Tag: gaming

Posted on

Hacking a Mega Drive Mini with Hakchi

Earthion is running on the Mega Drive Mini!

I posted a few years ago of my experience with hacking my Mega Drive Mini with Project Lunar. My coworker recently bought an MD Mini himself, and since I had already hacked his SFC Mini, I offered to hack his new MD Mini too. I sent him the compatibility list. There were games he wanted on it but crossed them off his list because they weren’t compatible with Project Lunar. But when I tried to hack into his Mini unit, Project Lunar was not recognizing it. The reason for that is because Project Lunar can only acknowledge one unit for one’s computer, so that’s a big problem.

Looking for answers, I had a bit of a conversation with Google’s AI assistant thingy. Project Lunar is kinda dead. I had already noticed that its image scraper no longer works, for one thing. Google suggested to me that I should use Hakchi instead since this is what I already used to hack our SFC Minis, and that for my unit I should uninstall Project Lunar and proceed to use Hakchi to re-hack it. It told me that Hakchi can allow you to add modules to it so that when adding the games which do not work on the MD Mini’s built-in emulator by Sega, you can select Retroarch to handle the emulation for games like After Burner II, Devil Hunter Yohko, Panorama Cotton, Hellfire and so on. It also says that you can force the game’s region in order to have the game play English fan translations such as for Nadia, Battle Golfer Yui, Vixen 357 and Gleylancer.

So, you have to first use Project Lunar to uninstall it from your MD Mini. This’ll wipe it clean and restore it to its original factory condition. I had to hold down the shift key on the keyboard and then click the uninstall button. Game save data will be restored from your original backup made when you first hacked your unit. Just pay attention to which games are not compatible through the Project Lunar game compatibility list. After adding such a game, right click on its title and choose Retroarch to handle those games. Once you do that, when selecting it from the menu it’ll load without having to do anything. Essentially, it’s like Retroarch steps in and says “Excuse me, I’ll take it from here.”

Tatsujin/Truxton requires the Genesis Xtreme GX core to be assigned to it. So when you select the game from the Mini’s game selection screen, Retroarch automatically takes over as the emulator rather than the default emulator (M2engage).

Furthermore, I learned that 32X games can be added to the MD Mini and you’ll have to assign the PicoDrive Extreme emulation core to handle it. This means that the excellent ports of Afterburner II and Space Harrier can be added! I also want to add Shadow Squadron/Stellar Assault and Star Wars Arcade too. Mega CD games can also be added.

So with Hakchi, I successfully hacked my coworker’s MD Mini unit. It took a few evenings and more consulting with the AI assistant, and I finally finished loading the games David asked for. Afterburner II, Verytex, Panorama Cotton, Devil Hunter Yohko, and so many other games now work on the MD Mini! Also, Earthion works on it too! I had tried loading it onto mine through Project Lunar, but the game was silent. Now it works great through Retroarch!

The games that the native M2engage emulator couldn’t handle for whatever reason now work on it thanks to Retroarch. You’ll just notice some Retroarch-related text that appear very briefly when you load these games. I noticed that the mode button didn’t work, so I had to press the reset button which loads the Retroarch menu. I configured the input setting so that the Mode button brings up the Retroarch menu. When you exit Retroarch, it will bring you back to the standard menu.

What’s more, it turns out that M2 added Sonic 1, Marble Madness, Aladdin and Gauntlet as hidden games since they had worked on these ports back in the day. Under Project Lunar, I added Gauntlet and Sonic manually but Hakchi just reveals them instantly, to my surprise. I saw them on the menu and was like, “Wait, I didn’t add these.” Bonus! That’s great. I loaded the fan efforts Final Fight MD and Mega R-Type too.

One annoyance is that upon hacking the unit, it changed half of the games’ titles to English and the genre field for these games were blank. I had to edit these and manually change them back.

The strange thing is that the built-in kanji dictionary on the MD Mini is rather limited. I didn’t have this problem with the SFC Mini. Google’s AI assistant was talking me through the process of importing an expanded dictionary, but I think it was just talking out its ass and I was going in circles for an hour or so. I thought I found an expanded kanji dictionary on GitHub, and it was telling me to FTP into the MD Mini unit to add the dictionary file to an augmentation package in its internal Linux home/usr/var directory. It still didn’t work, so I gave up. I think it’s not a big deal to most people, but it bothers me because I am a purist who can read Japanese. So for now I just switched them to English titles or the Romanized Japanese titles. I’ll have to figure out how to expand the kanji dictionary for my own MD Mini, but I doubt my coworker cares so much. For example, 餓狼伝説2 is a problem because the kanji for “hungry wolf” are complicated, thus it just shows up on the menu as 伝説2. So I just renamed it the English title, Fatal Fury 2. 鮫！鮫！鮫！ just shows up blank, so I renamed it Fire Shark. Battle Mania: Daiginjou バトルマニア大吟醸 became only バトルマニア大, so I renamed it to バトルマニア2 as a workaround. And forget about the V in katakana for Valis (ヴァリス) because it doesn’t have that katakana.

