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A Sega Master System ROM hack that replaces Ax Battler (Tarik), with Tyris Flare, and most graphics in the game.

Status: Hack complete.

Golden Axe: Tyris Edition Patch:
https://www.pyxosoft.com/projects/sms_golden_axe/downloads/golden_axe_tyris.bps

Golden Axe: Tyris Edition Dark Title Patch (Palette Credit: Slogra):
https://www.pyxosoft.com/projects/sms_golden_axe/downloads/golden_axe_tyris_dark...

SMS Editor source code here: https://github.com/xfixium/SMSEditor

The binaries (.exe) and the Golden Axe: Tyris Edition resources can be found here: https://github.com/xfixium/SMSEditor/releases under the assets section.

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_003.png (23.74 KB)

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_004.png (23.13 KB)

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_005.png (18.98 KB)

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_006.png (21.01 KB)

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_007.png (21.24 KB)

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_008.png (20.19 KB)

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_001.png (21.42 KB)

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_002.png (14.25 KB)

This looks incredible

Oh my god, your work is awesome!!.

Thak you for your time and effort making this hack possible.
Maybe having a physical copy would be incredible.

Thank you for your work!! Great passion project!! I am looking forward to see and play the final result!!

That looks awesome!

You are doing great ;) Thankyou very much !!!

This is absolutely INCREDIBLE.

You seem to've polished up every single aspect of the game. No aspect seems to be worse!

Excellent & impressive work!
Even your editor seems very polished.
Congrats!

Feel free to make a bigger rom if 512k are not enough ^^

A "plus" can be to add a menu to choose the hero (Ax Battler,
Tyris Flare or Gilius Thunderhead). Maybe get in touch with our great Maxim ?

Incredible work! Looking forward to it.

Yes !!! Thank you !
Tyris is my favorite female SEGA character, so I'm more excited with this than the recent free game Golden Axed (PC) news.

OMG!!!!
Impressive work with the game and the editor.
In my wet dreams I can imagine some new games using that editor as kidded can do.

These new graphics look truly amazing. It's definitely a huge upgrade compared to the original. :)

This is really impressive! I wish you the best for this project.

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I didn't think this would garner much attention, guess I was wrong. So thanks again! As for the suggestions.

If I have to go over the 512k original size, so be it, but I'd like to fit everything in using the size limit. If other characters were to be introduced, then yeah, for that you'd definitely have to. This rom is pretty packed. There are a lot of limiting things, the palette would definitely be one of the biggest challenges if going for all 3 selectable characters.

I'm not really all that interested in doing that for the time being. This was basically just a quick side project, because I've always been a Golden Axe fan, and Tyris is one of my fave characters as well :)

That being said, I'll make sure everything is available for anyone who may be interested in pursuing further features. That means all graphic resources, the editor source and binaries, and the SMS Golden Axe project file. Which I hope would come in handy.

I would love to have a physical copy of this Tyris Flare edition. Just as a keepsake. One day I'll have to look into that. I've been shopping around for a SMS Mark III of late, just so I have one. I still have my Genesis and Dreamcast. Phantasy Star is still one of my favorite games of all time.

Right now I'm laying out the last stage. I believe I'll have that done this weekend, as well as cleaning up the other graphics that need a little more polish. The last thing would be handling the compressed images, and trying to fit them into the rom. So maybe 2 weekends worth of work? Then push the patches out for a beta test.

Fantastic work. I already seek your permission to make a showcase video of this when the time comes.

The space gains in the Phantasy Star retranslation came from recompressing a large amount of the artwork and rewiring the pointers throughout. Not a small task but it can get you a lot of extra space. If you’re already editing much of it then it may not be such a big deal. Of course I guess it has a lot of necessarily uncompressed art too which isn’t easy to compress.

Tom wrote

Fantastic work. I already seek your permission to make a showcase video of this when the time comes.

Sounds great, I'm not familiar on what a showcase video means, but it sounds excellent lol

Maxim wrote

The space gains in the Phantasy Star retranslation came from recompressing a large amount of the artwork and rewiring the pointers throughout. Not a small task but it can get you a lot of extra space. If you’re already editing much of it then it may not be such a big deal. Of course I guess it has a lot of necessarily uncompressed art too which isn’t easy to compress.

So basically you're suggesting to compress the uncompressed image data in the ROM, to fit other graphics in? Then updating the pointers to that data? That would be pretty clever. That way, you could have your cake and eat it too, if the end result would be a rom still within the 512k limits. I'm not familiar with the overhead of uncompressing in game, but it doesn't seem to be that intensive? Correct me if I'm wrong.

xfixium wrote

Tom wrote

Fantastic work. I already seek your permission to make a showcase video of this when the time comes.

Sounds great, I'm not familiar on what a showcase video means, but it sounds excellent lol

I can make a full playthrough from start to finish and upload it on Youtube for people to see, think about screenshots, but better. I do have less free time now that I work as a substitute teacher in a high school, but I'm sure I can work something out especially if they're going to close everything again because covid.

Tom wrote

xfixium wrote

Tom wrote

Fantastic work. I already seek your permission to make a showcase video of this when the time comes.

Sounds great, I'm not familiar on what a showcase video means, but it sounds excellent lol
I can make a full playthrough from start to finish and upload it on Youtube for people to see, think about screenshots, but better. I do have less free time now that I work as a substitute teacher in a high school, but I'm sure I can work something out especially if they're going to close everything again because covid.

That would be great! I mean, except for the covid thing lol I wish someone would do that for the Psychic World rom hack too. I never seen that game before coming to this site.

