Shining Force romhacks, notes and other role-playing obsessions
This is a house with a few rooms in it. In each room sits a game I never really stopped playing — and everything that grew out of it: patches I wrote, mechanics I took apart to see how they tick, and the occasional long argument with myself about why a thirty-year-old strategy RPG still feels better than most things released last year.
Mega Drive · 1992
Shining Force is a classic tactical role-playing game (RPG) developed by Camelot Software Planning and published by SEGA in 1992 for the Mega Drive/Genesis console. It is widely considered one of the pioneers and most influential titles of the tactical RPG genre.
2 mods · 1 teardown · 1 essay
Mega Drive · 1993
The sequel that gave the formula room to breathe: a world you cross on foot, thirty-odd recruits, and battles wide enough to lose a flank in. It is also the game this house takes its name from.
1 mod · 2 teardowns
Mega Drive · 1993
The last and biggest of the Mega Drive Phantasy Stars: turns rolled on agility, five against five, and commands that fuse into Combination Attacks when the order works out. A complete disassembly exists, so the code can be read instead of guessed at.
1 teardown
The unused atlas still opens in the USA ROM. Motavia and Dezolis drawn by the game, with working scrolling, a link to an unused item, and two labels that need fixing.
Read the investigation ▸
Sega's manual promised fifteen Combination Attacks; thirty years of players found fourteen. The combo tables read straight out of the ROM: how many there are, how the game detects one on the turn order, which pairs are ordered, and which combo you can only ever perform between one dungeon and the next.
Read the teardown ▸
The Japanese script in English, inside the US ROM. 1,734 lines translated fresh from the Japanese game, the original names restored, the girl with the picture book and Max's brother put back where the 1993 localisation cut them. An IPS patch for the US ROM that also applies on top of Turn Queue & Tactics.
Read about the patch ▸
Odd Eye survives his defeat and joins the Force. A new recruitment scene, playable ally sprites, the Counter Sword and an MP-powered laser. Download the BPS patch for the original USA ROM.
Meet the newest recruit ▸
Every enemy follows two or three orders keyed to invisible regions painted on the battlefield, and when it charges it scores your party with a formula that, thanks to a bug, reads the wrong table and ignores promoted mages. The regions, the orders and the score, read out of the ROM, with maps of all thirty battles.
Read the teardown ▸
Both ROMs decoded and every one of their 2,232 lines laid side by side. In Japanese the save-file girl wants a bedtime story, Max washed up on a beach with no memory, Kane is his older brother, and the bookshelves are stacked with Sega magazines. The US script kept the plot and rewrote the story around it.
Read the comparison ▸
The hooded witch who keeps your saves turns into a young woman after the credits, wearing the two jewels Mitula carried off in the last scene. Both ROMs decoded, US and Japanese, the ending code traced instruction by instruction, and every clue for and against the two being the same person.
Read the article ▸
The dwarf smith in the hidden village does not roll once for your mithril weapon. He rolls up to four times, down a ladder of four weapons picked by the recipient's class, and stops at the first roll that comes up zero. Here is the routine, both ROM tables, the exact odds counted over all 65536 seeds instead of estimated, and a method that gets you the rarest weapon every single time.
Read the teardown ▸
A quality-of-life romhack for the US Mega Drive release. It puts the turn order on screen, lets you pick a difficulty when you start a new game, stops the game from throwing away surplus experience, and keeps a tally of every kill and every death for each member of the Force. Roughly three kilobytes of IPS patch, with not a single original byte moved.
Read the Turn Queue & Tactics write-up ▸
I play role-playing games and I write code, which is a combination that sooner or later leads you to open one of those games up and start moving instructions around inside it.
This is where everything that comes out of that ends up: the mods I build, notes on how these games are put together, thoughts on the ones I keep going back to, and the occasional long argument with myself about why a thirty-year-old strategy RPG still feels better than most things released last year. Whatever the next obsession turns out to be, it gets written up here too.
The name is borrowed, not invented: Creed's Mansion is a place you visit in Shining Force II, and it seemed like the right sign to hang over a house that collects old games.
Everything published here is either my own work or clearly credited. Patches are distributed as IPS or BPS files: bring your own ROM — no ROMs are hosted here, and they shouldn't be hosted anywhere else either.