Side Arms on the MD!

I was successful in adding 32X games easily enough. Stellar Assault (“Shadow Squadron”) and Star Wars Arcade now run on the MD Mini, as well as Space Harrier and After Burner thanks to the Retroarch PicoDrive Extreme module.

After Burner Complete 32X

Fan translations of Vixen 357, Battle Golfer Yui and Nadia now work, and I got them to run on the built-in default M2 emulator. The trick is to force the game’s region to United States from the Hakchi screen.

The number of shmups/shooters on my Mega Drive Mini has certainly proliferated, and as you can see the 32X and standard MD games are all listed together.

OK, so for Sega/Mega CD games, you will need the BIOS files: bios_CD_J.bin for Japanese Mega CD games and bios_CD_U.bin for North American Sega CD games. Typically the games will have all .bin files plus one .cue file. If you have all of the files unzipped to the same folder, you would just need to select the .cue file when adding the game and Hakchi will grab all the rest of the associated files automatically. The problem is that when I tried adding Snatcher, I immediately went way over the total storage capacity as it was 6x the size of the total available amount on the internal HD. You’d need an external USB drive or something to add these games, but in my position I’d rather just use my RetroPie for such games.

Lastly, I added two more standard MD games: Sailor Moon and Magical Taruruto-kun. I own Sailor Moon on the SFC and wanted to see the MD version. I own the original MD game of Taruruto-kun. I think I’ve only seen the anime a couple of times, way back when we had cable TV. My daughter wasn’t really interested in the show. It’s a pretty quirky platformer game. It comes with the Japanese MD Mini 2.

Posted on

Shantae is MUH WAIFU! I love the Shantae game series.

Shantae is a beautiful, belly-dancing genie whose magic powers is that she can do certain dances to transform into various animals. Her basic attack is whipping her long hair. Her concept was inspired by a cross between Nadia (one of my favorite anime shows, as you can see on this blog) and I Dream of Jeannie. I love the Shantae games, but I have to say that some are better than others. They range from standard platformers to Metroidvanias (my favorite). Shantae is, of course, very sexy. These games feature plenty of jiggle physics and scantily-clad girls. They are unapologetically sexy without being blatantly sexual, and fortunately Shantae’s creators are not making these games for the “modern audience” and thus remain very feminine, sexy, and adorable. If any pearl-clutching prudes are complaining that the female characters show too much skin, they are fortunately being ignored by Way Forward Games.

The Shantae games do not have a typical numerical naming scheme, so when I was getting into the series and wanted to play them in order, I had to do some research. If you are new to these great games, let me help you. Here are the games in order:

  • Shantae. The original game on the GBC and the only one not available on Steam. It’s a Metroidvania-style game, but unfortunately does not have a map. Hit detection is pretty clunky, making it very difficult to attack even simple enemies without getting hit. Dance Dance Revolution games were quite the rage around 2000, so in order to do various animal transformations you need to engage the dance mode and do the DDR-style moves to the beat of the song. It’s fun, but this can also be aggravating when you get hit by an enemy while doing a dance. Thus, the gameplay for this first game can be rather cumbersome. As such, I cannot completely recommend playing this game but if you do play it, play it first and you can appreciate how the gameplay vastly improves starting with the second game.
  • Shantae: Risky’s Revenge. This game came out for the DS. It features a map, but is more of a “go from point A to point B” platformer adventure game, except that you can jump between the foreground and the background. I don’t remember this game so well, but what I do remember is that it fixed so many issues with the original game. Changing into animals is so much easier, too. It makes attacking enemies so much easier. The pixel graphics are so much more enhanced and the graphics look great. Spoiler: Shantae loses her magic powers at the end of the game!
  • Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse. This is a straight-up Metroidvania with an extremely typical Metroidvania-style map screen. Shantae no longer has her magic powers and can only attack with her hair in the beginning of this game. She teams up with her enemy Risky to defeat a common enemy. Shantae collects various pirate weapons like a sword, a cannon, and a pirate hat. This is by far my favorite game in the series and I am currently playing it again on the 3DS. Metroidvania perfection.
  • Shantae: 1/2 Genie Hero. No more Metroidvania style, which really disappointed me. It became a regular platformer. It also abandoned the beautiful pixel graphics in favor of a cartoony appearance, which also disappointed me. Traveling between different areas is done with her friend Sky, riding on her giant pet bird Wrench. It’s cute. While I enjoyed this game, it just doesn’t compare to Pirate’s Curse.
  • Shantae and the Seven Sirens. While it still keeps the cartoon appearance, we’re back to a Metroidvania-style game complete with a map! I was so relieved. I really like this game, but one strike against it is the soundtrack. While the music itself isn’t bad, it does not have the Middle-Eastern style to it at all. I didn’t notice this at first, but I did once I learned that this game has a different composer. Only a few melodies remain, like the riff when Shantae finds a special item to advance the story.
  • Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution. This game was originally supposed to be the sequel to the first GBC Shantae game. It was under development for the GBA and was mostly finished but it was never released. Instead, Risky’s Revenge became the official sequel. Fortunately though, this game was resurrected thanks to Limited Run working with Way Forward to bring this game to the light of day. This game provides no map unfortunately. It does have a similar foreground/background dynamic to Risky’s Revenge. Plus it is great to see a pixel graphics Shantae game again. I enjoyed it. For some lousy reason though, this game was unplayable on Steam on my desktop. The GBA rom runs perfectly fine on RetroPie, but the Steam version has cartoon overlays which modernize the game. The game does work fine on my Dell Optiplex minicomputer though.