What I was thinking of may not be help much here. It looks like the game stores most of its tile data uncompressed in order to use it to make the "software sprites". Only a few areas like the title screen use a compressed format. If you find all art compressed this way, you can "free" the areas used for the art and the decompressor and replace it with a more powerful compressor and smaller art blocks. The decompressor is at offset $2df, if you catch all calls to that then you will find all the art too.

Doing this for Phantasy Star meant recompressing 71KB of data to 51KB, thus giving 20KB more space in the ROM, albeit in many small pieces.

Switching the game to use compressed art for sprites and backgrounds would likely slow it down too much, and be much more work.

Maxim wrote

What I was thinking of may not be help much here. It looks like the game stores most of its tile data uncompressed in order to use it to make the "software sprites". Only a few areas like the title screen use a compressed format. If you find all art compressed this way, you can "free" the areas used for the art and the decompressor and replace it with a more powerful compressor and smaller art blocks. The decompressor is at offset $2df, if you catch all calls to that then you will find all the art too.

Ah, I see. I may have to look into this if I can not reduce the compressed sizes of the images/tilemaps I want to put into the game. And thanks for sharing the offset location!

Maxim wrote

Switching the game to use compressed art for sprites and backgrounds would likely slow it down too much, and be much more work.

That is useful to know. I wasn't sure how much of a performance hit would come from it.

Edit: I managed to finish the last stage this weekend

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_014.png (19.03 KB)

I wanted that Eagle eye, as much as the turtle eye. Had to do some sacrificing, but I think it came out decently

sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_015.png (15.96 KB)

Absolutely amazing the changes. Can't wait to play the game.

This looks incredible!

hang-on wrote

This looks incredible!

Thank you for your information on the Altered Beast and Golden Axe trainers! It's the first thing I explored when I started researching this project. It was very helpful.

Wow if you are not increasing the rom size, I wonder why the original developers weren't able to design such impressive artwork.

PrOfUnD Darkness wrote

Wow if you are not increasing the rom size, I wonder why the original developers weren't able to design such impressive artwork.

My guess is budget and time constraints. Perhaps the limited graphic tools available at the time it was published, as well?

Edit: Touching up graphics, got all the stages where I like it now. Currently touching up game objects:

screen_40.png (9.8 KB)

Lt. Bitter and Death Adder comparisons

xfixium wrote

My guess is budget and time constraints.

Time constraints are most likely. Iirc, Sega were notorious for giving their developers very tight deadlines (about three months per game from start to finish) for their Master System games.

Additionally, I think the artists were going for maximum readability with the plainer backgrounds. So in the end this might be an artistic decision, probably fueled by a short development cycle in the first place.

Wow, this looks so great, nice job :)

Kagesan wrote

xfixium wrote

My guess is budget and time constraints.

Time constraints are most likely. Iirc, Sega were notorious for giving their developers very tight deadlines (about three months per game from start to finish) for their Master System games.

Yeah, this is very true according to numerous developer interviews; Sega basically imposed the harshest sweatshop conditions for the majority of their in-house SMS titles. Deadlines for Arcade releases were super tight too - considering the bleeding edge nature of some of the hardware - but SMS projects were in their own league of tightness.

bumtree wrote

Kagesan wrote

xfixium wrote

My guess is budget and time constraints.

Time constraints are most likely. Iirc, Sega were notorious for giving their developers very tight deadlines (about three months per game from start to finish) for their Master System games.

Yeah, this is very true according to numerous developer interviews; Sega basically imposed the harshest sweatshop conditions for the majority of their in-house SMS titles. Deadlines for Arcade releases were super tight too - considering the bleeding edge nature of some of the hardware - but SMS projects were in their own league of tightness.

Going a bit off the topic, but I was thinking that after seeing Jeremy Parish latest videos (he had been reviewing every North American NES and every Game Boy release in chronological order, only recently taking some time to look at Atari and Sega's comparative offerings in the same time periods).

He finished the 7800 1986/1987 lineup in only two or three videos.
But the shocker was just how small that 7800 library was: is that right that TWO GAMES, two ports of older computer games, is all Atari could muster in 1987?
(though he's only done one Game Gear video since I think the Japanese launch games were all that was out by the end of 1990? Maybe one or two more by the end of the year?)

Guessing from that perspective, Sega probably felt a need for tight timelines to get a fair quantity of games out to put up a presence on the retail shelves?
At the least, I think it's safe to say he'll have more SMS games to talk about in 1986-1987 retrospective. :)

Wow!!!

Awesome!!! the graphics look great, I wonder Can the 3 character be at the same time on screen since the blue, green and red are in life bars, forest, fire magic respectively, If the characters can then might be playable by romhacking keeping the fantastic art of yours.

KingMike wrote

Guessing from that perspective, Sega probably felt a need for tight timelines to get a fair quantity of games out to put up a presence on the retail shelves?

Mark Cerny has said as much, complaining that early on, Sega put too much emphasis on quantity and not enough on quality in the SMS library. However, I've always felt that he was oversimplifying or perhaps just focusing on the worst examples in that regard, because quite a few of the earliest games in the library have some surprising hidden depth in the gameplay mechanics. Although a game like Great Basketball was not what a basketball game could or should be in 1986, something like Enduro Racer or The Ninja appeared to be quite simple at first but actually held some satisfying depth.

I think it was more problematic several years later, when you would see a game like Aerial Assault come out that was clearly inferior to a game like R-Type that had preceded it by a few years. It just made me wonder if developers were putting their junior staff on 8-bit games while the more senior staff were focused on building the 16-bit library.

Not to go too off topic but I agree. Despite the accounts of dubious deadlines and working conditions, a bunch of the early ones circa 1986 do Indeed hold up well.

