U.N. Squadron - Area 88 disassembly is 92.57% complete
Good news! As everyone might know, while I'm doing Super Mario World Widescreen (which is very nearby completion, by the way! -- I wanna the final version out before my birthday, which is June 9); I'm also looking for potential candidates for getting a SA-1 or FastROM conversion. U.N. Squadron is one of them.
I recently got some trace log and after accumulating them and analyzing them I got around 92.57% completion, which is a great mark. The game is 1 MB big, which means there's about 76.08 KB left to understand: check if it's code, data, what kind of data or even if it's unused.
Currently the disassembly is 14 MB big, with 168,793 lines of assembly code and data references. The disassembly size might change depending if I find some more unused code or in case I end up changing the data structure from 8/16-bit or vice-versa. For comparison, Axelay's disassembly (which is 100% complete) is 14 MB big too, but with 166,826 lines of disassembled code and data.
U.N. Squadron is a cool game. Although it was made by a company which I have never disassembled its code before (CAPCOM), I'm confident that we will be able to make a SA-1 conversion of it. - I don't think FastROM would be enough for eliminating all slowdown from Area 88.
So what's your thoughts about the game? Make sure to comment here your expectations and feel free to ask any questions about the disassembly process, I'm always open for talk!
Comments (20)
very cool!
You're welcome!
Really interested in this U.N. Squadron SA-1 hack! There are enough differences from the arcade original to make it a worthy SA-1 conversion. There are lots of great exclusive Capcom games for the Snes that could benefit from your FastROM and SA-1 improvements, so I hope this work let you gain experience with Capcom games. Thanks!!
Thank you for encouraging me once again! By the way, Return of the Double Dragon is getting disassembled too, I believe it's a matter of time until I fully disassemble it too :)
I just increased my monthly contribution to thank you for taking care of this cult game. :-)
Thank you for the support, you're welcome!!
The one I have been waiting for buddy ! SA1 mod would make sensational.
You're welcome!
Well done! I can't wait to test this game without slowing down. I've been waiting for it for a long time and I'm very happy you took care of it. Do you have a release date for UN Squadron? Thank you for your work. And again well done !!!!!
There is no release date yet since it depends on some factors, but I think we can estimate it between 2-3 months given when I announced I got 95% code coverage on Axelay and the actual release
Capcom are known to have great artists and game designers but definitely their coding level is not that great (compared to Konami for instance) so I'm confident that you will have more rooms for code optimization here :-)
It's a new publisher for me, so we'll see how different it is compared to Konami :) I know there's a lot of games that people would like to get some optimization
Thank you for working on this! For me this (and Gradius III) are the holy grail SNES shmup games. Can't wait to dive into it!
You're welcome!
U.N. Squadron💜 Yesssssssss!!!
💜
On the subject of SMW Widescreen, a video showcasing Mario Kart ROM hacks recently highlighted the BSNES' widescreen mode, with the vanilla version of SMW. https://youtu.be/QIv1Xgml_d8?t=182 It's too bad AntDude didn't have your SMW widescreen mod before then! Maybe he'd show it in a future video?
Considering the amount of polish I'm putting on SMW Widescreen, I'm sure it will end up appearing eventually on some known YouTube channels ^^
How similar is it to the arcade version? I think I played it once or twice but wasn't really impressed. As I've said before, I'm just here to support what you're working on, whatever it is (with a slight preference for things that can run on hardware / MiSTer). That said, if it's just a straightforward port of the arcade game without a bunch of changes, it might be more interesting to do something more unique to the SNES.
The SNES version is different. Much interesting to play