With each game, Shantae is drawn differently. I’m partial to her Risky’s Revenge version best as I like her darker skin tone.

Posted on

Retrogaming at Video Game Museum Robot in Fukaya, Saitama Prefecture

It’s Halloween today. I drove to Video Game Museum Robot in Fukaya, Saitama Prefecture with my friend Adrian to play some retro games.

The place looks like a dump from the outside, but that adds to the charm. You might just drive right by without realizing that it’s a treasure trove of retrogaming.

The arcade is mostly Sega cabinets: Astro City, New Astro City, and Blast City cabinets. They have this one which I believe is a Neo 19 cabinet. When we walked in, I was expecting to see row after row of glowing game screens. One thing that irritates me about Western gamers is that everyone erroneously calls every Japanese arcade cabinet a “candy cab.” I think this comes from that Neo Geo forum in the mid 2000’s and everyone just copies that. There is indeed a Neo Geo Candy, but there are many other names by various manufacturers such as the aforementioned Sega Astro City and so on, the Taito Egret, Konami Windy, Namco Cyber Lead, and many others. It’s an example of “trademark genericide,” such as when people call every tissue “Kleenex,” every cotton swab a “Q-Tip,” or like in the Philippines every toothpaste is called “Colgate.”

So when we went inside at first, it surprised me to see that aside from the newer games in the front near the door, nearly all of these retro game cabinets were shut off. To play them, you have to switch them on. This really threw me off at first because for a moment I was wondering if most of them were out of order. Then I saw the signs printed in Japanese asking customers to shut the cabinets off after using. They had switches dangling on the top right corner. Apparently this is both an effort to conserve energy and to prevent screen burn-in. Some of the screens were in better shape than others. I wonder how many customers they lose when people just poke inside, see that all the machines are off, and just leave?

The first game we tried was Capcom’s Dungeon and Dragons, and the first player’s two main buttons weren’t working. So I was afraid that the place was a dump. But the rest of the games turned out to be fine. It certainly isn’t on par with Taito’s HEY arcade in Akihabara, but we still had fun. Since D&D was a disappointment, we moved on to playing Gradius.

Adrian had never played a Gradius game before. He wasn’t used to the powerup system.

Under Defeat is one of my prized Dreamcast possessions. I think this was the first time I ever saw this game in an arcade. Maybe I have seen it before but overlooked it.

Adrian grew up playing Raiden Fighters Jet at an arcade in Los Angeles in the ’90s.

YES! I got to play Arkanoid with a wonderful knob controller! This PCB is the North American version imported from the USA, a Taito game licensed to Romstar.

I played some Mushihimesama Futari next to Arkanoid.

They have an excellent selection of retro game magazines to peruse! I wish I had more time to look at them more. DOS/V was the Japanese version of DOS for Japanese PCs up until Windows 95 took over in the ’90s. I thought for a moment that this was an old magazine, but it’s from April 2018.

I played some Gal’s Panic 2.

They had the Konami classic multi-game selector, so I introduced my friend to Gyruss.

I had to do it.

I was surprised to see Puzzle! Mushihime-tama there, so I played a round.