The Ninja is a great example; while on the face of it it's a downgrade from the arcade original it really does prove to be the superior, more refined game.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World still defines the system to an extent.

Fantasy Zone is probably far better than a game quickly co-developed alongside the original ought to have been.

Anyway, I'm going to refamiliarise myself with Golden Axe SMS in anticipation of this remarkable looking overhaul..

[quote="Centrale"]

KingMike wrote

It just made me wonder if developers were putting their junior staff on 8-bit games while the more senior staff were focused on building the 16-bit library.

lol I thought this as well. Also, there are no credits for this game at the end. Not that every game had credits at the end though, but it's highly sus.

Thanks again for the encouraging words everyone! Like I said previously, I'm reworking some of the graphics atm. I didn't have the time this weekend to finish, unfortunately. So, it continues forward, till this weekend, I should be free to polish it off.

screen_41.png (9.15 KB)

Screwing around with the SMS palette and Adder family. Touched up his mask, as it was a tad flat before.

[quote="Centrale"]

KingMike wrote

I think it was more problematic several years later, when you would see a game like Aerial Assault come out that was clearly inferior to a game like R-Type that had preceded it by a few years. It just made me wonder if developers were putting their junior staff on 8-bit games while the more senior staff were focused on building the 16-bit library.

In a Spanish Megaforce magazine issue around 1991, they already said that Juniors went to the Master System division, later promoting to Megadrive one and later on to the Arcade.

very good work, i love golden axe :>

Hi all, wanted to give an update, as I unfortunately have been busy with other things. My bro gave me 2 of his Game Gears a while back that didn't work, for me to fix. I replaced the caps in both. Both were worked after recapping, but the screen of the older one was still screwed. So I bought one of those McWill screens, and that took up my last weekend, and some of the one prior.

I'm back on this project this weekend, I have one last thing I want to touch up (re-sprite) before a "beta" release for testing. I also got my son a ps vita, and set up retroarch on it. So I loaded the modded rom on it for giggles.

20201105_191920.jpg (3.83 MB)

McWill wiring up

20201105_210925_1.jpg (1.43 MB)

McWill, my first time ever doing this. I'm actually surprised it worked XD

20201107_162244.jpg (3.86 MB)

Golden Axe hack on a hacked PS Vita

You put alot of love in!
Looks like an early Megadrive game, wow!
Golden Axe already looked pretty cool for an 8 bit game, but this is just amazing

Update:
I've completed the touch ups to the sprites. This was a pain because I decided to redo a couple of sprites entirely. lol But, things are mostly where I would like them to be.

I forgot that I had to adjust the origin points of some of Tyris's tilemaps. This is because I changed the tilemap size for things like Tyris laying down, and her flying kick. So I changed up the tool I created, and added a properties page. So that the origin points can be changed. (I actually don't know what the points are called, so I defined the 4 bytes as a "rect") I had already kept track what things I changed, so I went back and cleaned that up.

Changed tilemaps:
Ax Battler Attack Up, Frame 1, 7 x 5 (253, 249) (254,249)
Ax Battler Kick, Frame 2, 5 x 8 (252,248) (255,248)
Ax Battler Camp, Frame 1, 6 x 3 (253,253)
Ax Battler Tackle, Frame 1, 6 x 5 (254,249) (253,249)
Ax Battler Damage, Frame 1, 4 x 8 (254, 248) (254,248)

So, I got to the compression crap today. I was pleasantly surprised that I could fit the new HUD graphics with no change to the rom at all. I haven't changed the Title or the magic select screen yet, however. But honestly, if those don't work out, I'm pretty happy with the things as they are right now.

But enough talking, I've attached a test patch for Golden Axe Tyris Flare edition. This is my first rom hack, so hopefully the patch works. It seemed pretty painless. I used floating131, as described by this site here: https://www.smspower.org/Hacks/HowToUseBPSAndIPSPatchFiles

I believe you need to download it, to apply the patch

Please give it a play through, and some feedback. Thanks!!

EDIT: Looks like I forgot 2 palette entries on Tyris's stage 5 palette. I'll fix that up for next test release.

I also attached the sprite graphics, and my next idea for a 2 player TMNT game, based on the NES version.

sprites.png (519.56 KB)

All sprite changes

sms_tmnt_0002.png (12.37 KB)

I believe there is no SMS TMNT, there honestly should be imo

golden_axe_tyris_test.zip (202.37 KB)

Golden Axe Tyris Flare Test Patch

That's some terrific sprite work.

xfixium thank you for your effort and time making this hack possible. Golden Axe is one of my favourite games because my dad bought it for my brother and me.

But one thing called my attention more than anything in your post.
And it is related with your next idea.
Can we know more about it?

The SMS has no TMTN game and only a very few 2 players coop games. When I was a child I used to think why Sega didn't make Golden Axe or Streets of Rage with 2 players.

Thank you!.

Aranya wrote

xfixium thank you for your effort and time making this hack possible. Golden Axe is one of my favourite games because my dad bought it for my brother and me.

Yes, I do recall you saying you were allowed very few games a year. :)

Aranya wrote

But one thing called my attention more than anything in your post.
And it is related with your next idea.
Can we know more about it?

The SMS has no TMTN game and only a very few 2 players coop games. When I was a child I used to think why Sega didn't make Golden Axe or Streets of Rage with 2 players.

I hear ya. I wondered that myself. Golden Axe I can sort of see why. Since the drawing technique seems intensive, so much that it affects input polling it seems. But Double Dragon exists, and therefore I believe a TMNT type game has hope in that regard. I mean, it'd probably be a flicker fest, but at least it SEEMS doable on the surface.

