A Link to the Past DX. Great romhack and the MSU-1 implementation is perhaps the best one of all of the SNES games that use it (some are bad).
All new, CD-quality soundtrack (MSU-1, higan/bsnes or SD2SNES only, requires separate download of soundtrack files)
Improved Pegasus boots, turn while running
Break pots with sword
Collect items with sword
Cancel flute transport
Death counter no longer increments when selecting “Save and Quit”
Use L/R to quickly switch between items
Slowdown reduced (FastROM)
There’s another romhack that builds on this one and adds a ton more visual enhancements and changes. I have not tried that one myself but it looks interesting.
I’ve been kicking around the idea of making a seperate msu-1 thread. There doesn’t seem to be a proper post organizing all of them anywhere. It’s just a mess of links on different sites.
if you enjoy rainbow edition, you need to see koryu in action. homing fireballs, shoryukens that spawn fireballs, zangief jumping through the top of the screen to the bottom… it is a thing of beauty (in MAMEas Xiang Long, Chinese bootleg)
That was the one that came over here in the arcades instead of Rainbow Edition. The massive damage of the multiple fireballs of the shoryuken was hilarious. Usually every fight ended in about 3 seconds. Even on block the damage was crazy. It was more popular than vanilla SF2.
Pokemon RomHacks are fairly commonplace these days, but this is one of the best. Essentially a collection of QoL improvements to FireRed to round out some omissions and bring it up to snuff: https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=285094
I’m actually working on a rom hack myself, slowly. I’m making a Japanese version of a NES game that wasn’t released there. Just a title screen hack though
I’ve got a version of Simon’s Quest which has this:
and this
Applied.
One day I’ll play though this one too:
It’s really cool, they have integrated a map screen taken from the Japanese manual! And it really works well.
This is funny to me since the original release of Metroid had saving already, they just cheaped out and didn’t add a battery to the NES localisation.
I’ve been snooping around for some good enhancement or ‘fix’ hacks for a while. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played or watched footage for a game and thought “this just needs a few minor tweaks and it’d be fantastic!”. I linked the Contra: Hard Corps Enhancement Pack in another thread, here is another I am a fan of from the same guy:
I am also a fan of most color hacks, especially those that restore arcade colors to home ports. Here are a few Genesis ones I like:
Of course there are more but those are the ones I’ve tried and liked. I compared Golden Axe to the arcade version on Wii VC and it was pretty close. These are very slight changes in the grand scheme, but sometimes new color is all it takes to revitalize an old favorite.
There’s too many to list, but many GBA games have graphics enhancements that are designed to undo some of the brightness on games that was done to try to counteract the original dim, non backlit screen. Many SNES to GBA ports have this, as well as music restoration patches where music was downgraded from SNES to GBA.
There’s also a great retranslation of the original Phantasy Star for Master System that you apply to the Japanese ROM. Phantasy Star is one of the few games that had an FM soundtrack in the Japanese version that is NOT present on the North American release, so if you want the FM sound you HAVE to use the Japanese version as a base.
And the retranslation itself is great, much better than the original try by SEGA. So you get a better text, with better music. They also have translated the manual. Some very fine work indeed.
