Classic video game modifications, fan translations, homebrew, utilities, and learning resources. Gradius Gaiden Need second player for speed section to prevent checkpoint warping Gradius V Lots of continues likely needed, speed section has forced deaths, assuming Revival Start is off Theoretically impossible: Gradius 2 (Arcade) Speed section Nemesis 3 (MSX) Queensryche boss requires Options and/or Tailgun.
Many gamers of a certain age (this author included) remember the early '90s disappointment of buying the SNES version of hit arcade shmupGradius III. In magazine screenshots, the game's huge, colorful sprites were a sight to behold, comparable to the 1989 arcade original. In action, though, any scene with more than a handful of enemies would slow to a nearly unplayable crawl on the underpowered SNES hardware.
Now, Brazilian ROM hacker Vitor Vilela has righted this nearly three-decade-old wrong with a ROM patch that creates a new, slowdown-free version of the game for play on SNES emulators and standard hardware. Political news.
The key to Vilela's efforts is the SA-1 chip, an enhancement co-processor that was found in some late-era SNES cartridges like Super Mario RPG and Kirby Super Star. Besides sporting a faster clock speed than the standard SNES CPU (up to 10.74 Mhz versus 3.58 Mhz for the CPU), SA-1 also opens up faster mathematical functions, improved graphics manipulation, and parallel processing capabilities for SNES programmers.
Vilela has been working for months with old SA-1 development hardware and modern development tools to document that chip's inner workings and mappings. As of this week, Vilela says that work on Gradius III can now be considered 'stable' and that 'the new SA-1 era' can begin.
Unlike specialty chips such as the well-known Super FX, the SA-1 has the same architecture as the core SNES CPU, which makes porting code written for the base system easier. But that doesn't mean you can just add the chip to any game ROM and get an instant speed boost. Vilela writes that it took 'three months of researchment [sic], disassembly, code analysis, memory remapping, and code editing' to get to this point. The patch 'changes most of the data structures [and] pointers and finally creates an intermediate system for calling SA-1 for most intensive routines and the SNES for the PPU/APU interaction routines and V-blank refreshing.'The result, as is apparent in the comparison videos embedded here, is a version of Gradius III that Vilela says runs two to three times faster than the original. It also keeps its silky smooth frame rate no matter how many detailed, screen-filling sprites clutter the scene. That's even true in the game's notorious, bubble-filled Stage 2, which is transformed from a jittery slide show to an amazing showcase of the SNES' enhanced power. As if that wasn't enough, the patch even slashes the game's loading times, cutting a full 3.25 seconds from the notably slow startup animation.
While impressive from a technical standpoint, one could argue this patch ruins the way Gradius III was meant to be played. Vilela notes that the lack of slowdown 'makes it incredibly super difficult' and even suggests that 'some arcade segments of the game do not look RTA (real-time action) viable with SA-1. But we shouldn't underestimate the human capabilities.'
Real SNES hardware reportedly has no problem with the SA-1 patched Gradius III, even when running through a tool like SD2SNES. But while Vilela says 'the most up-to-date SNES emulators including bsnes and Snes9x' will work with the patched version of the game, emulators like ZSNES are not compatible.
With the root work in place, Vilela is already fielding requests for other slowdown-prone SNES games that could benefit from the SA-1 porting treatment. For now though, he says he'll return to work on Touhou Mario World 2, which is a 'bullet hell' version of the platformer that shows off the SA-1's capabilities.
Coming on the heels of a recent 'HD emulation mod' that enhances the clarity of 'Mode 7' SNES games, we have to wonder what other enhancements the modern hacking community can bring to the 16-bit gaming era.
Listing image by Konami
Gradius IIIAlso known as: Gradius III: Densetsu kara Shinwa he (JP)Developer:Publisher:Platform:(Custom)Released in JP: December 11, 1989Released in AS: December 1989This game has.This game has.This game has.This game has.This game has.The first two games were difficult enough, but Gradius III goes out of its way by making its stages more hair-pullingly hard than ever before. There are no continues either, as no 'easier' localized version was released overseas (well, not completely) as the previous entries, so don't think you can just money your way out of this one. Contents.Unused Graphics Power-UpsThere are eight unused Edit Mode power-up icons in the game ROM. Unfortunately, none of them seem to have been properly coded, so the icons are all that's left of them.Power-UpPrevious GamesNotesMissile-typeSalamander (MSX)Nemesis 3 (MSX)Would home in on enemies, naturally. This is the only unused power-up that has unique graphics in the ROM:N/AThis would drop floating mines behind the player ship instead of missiles. A similar concept was used ten years later in Gradius IV.Double-typeN/AStandard three-way shot.
This could be an early version of the Spread Gun (which can be upgraded to a three-way shot) or an entirely different power-up.Since there's no telling exactly how the three-way shot would work, an icon can't be properly constructed.Option-typeNemesis 3 (MSX)Options would surround the ship in an arrow formation. This was later implemented in.There don't seem to be any graphics for this icon left in the game besides the name of the power-up.Nemesis 2 (MSX)Nemesis 3 (MSX)This would make Options rotate counterclockwise around the ship. Another power-up that made its way into the SNES version.?-typeN/AThe shield in the icon looks larger than the normal Force Field graphic. Maybe you'd be able to stack multiple fields?N/AThe last unused power-up that was later added to the SNES port. The shields rotate. Whoa.N/AAn interesting concept that never made it to any Gradius game: These Shields would actively home in on and destroy enemy bullets.EnemiesNew Enemies. In the final game, there are two different enemies that come out of the silver hatches in the final stage.