About a week ago or such, I threw together a stage 1 mock-up, and put together how I think the palette system would work for the game. I plan on playing by the "rules", and have manageable sprite sizes, and object management on each area. Very closely mimicking the NES version (But referencing the original arcade graphics a bit, as I believe SMS can kill NES in this regard).

As I may have mentioned before, I'm very green when it comes to what the SMS can do. I understand certain things, based on what this site has provided. I'd like to start learning to code at this point. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But at the very least, I want to gather the graphic resources.

stage_01.png (17.27 KB)

Stage 1 mock up and palette theory

Actually, a game like TMNT 2 it's not the most complex thing in the world. We have the amazing GSLib from Psidum to take care of all the background stuff. Sprites, collisions and so on are not so easy, but it's not the most complex of the games.

kusfo wrote

Actually, a game like TMNT 2 it's not the most complex thing in the world. We have the amazing GSLib from Psidum to take care of all the background stuff. Sprites, collisions and so on are not so easy, but it's not the most complex of the games.

I'll have to look into that lib, as well as the SMSKit that I see mentioned. I've done game development in other frameworks before (ie Game Maker, Godot, Unreal, and Unity), but not for the SMS. I'm sure there will be pain points. For now, I'm just gonna do all the graphics for everything in TMNT, and go from there. Sprite work is kinda therapeutic for me.

Also, for any who are interested, any feedback on the patch would be appreciated. It seemed to run well for me, but that may not be true for others. Thanks in advance.

I'll try to test the patch at my computer (today I'm using my work laptop). In any case, developing for the SMS has its difficulties (programming in C, etc), but also the machine is quite simple and the VDP and the PSG do almost everything by themselves.

If you're curious, this is the source code of a game demo I did on two different one day Jam sessions a while ago (it's a brawler). It uses GSLib a lot.

https://github.com/kusfo/mastersystembrawler

kusfo wrote

I'll try to test the patch at my computer (today I'm using my work laptop). In any case, developing for the SMS has its difficulties (programming in C, etc), but also the machine is quite simple and the VDP and the PSG do almost everything by themselves.

If you're curious, this is the source code of a game demo I did on two different one day Jam sessions a while ago (it's a brawler). It uses GSLib a lot.

https://github.com/kusfo/mastersystembrawler

Thank you for the information, any bit is appreciated. I'll take a look at that source. I tend to do a bunch of research before delving into things, and anything will help.

Splendid sprite work! I only have a single remark. The hammer of the boss is too blue for my taste.

Also looking forward to your TMNT project! :)

Amazing! I made a little video:

I had 2 bugs (not on this video). I don't know if they are already present in the original game.

In the very begining of Stage 2, the first enemie can be stuck off screen on the left and then you can't do nothing.

In Stage 2 when you meet the first dragon, if the dragon want to leave the screen by the left, it can be stuck by the wall, then the dragon will jump forever.

Calindro wrote

Splendid sprite work! I only have a single remark. The hammer of the boss is too blue for my taste.

Also looking forward to your TMNT project! :)

Thanks! In the instance of the hammer, I just copied the source material. As the arcade and genesis ports also have the hammer colored using the primary palette colors.

Revo wrote

In the very begining of Stage 2, the first enemie can be stuck off screen on the left and then you can't do nothing.

I'll have to look into that on the original, how did you make him stuck?

Revo wrote

In Stage 2 when you meet the first dragon, if the dragon want to leave the screen by the left, it can be stuck by the wall, then the dragon will jump forever.

I know this exists in the original, I've triggered it a few times in different spots.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

Author	Message
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	SMS Golden Axe Tyris Flare Edition ROM Hack Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2020 10:13 am Last edited by xfixium on Wed Jul 06, 2022 9:58 pm; edited 8 times in total
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	A Sega Master System ROM hack that replaces Ax Battler (Tarik), with Tyris Flare, and most graphics in the game. Status: Hack complete. Golden Axe: Tyris Edition Patch: https://www.pyxosoft.com/projects/sms_golden_axe/downloads/golden_axe_tyris.bps Golden Axe: Tyris Edition Dark Title Patch (Palette Credit: Slogra): https://www.pyxosoft.com/projects/sms_golden_axe/downloads/golden_axe_tyris_dark... SMS Editor source code here: https://github.com/xfixium/SMSEditor The binaries (.exe) and the Golden Axe: Tyris Edition resources can be found here: https://github.com/xfixium/SMSEditor/releases under the assets section. sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_003.png (23.74 KB) sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_004.png (23.13 KB) sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_005.png (18.98 KB) sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_006.png (21.01 KB) sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_007.png (21.24 KB) sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_008.png (20.19 KB) sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_001.png (21.42 KB) sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_002.png (14.25 KB)

bumtree Joined: 01 Apr 2016 Posts: 45	Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2020 11:00 am
bumtree Joined: 01 Apr 2016 Posts: 45	This looks incredible

Aranya Joined: 02 Mar 2011 Posts: 175 Location: Valencia,Spain.	Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2020 12:59 pm
	Oh my god, your work is awesome!!. Thak you for your time and effort making this hack possible. Maybe having a physical copy would be incredible.

Estelios Joined: 12 Apr 2018 Posts: 29 Location: Chania, Crete	Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2020 1:38 pm
	Thank you for your work!! Great passion project!! I am looking forward to see and play the final result!!

haroldoop Joined: 25 Feb 2006 Posts: 919 Location: Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil	Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2020 8:14 pm
	That looks awesome!

BcnAbel76 Joined: 28 Feb 2016 Posts: 504 Location: Barcelona	Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2020 10:13 pm
	You are doing great ;) Thankyou very much !!!