It was surprising to see a 4 player Gauntlet cab! It’s always refreshing to see an Atari game in a Japanese game center. The Mikado in Takadanobaba has a Marble Madness cab and I got to play it, but the screen was pretty messed up and the colors were weird. This Gauntlet was in better condition. We could have given it a shot, but by that time we had to get going as it was getting dark and I wanted to get back before it got too late. We were hoping to play some Marvel vs. Capcom against each other, but they didn’t have this game. I did see Vampire Hunter and Vampire Savior and I had practiced this game a bit at home on Steam recently, but maybe next time.

Oh yes, and before we went to this arcade, we had lunch at a place called King God Burger in Maebashi. Fantastic food!

Posted on

New pinball games at Starfighters Arcade

My friend Kevin took these pictures at the Starfighters arcade in Arizona I visited last year. They have some new pinball additions by Stern!

Star Wars: Fall of the Empire. Visuals only from the OT! Prequels can get lost.

G1 Transformers! Yeah!

Unfortunately, I no longer know of any places in Japan where I can play pinball. There was a Mikado location near their main game arcade that specialized in pinball, but it closed down.

Posted on

Dragon Quest 40th Anniversary campaign at Loft 2026

For the 3rd year in a row, Loft has had a Dragon Quest sale. This time it’s for the 40th anniversary of the beloved game series. Lots of neat merchandise on sale.

I bought one of these “Lemon Slime” windchimes. Summer is drawing to an end, but windchimes are nice any time of the year, I say.

I also bought a sheet of Slime stickers.

Posted on

Radiant Silvergun on Steam with an 8BitDo M30 gamepad

Last summer I posted a video on my YouTube and Odysee channels of testing out this LE Earthion Saturn-style gamepad by 8BitDo on Steam via Linux Mint as well as RetroPie. I recently bought Radiant Silvergun on Steam and it works great on Bazzite (I couldn’t get it to work on my Mint desktop). My desktop computer does not have built-in Bluetooth, so I bought a USB Bluetooth dongle. The results were a bit crappy. The controller works fine using the USB cable, but I have had many problems with my install of Steam on my desktop ever since I upgraded to a bigger HD. After a while, Steam forgets that the controller is connected and I have to reboot. When using the Bluetooth, the controls are floaty and is not very responsive. Fortunately with my Optiplex minicomputer with Bazzite as its OS. I am relieved, because I thought that the controller had some compatibility issue with Linux. The problem is either with the USB dongle or (most likely) the bad install of Steam I have on the Mint desktop.

RSG on Steam features English subtitles! I was not expecting this. Mayu-chan bought this game for my Saturn back in 1997 for only 3,000 yen, when she was still my pen-pal! (Or was that in 1999?) It’s one of my most-prized Saturn games in my collection.

However, the game is too awkward playing on a Playstation-style controller (I have a Logitech F310), but if you’ve played the game on the Saturn then an 8BitDo M30 Saturn-style retro gamepad works exactly as you’d expect. After nearly 3 decades of playing RSG, I know the buttons by heart and I was expecting that I’d have to configure the buttons to get it to feel normal to me. It turns out that it wasn’t necessary at all!

I’ve tried this M30 controller out on many games and even when Steam says that the controller may not work, it actually works fine most of the time. So this is great news as it works on nearly all of the shmups I’ve played it on so far, as well as Saturn games I own that I’ve repurchased on Steam. King of Fighters, Metal Slug, Time Gal, Gunbird, Twinkle Star Sprites, Gradius Origins and many other games.

Unfortunately, not all of the Saturn Tribute (“S-Tribute”) games by City Connection do not automatically support the M30, which is a real shame. Elevator Action Returns, Layer Section and Cotton Boomerang work with this controller, but unfortunately Cleopatra Fortune and Metal Black do not. I haven’t tried reconfiguring the Steam Input on such games yet.

I bought several discounted games on Steam’s summer sale, which is unfortunately now over. (Although it’s probably for the best as I already have so many games as it is.) I mostly bought a lot of shmups and other retro games.

Posted on

Raimais, a late-’80s arcade game by Taito

Here’s a late-’80s Taito arcade game I stumbled upon while browsing Final Burn Alpha titles. I guess I could describe it as a cross between Pac-Man and Rally-X, yet with a Taito aesthetic. Navigate the maze to collect the dots while avoiding enemies. You can collect power-ups like one to slow down the enemies, one that will kill one enemy as soon as it touches you, or a laser (similar to Arkanoid). When you clear a screen, several exits open up and the next level will be different depending on which exit you take. Give it a shot or else you suck.

According to Wikipedia, it was released as Youmais for the Famicom Disk System.