Time Pilot for SNES

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- Use an IPS-patcher (for example Lunar-IPS: https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/240/ ).
- Apply the patch to a clean rom of Ganbare Goemon - Boku ga Dancer ni Natta Riyuu - Kirakira Douchuu (J).smc (no header).

This hack turns the unlockable Time Pilot game in Ganbare Goemon 4 into a standalone game. It also adds additional features which were not previously included:
- A new main title screen based on the 1982 arcade game
- Title screen includes a working top high score counter
- The game loops back to the first level if you beat the final boss (like the 1982 arcade original)
- The patch makes the NTSC rom region free
- The patched rom is smaller than the original full game (now only 2MB)
 
- Tested on real hardware using flash cartridges and on Snex9X and Mesen-S emulators (works).



Svambo personal notes:

Time Pilot was one of the first games I played back in the days on the C64 with my brother. We spent hours and hours trying to shoot down planes and boss-planes and reach the UFO level.

Many years later the SNES became the console I love the most. Unfortunately it never had a port of Time Pilot. At least I thought so until some time ago I was chatting with Nokia3310 about his brilliant Pitfall and Pacman standalone-hacks (check them out if you haven't yet - I had a lot of fun with them).

Nokia3310 told me there was a Time Pilot game hidden in Ganbare Goemon - Boku ga Dancer ni Natta Riyuu - Kirakira Douchuu. You had to play through the Ganbare Goemon game with a 100% rating to unlock Time Pilot in the mini-games.

Well, one thing let to another an after quite some hours of digging through the code we now present you the Time Pilot standalone-hack.

Hope you have some fun with it.

08.2022 Svambo



Nokia3310 personal notes:

I'm happy to have been involved in this project and the end results are great. Svambo created a main title screen with a top high score counter and did a great job of making all this work the way it does.

Atariboy initially contacted me about Time Pilot in this Japanese only game, so a big thanks to him for making me aware of this. By the time I received the message, Hacker65xx had already created a patch that unlocks this in Ganbare Goemon 4. I wasn't enthusiastic to work on a game when a patch already exists but I mentioned this in a conversation with Svambo.

Svambo has fond memories of a C64 version of Time Pilot, has an attachment to the SNES (like me) and asked if I wanted to work on a standalone version with him. I was surprised that he asked me because I'm still learning. He has achieved some impressive things on SNES. Arkanoid Reblocked, translations of Bomberman 4 and Cotton 100% are all great, essential SNES hacks, just to name a few. He got to work on creating the new, fully working title screen (the hard part!) while I worked on the Game Over stuff.

I also want to thank Hacker65xx for creating the previous Time Pilot Unlocked patch. The new 'standalone game' version doesn't use this but it was useful for testing certain things in the early stages.

I guess it's a strange thing to see a 1982 arcade classic appearing 40 years later on SNES as a standalone game but it's been fun to be a part of it.

Enjoy :)

Nokia3310