Flygon Joined: 30 Jun 2016 Posts: 202 Location: Australia	Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:07 am
	This is absolutely INCREDIBLE. You seem to've polished up every single aspect of the game. No aspect seems to be worse!

ichigobankai Joined: 04 Jul 2010 Posts: 560 Location: Angers, France	Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:41 am
	Excellent & impressive work! Even your editor seems very polished. Congrats! Feel free to make a bigger rom if 512k are not enough ^^ A "plus" can be to add a menu to choose the hero (Ax Battler, Tyris Flare or Gilius Thunderhead). Maybe get in touch with our great Maxim ?

Bock Site Admin Joined: 08 Jul 2001 Posts: 8735 Location: Paris, France	Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 8:12 am
	Incredible work! Looking forward to it.

bertodecosta Joined: 21 Oct 2016 Posts: 21	Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 8:29 am
bertodecosta Joined: 21 Oct 2016 Posts: 21	Yes !!! Thank you ! Tyris is my favorite female SEGA character, so I'm more excited with this than the recent free game Golden Axed (PC) news.

law81 Joined: 21 Oct 2015 Posts: 304	Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 9:20 am
law81 Joined: 21 Oct 2015 Posts: 304	OMG!!!! Impressive work with the game and the editor. In my wet dreams I can imagine some new games using that editor as kidded can do.

Calindro Joined: 14 Apr 2013 Posts: 641	Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 9:49 am
Calindro Joined: 14 Apr 2013 Posts: 641	These new graphics look truly amazing. It's definitely a huge upgrade compared to the original. :)

Revo Guest	Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 10:43 am
Revo Guest	This is really impressive! I wish you the best for this project.

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 1:57 am
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Thanks for the feedback everyone! I didn't think this would garner much attention, guess I was wrong. So thanks again! As for the suggestions. If I have to go over the 512k original size, so be it, but I'd like to fit everything in using the size limit. If other characters were to be introduced, then yeah, for that you'd definitely have to. This rom is pretty packed. There are a lot of limiting things, the palette would definitely be one of the biggest challenges if going for all 3 selectable characters. I'm not really all that interested in doing that for the time being. This was basically just a quick side project, because I've always been a Golden Axe fan, and Tyris is one of my fave characters as well :) That being said, I'll make sure everything is available for anyone who may be interested in pursuing further features. That means all graphic resources, the editor source and binaries, and the SMS Golden Axe project file. Which I hope would come in handy. I would love to have a physical copy of this Tyris Flare edition. Just as a keepsake. One day I'll have to look into that. I've been shopping around for a SMS Mark III of late, just so I have one. I still have my Genesis and Dreamcast. Phantasy Star is still one of my favorite games of all time. Right now I'm laying out the last stage. I believe I'll have that done this weekend, as well as cleaning up the other graphics that need a little more polish. The last thing would be handling the compressed images, and trying to fit them into the rom. So maybe 2 weekends worth of work? Then push the patches out for a beta test.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1385 Location: italy	Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 5:41 am
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1385 Location: italy	Fantastic work. I already seek your permission to make a showcase video of this when the time comes.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 15016 Location: London	Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 7:07 am
	The space gains in the Phantasy Star retranslation came from recompressing a large amount of the artwork and rewiring the pointers throughout. Not a small task but it can get you a lot of extra space. If you’re already editing much of it then it may not be such a big deal. Of course I guess it has a lot of necessarily uncompressed art too which isn’t easy to compress.

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:26 pm
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Tom wrote Fantastic work. I already seek your permission to make a showcase video of this when the time comes. Sounds great, I'm not familiar on what a showcase video means, but it sounds excellent lol Maxim wrote The space gains in the Phantasy Star retranslation came from recompressing a large amount of the artwork and rewiring the pointers throughout. Not a small task but it can get you a lot of extra space. If you’re already editing much of it then it may not be such a big deal. Of course I guess it has a lot of necessarily uncompressed art too which isn’t easy to compress. So basically you're suggesting to compress the uncompressed image data in the ROM, to fit other graphics in? Then updating the pointers to that data? That would be pretty clever. That way, you could have your cake and eat it too, if the end result would be a rom still within the 512k limits. I'm not familiar with the overhead of uncompressing in game, but it doesn't seem to be that intensive? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1385 Location: italy	Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:40 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1385 Location: italy	xfixium wrote Tom wrote Fantastic work. I already seek your permission to make a showcase video of this when the time comes. Sounds great, I'm not familiar on what a showcase video means, but it sounds excellent lol I can make a full playthrough from start to finish and upload it on Youtube for people to see, think about screenshots, but better. I do have less free time now that I work as a substitute teacher in a high school, but I'm sure I can work something out especially if they're going to close everything again because covid.

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 1:32 pm Last edited by xfixium on Mon Oct 19, 2020 9:55 am; edited 1 time in total
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Tom wrote xfixium wrote Tom wrote Fantastic work. I already seek your permission to make a showcase video of this when the time comes. Sounds great, I'm not familiar on what a showcase video means, but it sounds excellent lol I can make a full playthrough from start to finish and upload it on Youtube for people to see, think about screenshots, but better. I do have less free time now that I work as a substitute teacher in a high school, but I'm sure I can work something out especially if they're going to close everything again because covid. That would be great! I mean, except for the covid thing lol I wish someone would do that for the Psychic World rom hack too. I never seen that game before coming to this site.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 15016 Location: London	Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 1:52 pm
	What I was thinking of may not be help much here. It looks like the game stores most of its tile data uncompressed in order to use it to make the "software sprites". Only a few areas like the title screen use a compressed format. If you find all art compressed this way, you can "free" the areas used for the art and the decompressor and replace it with a more powerful compressor and smaller art blocks. The decompressor is at offset $2df, if you catch all calls to that then you will find all the art too. Doing this for Phantasy Star meant recompressing 71KB of data to 51KB, thus giving 20KB more space in the ROM, albeit in many small pieces. Switching the game to use compressed art for sprites and backgrounds would likely slow it down too much, and be much more work.

