Super R-Type SA-1, JAPANESE version is now available for testing

Hi, everyone!

Happy to share that the Japanese Super R-Type now runs with the SA-1 patch too, so the slowdown is gone from this version as well.

Back in 2020, when I released the American patch (you can download here - open for everyone), I looked at the Japanese version and gave up: there were too many differences to be worth disassembling the game again, so I moved to the next one. This time I found a way around it.

This one was the opposite of the European version (already available for patrons, if you missed it you can see it here): there, seven bytes. Here, the entire ROM looks different.

The game is the same, but re-assembled

As explained here, Japan is the same program built again, so the code is the same but it sits in different places. Comparing the two ROMs byte by byte gives you nothing useful. Lined up properly, block by block, almost everything matches: around 11,000 of the changes the patch makes found their exact instruction bytes in the Japanese ROM and moved with them automatically. The few dozen places left, I read one by one and adjusted by hand. No new trace log was needed.

Japan is the older build

And those leftovers turned out to be the fun part: they are the small things the American version added on top of the Japanese one. Japan was released in July 1991 and America in September 1991, so you can see what Irem polished in those two months:

• the screen turns on at once at the start, where Japan fades it in over an extra step

• a pause of about 1.5s with a sound effect, that Japan does not have

• two extra blink states in a menu

The difficulty and training messages are in kana in Japan and in English in the USA, but that is text, and the patch doesn't touch text. I played the whole game on "Kids", the easiest level, to test this build, and the image on top is what the game told me at the end:

作戦終了 (Operation complete)
But this was only training. In real combat, no one knows what dangers await you...
Good luck at level EASY!

So Kids doesn't give you the real ending, it sends you to Easy. Anyway, that's enough game spoilers, you will have to play it yourself if you wanna know what happens between Easy and PRO, the hidden level you only reach by clearing Hard :)

By the way, the American and European versions don't have "Kids", they call the same level "Novice". Maybe someone thought "Kids" would tell an adult that this mode isn't for them, when it's just the easy one. I wonder how Japanese players took it.

How to install

Same patchers as before, beat or FLIPS. The BPS patch is in the attachments.

Your Japanese ROM before patching:

• CRC32: 4E872C8B

• SHA256: F57F9A3EF36A66B739EA7F723B67122A39C3898AFC967AD7EDDAFB7BEB8D1CB1

After patching:

• CRC32: 22AEE9BB

• SHA256: 6513038036A01CB83B6A44EA0E48D8B55D1ACE2569824EC8FFDE8D0F1BF86300

Same requirements as the European and American one: 32 kB (256 Kbit) of BW-RAM, real hardware or Snes9x and bsnes/higan/ares. ZSNES is not supported.

Closing

I cleared it once, on Kids, so the harder levels and real hardware are exactly where your reports help the most. Let me know how this one plays, if you were able to play end-to-end, on which difficulty, and if you found anything unusual. I'm open for feedback, so comment below or e-mail me if you find anything.

Contra Spirits is probably the next one during this week and I might release a new version of SimCity SA-1 (it now simulates up to 18x faster than original) or maybe the initial version of Super Metroid SA-1. Let me know if you a have a preference!

Thank you for the support and happy ROM hacking!