After Burner II Silent Attract Mode Available for Download!

supertechnoboy

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After Burner II Silent Attract Mode Available for Download!

I have developed a silent attract mode for After Burner II. I modified the two program ROMs to mute the engine, missile, and explosion sounds that occur during the attract sequence because, frankly, they drive me nuts!

I had a pretty steep learning curve, having never even seen assembly language before this project. I tried to document all of my work so that others might find the curve less steep in the future. I must say, I really enjoyed the whole experience.

The entire writeup is available on my website here or if you want to skip all my ramblings and just download the patch files, you can get them here.

While I was doing this, I also discovered how to create the opposite effect--a noisy After Burner. This turns on all of the game sounds during attract mode, but has an undesirable side effect. In the game sequences where the jet is not shot down before the high score table, the engine noise persists until another sound occurs. This is very annoying and probably makes the noisy After Burner a bad idea.

I finished the coding over Christmas, but I just now had a chance to install and test the ROMs that Steph burned for me, and they work great! Enjoy!
 
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my ABII only makes one explosion sound every once in a while, is it usually noisier?
There should be three sounds in sequence when the jets appear to blow up the "I" and turn it into a "II". Engines when the jets appear, missile sounds when the missiles are launched, and an explosion when the missiles hit. There is also a random sound that I think was a bug. After the gameplay sequences where there are helicopters (like the snowy one) there is a "leftover" helicopter sound that plays when the high score table disappears. I actually had the entire thing written a different way, but couldn't mute that damn helicopter sound so I had to start over with a new (and better) plan.
 
I have developed a silent attract mode for After Burner II. I modified the two program ROMs to mute the engine, missile, and explosion sounds that occur during the attract sequence because, frankly, they drive me nuts!

I had a pretty steep learning curve, having never even seen assembly language before this project. I tried to document all of my work so that others might find the curve less steep in the future. I must say, I really enjoyed the whole experience.

Great writeup! Yes, it can be very satisfying to hack roms to fix or change things, provide new features, etc. Documenting what you did and how you did it is essential.

To put my tin-foil hat on for a second, to avoid any "legal unpleasantries", you may not want to provide ROM data from your website, as it is considered redistribution of copyrighted material. Instead, you can post a patch file which describes which bytes in what ROMs should be changed from X to Y. I have a patcher program on my site that runs off a simple patch file format. There are other formats as well (see www.romhacking.net for some other formats).
 
To put my tin-foil hat on for a second, to avoid any "legal unpleasantries", you may not want to provide ROM data from your website, as it is considered redistribution of copyrighted material. Instead, you can post a patch file...
Thanks a ton, and you're absolutely right! I created some IPS patch files and removed the ROMS from the website. Legal unpleasantries avoided!
 
I find it amusing that this thread would pop up when there are other threads on here that teach people how to get their games to MAKE NOISE during the attract sequence (Tron and Satans Hollow). Congratulations on your work. It's always nice to see someone take on a project like this and share their experience...

Lee
 
I have developed a silent attract mode for After Burner II. I modified the two program ROMs to mute the engine, missile, and explosion sounds that occur during the attract sequence because, frankly, they drive me nuts!

Talk about great timing. I've thought about bringing AfterBurner to the company arcade some time this year (after I finish refurbing the control panel), and this was always in my mind as a potential dealbreaker... well, until today.

Thanks for this!
 
Talk about great timing. I've thought about bringing AfterBurner to the company arcade some time this year (after I finish refurbing the control panel), and this was always in my mind as a potential dealbreaker... well, until today.

Thanks for this!
You're very welcome. If you don't want to mess with the rom/patch files, you can just tell Steph what you want and he can burn a pair for you.
 
nice job!

personally, it's a rather quiet attract mode in general, so
I think it's tolerable. one BIG glitch in AB is the FREE PLAY option -- it don't work right!
 
Is there anyway to turn off the warning lights in attract mode? Strange request but I'm using those warning lights to trigger a mod and attract mode is killing it.

Maybe it would be easier to have an auto coin up as then AB would be in the start a game loop scren which doesn't have flashers.
 
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