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2020 12:48 am
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Maxim wrote What I was thinking of may not be help much here. It looks like the game stores most of its tile data uncompressed in order to use it to make the "software sprites". Only a few areas like the title screen use a compressed format. If you find all art compressed this way, you can "free" the areas used for the art and the decompressor and replace it with a more powerful compressor and smaller art blocks. The decompressor is at offset $2df, if you catch all calls to that then you will find all the art too. Ah, I see. I may have to look into this if I can not reduce the compressed sizes of the images/tilemaps I want to put into the game. And thanks for sharing the offset location! Maxim wrote Switching the game to use compressed art for sprites and backgrounds would likely slow it down too much, and be much more work. That is useful to know. I wasn't sure how much of a performance hit would come from it. Edit: I managed to finish the last stage this weekend sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_014.png (19.03 KB) I wanted that Eagle eye, as much as the turtle eye. Had to do some sacrificing, but I think it came out decently sms_golden_axe_tyris_flare_015.png (15.96 KB)

law81 Joined: 21 Oct 2015 Posts: 304	Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2020 9:30 am
law81 Joined: 21 Oct 2015 Posts: 304	Absolutely amazing the changes. Can't wait to play the game.

hang-on Joined: 23 Mar 2013 Posts: 611 Location: Copenhagen, Denmark	Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2020 8:46 pm
	This looks incredible!

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2020 7:35 am
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	hang-on wrote This looks incredible! Thank you for your information on the Altered Beast and Golden Axe trainers! It's the first thing I explored when I started researching this project. It was very helpful.

PrOfUnD Darkness Joined: 29 Jun 1999 Posts: 392 Location: Brazil	Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2020 5:13 am
	Wow if you are not increasing the rom size, I wonder why the original developers weren't able to design such impressive artwork.

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2020 9:33 am
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	PrOfUnD Darkness wrote Wow if you are not increasing the rom size, I wonder why the original developers weren't able to design such impressive artwork. My guess is budget and time constraints. Perhaps the limited graphic tools available at the time it was published, as well? Edit: Touching up graphics, got all the stages where I like it now. Currently touching up game objects: screen_40.png (9.8 KB) Lt. Bitter and Death Adder comparisons

Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 897	Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2020 5:47 am
Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 897	xfixium wrote My guess is budget and time constraints. Time constraints are most likely. Iirc, Sega were notorious for giving their developers very tight deadlines (about three months per game from start to finish) for their Master System games. Additionally, I think the artists were going for maximum readability with the plainer backgrounds. So in the end this might be an artistic decision, probably fueled by a short development cycle in the first place.

dink Joined: 09 Dec 2013 Posts: 233 Location: detroit	Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2020 1:42 pm
dink Joined: 09 Dec 2013 Posts: 233 Location: detroit	Wow, this looks so great, nice job :)

bumtree Joined: 01 Apr 2016 Posts: 45	Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2020 8:40 pm
bumtree Joined: 01 Apr 2016 Posts: 45	Kagesan wrote xfixium wrote My guess is budget and time constraints. Time constraints are most likely. Iirc, Sega were notorious for giving their developers very tight deadlines (about three months per game from start to finish) for their Master System games. Yeah, this is very true according to numerous developer interviews; Sega basically imposed the harshest sweatshop conditions for the majority of their in-house SMS titles. Deadlines for Arcade releases were super tight too - considering the bleeding edge nature of some of the hardware - but SMS projects were in their own league of tightness.

KingMike Joined: 14 Oct 2008 Posts: 540	Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 2:11 am
KingMike Joined: 14 Oct 2008 Posts: 540	bumtree wrote Kagesan wrote xfixium wrote My guess is budget and time constraints. Time constraints are most likely. Iirc, Sega were notorious for giving their developers very tight deadlines (about three months per game from start to finish) for their Master System games. Yeah, this is very true according to numerous developer interviews; Sega basically imposed the harshest sweatshop conditions for the majority of their in-house SMS titles. Deadlines for Arcade releases were super tight too - considering the bleeding edge nature of some of the hardware - but SMS projects were in their own league of tightness. Going a bit off the topic, but I was thinking that after seeing Jeremy Parish latest videos (he had been reviewing every North American NES and every Game Boy release in chronological order, only recently taking some time to look at Atari and Sega's comparative offerings in the same time periods). He finished the 7800 1986/1987 lineup in only two or three videos. But the shocker was just how small that 7800 library was: is that right that TWO GAMES, two ports of older computer games, is all Atari could muster in 1987? (though he's only done one Game Gear video since I think the Japanese launch games were all that was out by the end of 1990? Maybe one or two more by the end of the year?) Guessing from that perspective, Sega probably felt a need for tight timelines to get a fair quantity of games out to put up a presence on the retail shelves? At the least, I think it's safe to say he'll have more SMS games to talk about in 1986-1987 retrospective. :)

gorgyrip Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 81	Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2020 12:48 am
gorgyrip Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 81	Wow!!!

FeRcHuLeS Joined: 22 Mar 2015 Posts: 228	Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2020 5:12 pm
FeRcHuLeS Joined: 22 Mar 2015 Posts: 228	Awesome!!! the graphics look great, I wonder Can the 3 character be at the same time on screen since the blue, green and red are in life bars, forest, fire magic respectively, If the characters can then might be playable by romhacking keeping the fantastic art of yours.

