El-Hazard for GBA v1.0

posted in Free ROMs News by narvick on Jul 28th, 2003

Rob sends us this news concerning an update to his GBA remake of El-Hazard!:

El-Hazard for the GBA ROM updates -- I finally got a Flash2Advance cartridge kit and was able to fully test and debug on true hardware! (256Mb required, of course) * ROM version now v1.0 for GBA (0x10 in header) * Fixed sound system to properly play BGMs on real hardware (oh, turn the sound chip ON before writing to its registers hur hur) and added channel 3 support to some BGMs for a little bit of variation in the sound. * Fixed real hardware only glitch where some BGMs would cause a massive crash (go into your favorite paint program and randomly spraypaint colors... looks kinda like that); however, I have noticed there's still a situation where this may occur. It appears to be related to after at least one sound effect plays (the major explosion). At this point in time I'm not familiar enough with this area of the bug to properly exterminate it. It only happens intermittedly in this case, and most times if you at least keep going without idling too much things are okay. Hey, I left it idling in Chapter 6 on the map for about 10 minutes while typing this, and it's running fine. * Fixed "Ura Map" graphic, however, it's a bit too slow raising upward at the moment. If you're wondering what the difficulty is... the mode I'm using doesn't allow for multiple layers and there's not enough sprite memory to break it up that way unless I ruin all its colors. So it's using a custom RLE compression method of mine as a major hack. * Fixed exiting the OPTION menu so that dialog images are reloaded (if faces were not turned off) to prevent corrupted graphics / palettes * Fixed some item pictures that weren't displaying correctly ROM will now be distributed only with a validated header (for BIOS boot); however, it will NOT be padded to a full binary 32MB, as this causes an error in writing with Flash2Advance without trimming. It'll run just fine without being padded. Of course, if for one reason or another that would be required or desired, all that's needed is the nifty utility "GameBoy Advance ROM Manipulator" and run it with the -p option. Since IPS patches also seem to malfunction with the original large ROM, AFAIK the only solution is a total redownload of the now 19.8MB ZIP file. However I think for the fixes it's well worth it. If anyone knows and can prove differently, please let me know. Also, this will probably be the last worked-on version unless a significant quantity of bug reports are emailed to me. I'd like to move on and try to develop something original and perhaps more befitting a GBA for its abilities. With all the fixes, however, this game should be plenty playable beginning to end, and probably best applied to long plane trips and the like for its nine different possible outcomes!

Grab it at the GameBoy Advance ROMs page!

EDIT: There have been some problems downloading this file. We are working on a solution and will let everyone know when it is resolved.

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