New early release - F-Zero + 3.58 MHz FastROM patch v1.0
Hi! I'm glad to share with you all the FastROM patch of F-Zero! Although F-Zero does not have many slowdown occurrences compared to other games, there's a few spots where slowdown can occur, in particular intensive tracks where you can end up seeing more than 4 vehicles at the same time.
The patch will be useful specially for ROM hacks. The F-Zero ROM hacking community is advancing quickly and a lot of cool things will be coming, specially with a complete and reliable FastROM patch directly from Project FastROM series. Things like 2-player mode and full car simulation are possible benefits we might get in the future.
You can download the patch under the attachments of this post. This is a BPS patch, so you need the original USA F-Zero ROM before applying it. If you don't know how to apply BPS patches, make sure to read my SnesLab article for more information: https://sneslab.net/wiki/How_to_apply_ROM_patches
You're free to record and stream it, make sure to mention me so more people can know my work.
If you have any feedback, bug or slowdown spot which you think it must be improved, please comment on this post and I'll analyze for a workaround.
Have fun!
Comments (8)
https://youtu.be/Os7uF3kTSm0 Here's a play-through on Expert in Knight League.
Awesome gameplay, that was a fun watch! Glad it works well
WOW! F-Zero is one of my favourite SNES games! It'd great if this FastROM patch let the hacking community do more things with this game! By the way, I found a list that may be helpful for your researh. It details which games uses SlowROM or FastROM, the special chips, etc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1J-Y2z2UeoYw5UHYP1f-rW5VswUXRdpdzsYJFFAA88Ns/edit#gid=1207031949 I found there that Return of Double Dragon is SlowROM. Maybe converting it to fastROM would let play the game at 60 fps without the SA-1, or at least improve the flow of the game. Thank you for your awesome work!
Thanks for the link! Indeed, Return of Double Dragon is SlowROM, I just confirmed by looking its header data. I still didn't have the chance of disassembling it, but if you happen to have a video with the slowdown spots that would help me already figuring out if FastROM would be enough or if SA-1 would be needed
Which USA F-Zero rom? Flips complains about a mismatched rom when I try to use the No-Intro one (F-Zero (USA).sfc w/ CRC32 AA0E31DE). Edit: Ironically enough, "F-ZERO (U) [!].smc" works just fine, even though the files are identical. Does flips verify the filename and not the hash?
This is interesting, the CRC32 matches on the F-Zero ROM I used for producing the patch. I wonder if the no-intro version has some special header that FLIPS doesn't not recognize at all?
This was unexpected. Thanks!
Fun fact, F-Zero was already 100% disassembled and I had a complete copy of it on my computer. So pretty much 70% of the work needed for FastROM I did it in 2019.