Centrale Joined: 06 Apr 2015 Posts: 97	Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2020 7:57 pm
Centrale Joined: 06 Apr 2015 Posts: 97	KingMike wrote Guessing from that perspective, Sega probably felt a need for tight timelines to get a fair quantity of games out to put up a presence on the retail shelves? Mark Cerny has said as much, complaining that early on, Sega put too much emphasis on quantity and not enough on quality in the SMS library. However, I've always felt that he was oversimplifying or perhaps just focusing on the worst examples in that regard, because quite a few of the earliest games in the library have some surprising hidden depth in the gameplay mechanics. Although a game like Great Basketball was not what a basketball game could or should be in 1986, something like Enduro Racer or The Ninja appeared to be quite simple at first but actually held some satisfying depth. I think it was more problematic several years later, when you would see a game like Aerial Assault come out that was clearly inferior to a game like R-Type that had preceded it by a few years. It just made me wonder if developers were putting their junior staff on 8-bit games while the more senior staff were focused on building the 16-bit library.

bumtree Joined: 01 Apr 2016 Posts: 45	Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2020 12:22 am
bumtree Joined: 01 Apr 2016 Posts: 45	Not to go too off topic but I agree. Despite the accounts of dubious deadlines and working conditions, a bunch of the early ones circa 1986 do Indeed hold up well. The Ninja is a great example; while on the face of it it's a downgrade from the arcade original it really does prove to be the superior, more refined game. Alex Kidd in Miracle World still defines the system to an extent. Fantasy Zone is probably far better than a game quickly co-developed alongside the original ought to have been. Anyway, I'm going to refamiliarise myself with Golden Axe SMS in anticipation of this remarkable looking overhaul..

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2020 1:58 am
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	[quote="Centrale"] KingMike wrote It just made me wonder if developers were putting their junior staff on 8-bit games while the more senior staff were focused on building the 16-bit library. lol I thought this as well. Also, there are no credits for this game at the end. Not that every game had credits at the end though, but it's highly sus. Thanks again for the encouraging words everyone! Like I said previously, I'm reworking some of the graphics atm. I didn't have the time this weekend to finish, unfortunately. So, it continues forward, till this weekend, I should be free to polish it off. screen_41.png (9.15 KB) Screwing around with the SMS palette and Adder family. Touched up his mask, as it was a tad flat before.

kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 905 Location: Spain	Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2020 8:20 am
kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 905 Location: Spain	[quote="Centrale"] KingMike wrote I think it was more problematic several years later, when you would see a game like Aerial Assault come out that was clearly inferior to a game like R-Type that had preceded it by a few years. It just made me wonder if developers were putting their junior staff on 8-bit games while the more senior staff were focused on building the 16-bit library. In a Spanish Megaforce magazine issue around 1991, they already said that Juniors went to the Master System division, later promoting to Megadrive one and later on to the Arcade.

minden_ Joined: 07 May 2015 Posts: 3 Location: Germany	Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2020 12:48 pm
minden_ Joined: 07 May 2015 Posts: 3 Location: Germany	very good work, i love golden axe :>

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2020 9:41 pm
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Hi all, wanted to give an update, as I unfortunately have been busy with other things. My bro gave me 2 of his Game Gears a while back that didn't work, for me to fix. I replaced the caps in both. Both were worked after recapping, but the screen of the older one was still screwed. So I bought one of those McWill screens, and that took up my last weekend, and some of the one prior. I'm back on this project this weekend, I have one last thing I want to touch up (re-sprite) before a "beta" release for testing. I also got my son a ps vita, and set up retroarch on it. So I loaded the modded rom on it for giggles. 20201105_191920.jpg (3.83 MB) McWill wiring up 20201105_210925_1.jpg (1.43 MB) McWill, my first time ever doing this. I'm actually surprised it worked XD 20201107_162244.jpg (3.86 MB) Golden Axe hack on a hacked PS Vita

D Joined: 01 Apr 2005 Posts: 255 Location: Almere, The Netherlands	Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2020 3:58 pm
	You put alot of love in! Looks like an early Megadrive game, wow! Golden Axe already looked pretty cool for an 8 bit game, but this is just amazing

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 8:58 pm
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Update: I've completed the touch ups to the sprites. This was a pain because I decided to redo a couple of sprites entirely. lol But, things are mostly where I would like them to be. I forgot that I had to adjust the origin points of some of Tyris's tilemaps. This is because I changed the tilemap size for things like Tyris laying down, and her flying kick. So I changed up the tool I created, and added a properties page. So that the origin points can be changed. (I actually don't know what the points are called, so I defined the 4 bytes as a "rect") I had already kept track what things I changed, so I went back and cleaned that up. Changed tilemaps: Ax Battler Attack Up, Frame 1, 7 x 5 (253, 249) (254,249) Ax Battler Kick, Frame 2, 5 x 8 (252,248) (255,248) Ax Battler Camp, Frame 1, 6 x 3 (253,253) Ax Battler Tackle, Frame 1, 6 x 5 (254,249) (253,249) Ax Battler Damage, Frame 1, 4 x 8 (254, 248) (254,248) So, I got to the compression crap today. I was pleasantly surprised that I could fit the new HUD graphics with no change to the rom at all. I haven't changed the Title or the magic select screen yet, however. But honestly, if those don't work out, I'm pretty happy with the things as they are right now. But enough talking, I've attached a test patch for Golden Axe Tyris Flare edition. This is my first rom hack, so hopefully the patch works. It seemed pretty painless. I used floating131, as described by this site here: https://www.smspower.org/Hacks/HowToUseBPSAndIPSPatchFiles I believe you need to download it, to apply the patch Please give it a play through, and some feedback. Thanks!! EDIT: Looks like I forgot 2 palette entries on Tyris's stage 5 palette. I'll fix that up for next test release. I also attached the sprite graphics, and my next idea for a 2 player TMNT game, based on the NES version. sprites.png (519.56 KB) All sprite changes sms_tmnt_0002.png (12.37 KB) I believe there is no SMS TMNT, there honestly should be imo golden_axe_tyris_test.zip (202.37 KB) Golden Axe Tyris Flare Test Patch

Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 897	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 8:09 am
Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 897	That's some terrific sprite work.