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This third enemy design didn't make the cut.Having a relatively impressive 18-frame animation count wasn't enough to keep this spider beetle-looking thing in the final version.Returning EnemiesEnemies from previous Gradius games and spin-offs. Most of the graphics are ripped directly from those games, and it's not clear whether or not they were actually intended to be used in the game.
The only exception is the small Moai head from Life Force JP, which has new graphics and was likely meant to appear somewhere in the game proper.EnemyNameGradius. UrolistOther SpritesThe title screen image is 320×240 pixels, but since the game's resolution is 320×224 the last 16 lines of the image get cut off.The blue screen-clearing power capsules seen in previous Gradius games are conspicuously absent in this one. They did make it into the SNES port, albeit using the same design as the power capsules instead of two separate sprites for each.Two unused enemy hatch designs, both of which have the same retractable base.Two unused rock designs for use in Stage 3's underground section. Even though there are three different designs, the final game only uses one of them. Kind of a waste, eh?Small and large boulders, likely meant to be used in Stage 3's digging section. Even though they both have special falling animations, the final game still uses the same rock design used everywhere else in the stage. That design isn't even animated!Rock pillars of varying thickness.
Could have made good obstacles in the underground section. Maybe they could have dropped down from the ceiling or jutted up from the floor or something. No such luck, though.Small and large vines shriveling up which would have been used after the Choking Weed boss is defeated. In the actual game, those vines just explode like everything else in this game.A whole mess of crystals. Similar, less-detailed crystals appear in Stage 3 of Gradius II as destructible objects. At one point in development, the Crystal Maze might have been more closely based on the Gradius II Crystal stage.The palette for this object is loaded during the flying crystal section of the Crystal Maze and might have appeared as an added obstacle. Dig that 12-sided die!The ships from the first Gradius and Salamander are in the ROM.
The Gradius ship uses the default ship palette, while the Salamander ship actually has a custom palette loading during the Salamander stage (Palette 16) that's not used by any other object in the game.It's plausible that in the Gradius and Salamander stages, those ships would be used in place of the standard Vic Viper design. It would certainly explain why the player loses all of their power-ups after being transported to either stage.The volcanic rocks used in the first Gradius games. Uses palette 1B in the Gradius stage which, again, isn't used by any other object. The developers might have originally planned to keep the volcanic eruption that prefaced the Big Core boss fight in the original game.Small and large blue plasma balls in the same style as the energy balls shot out by Bacterion at the end of the game. It's possible that he was mean to actually attack the player, but given the history of Gradius games' final bosses being completely ineffectual, this was likely meant to be used by some other boss.A strange metal disc.
No clue on this one, and that's probably not even the correct palette. Weird.MiscellaneousThese filler tiles are in the Cell stage tileset. アキ means 'empty'.In the previous international releases of Gradius and Gradius II, the 'Option' power-up was renamed to 'Multiple'. Since this game was never released in Europe or North America, this graphic was never used. But oddly enough, this game's announcer always says Multiple when selecting the power-up.High score numbers taken from Gradius and Gradius II, respectively.
Gradius III has its own, larger font that it uses for the high score table, making these graphics superfluous.In Gradius II, players could enter their gender and age in the high score table. This feature was taken out of Gradius III and instead uses the differently-gendered heads from Gradius, but the differently-aged heads are still in the ROM.This lion enemy is used in Stage 1, the Desert level. However, Stage 7, the Fire stage, has an unused palette that matches up with the lion design perfectly. Considering that the dragon enemy is used in both Stage 1 and Stage 7, they might have planned to reuse this enemy as well.While the Crystal Maze stage in the final game only uses blue crystals, there are palettes for at least four other colors. The cubes on the left are the sprite-based cubes, while the cubes on the right are the tile-based cubes.Palette 1DPalette 1EThe small vines that the Choking Weed sucks up actually use the wrong palette!
Palette 1D is used by the Choking Weed's bulb, while palette 1E is totally unused in-game and fits the vine graphic a lot better.Unused MusicThe IDs listed here are internal track IDs and don't match up the ones used in the game's sound test.IDTrackNotes90. (Source: ) Regional Differences IntroThe Japanese version goes through a pictorial history of the Gradius series (the arcade games, anyway) before transitioning to the title screen. In all other sets, the game immediately transitions to the title screen.The actual title screen sequence is the same length in all versions, leading to an odd experience in non-Japanese sets where the game just stays on a static image for more than a minute before the music ends.Title Screen JapanInternationalAll non-Japanese sets delete the game's subtitle, 伝説から神話ヘ ('From Legend to Myth').Beginner CourseThe Japanese set has an additional mode select before the Weapon Select screen. The option on the left is the normal game, while the option on the right is a special beginner mode that ends after Stage 3.
Another thing that differentiates them the most apart from the limited stages to be played, is that when the player dies in the beginner mode, they gradually lose whatever power-up they have equipped with each death as opposed to the series' traditional die-and-have-nothing that is also present in the normal mode.Despite the fact that the non-Japanese sets don't have this selection and the player is thrown into the full game directly, the gradual power-up losing routine from the Japanese's beginner mode is actually present in them and is in it throughout the whole game! So in a way, the non-Japanese versions can 'slightly' (big emphasis on that word) be considered the easier versions of this hellishly hard mess of a game.Select DifficultyTechnical(Normal)Beginner (Intro to game)Ends after 3 stages.After defeating the boss of Stage 3, a special message appears.You've cleared the beginner course.But the world of Gradius is much morethan just that.
Now try challengingyourself with the technical course!!We pray for your success.