABC as stated in the docs. Intended?

I, uhh... what

I tried it on my board yesterday and it wouldn't even boot (hence the download link being removed now)... ABC should not reset, only Start+ABC. Very confusing...

How is the rank behavior after game over? does it reset like in Zakk's ROMs?
If not, please add. Needing to turn off/on the PCB after each run is disturbing...

The rank behavior is the same as original. The addition of Start+ABC and removing the boot-up test was done so that you could easily reset everything without waiting ages.

Now if you only made practice-hack for DOJ black label.
It has quite dynamic rank, and requires lots and lots of memorizing the stages.
(and why not ddp too)
Possible?

Possible, unlikely for me to do. I don't really like DOJ nor DDP that much, so I probably won't do those for a while, if ever.

[Dave_K.]

I thought you also did a rank display for Bakraid?

[trap15]

I did, but that patcher is broken as well.... I really need to test things before release I intend to come back to that one in the near future.

[wnka]

WEIRD. My board boots and I played a few credits just fine. I used the Windows patcher. Let me know if you need more info.

[trap15]

What region and rom-set did your board come with? Mine is Korean with the Denmark/China set. Going to be playing around with removing various parts of the patch to try to get it working. Stay tuned

[wnka]

My board is Taiwan I think with the jumpers cut to make it JPN and previously it had Zakk ROMs installed. I used 27c040 EPROMs since that's all I had on hand.

[Icarus]

I was just having a chat with Plasmo about Donpachi, and a thought occurred to me: do you know if it is possible to add a chaining timer to the game? I think it would benefit those looking for the more complicated chaining routes to know exactly how much time they have before the chain cuts out.