Aranya Joined: 02 Mar 2011 Posts: 175 Location: Valencia,Spain.	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 9:53 am
	xfixium thank you for your effort and time making this hack possible. Golden Axe is one of my favourite games because my dad bought it for my brother and me. But one thing called my attention more than anything in your post. And it is related with your next idea. Can we know more about it? The SMS has no TMTN game and only a very few 2 players coop games. When I was a child I used to think why Sega didn't make Golden Axe or Streets of Rage with 2 players. Thank you!.

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 11:34 am
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Aranya wrote xfixium thank you for your effort and time making this hack possible. Golden Axe is one of my favourite games because my dad bought it for my brother and me. Yes, I do recall you saying you were allowed very few games a year. :) Aranya wrote But one thing called my attention more than anything in your post. And it is related with your next idea. Can we know more about it? The SMS has no TMTN game and only a very few 2 players coop games. When I was a child I used to think why Sega didn't make Golden Axe or Streets of Rage with 2 players. I hear ya. I wondered that myself. Golden Axe I can sort of see why. Since the drawing technique seems intensive, so much that it affects input polling it seems. But Double Dragon exists, and therefore I believe a TMNT type game has hope in that regard. I mean, it'd probably be a flicker fest, but at least it SEEMS doable on the surface. About a week ago or such, I threw together a stage 1 mock-up, and put together how I think the palette system would work for the game. I plan on playing by the "rules", and have manageable sprite sizes, and object management on each area. Very closely mimicking the NES version (But referencing the original arcade graphics a bit, as I believe SMS can kill NES in this regard). As I may have mentioned before, I'm very green when it comes to what the SMS can do. I understand certain things, based on what this site has provided. I'd like to start learning to code at this point. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But at the very least, I want to gather the graphic resources. stage_01.png (17.27 KB) Stage 1 mock up and palette theory

kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 905 Location: Spain	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 1:14 pm
kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 905 Location: Spain	Actually, a game like TMNT 2 it's not the most complex thing in the world. We have the amazing GSLib from Psidum to take care of all the background stuff. Sprites, collisions and so on are not so easy, but it's not the most complex of the games.

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 2:19 pm
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	kusfo wrote Actually, a game like TMNT 2 it's not the most complex thing in the world. We have the amazing GSLib from Psidum to take care of all the background stuff. Sprites, collisions and so on are not so easy, but it's not the most complex of the games. I'll have to look into that lib, as well as the SMSKit that I see mentioned. I've done game development in other frameworks before (ie Game Maker, Godot, Unreal, and Unity), but not for the SMS. I'm sure there will be pain points. For now, I'm just gonna do all the graphics for everything in TMNT, and go from there. Sprite work is kinda therapeutic for me. Also, for any who are interested, any feedback on the patch would be appreciated. It seemed to run well for me, but that may not be true for others. Thanks in advance.

kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 905 Location: Spain	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 2:22 pm
kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 905 Location: Spain	I'll try to test the patch at my computer (today I'm using my work laptop). In any case, developing for the SMS has its difficulties (programming in C, etc), but also the machine is quite simple and the VDP and the PSG do almost everything by themselves. If you're curious, this is the source code of a game demo I did on two different one day Jam sessions a while ago (it's a brawler). It uses GSLib a lot. https://github.com/kusfo/mastersystembrawler

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 2:32 pm
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	kusfo wrote I'll try to test the patch at my computer (today I'm using my work laptop). In any case, developing for the SMS has its difficulties (programming in C, etc), but also the machine is quite simple and the VDP and the PSG do almost everything by themselves. If you're curious, this is the source code of a game demo I did on two different one day Jam sessions a while ago (it's a brawler). It uses GSLib a lot. https://github.com/kusfo/mastersystembrawler Thank you for the information, any bit is appreciated. I'll take a look at that source. I tend to do a bunch of research before delving into things, and anything will help.

Calindro Joined: 14 Apr 2013 Posts: 641	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 4:22 pm
Calindro Joined: 14 Apr 2013 Posts: 641	Splendid sprite work! I only have a single remark. The hammer of the boss is too blue for my taste. Also looking forward to your TMNT project! :)

Revo Guest	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 8:30 pm
Revo Guest	Amazing! I made a little video: I had 2 bugs (not on this video). I don't know if they are already present in the original game. In the very begining of Stage 2, the first enemie can be stuck off screen on the left and then you can't do nothing. In Stage 2 when you meet the first dragon, if the dragon want to leave the screen by the left, it can be stuck by the wall, then the dragon will jump forever.

xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 9:29 pm
xfixium Joined: 18 Jul 2020 Posts: 410	Calindro wrote Splendid sprite work! I only have a single remark. The hammer of the boss is too blue for my taste. Also looking forward to your TMNT project! :) Thanks! In the instance of the hammer, I just copied the source material. As the arcade and genesis ports also have the hammer colored using the primary palette colors. Revo wrote In the very begining of Stage 2, the first enemie can be stuck off screen on the left and then you can't do nothing. I'll have to look into that on the original, how did you make him stuck? Revo wrote In Stage 2 when you meet the first dragon, if the dragon want to leave the screen by the left, it can be stuck by the wall, then the dragon will jump forever. I know this exists in the original, I've triggered it a few times in different spots. Thanks for the feedback! :)

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