Simpsons Free Play ROM Hack

DogP

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Hey,

I've got a 4P Simpsons cab... and the one thing that has really bugged me is the lack of free play on the game. I put credit buttons in the coin returns, but inevitably, someone presses it 20 times, adding a bunch of lives, then gets bored and walks away... leaving everyone else to kill off all those lives.

So... I decided to create a real freeplay ROM hack. This has the full attract mode, and to start, you simply press any button. It only adds 1 credit worth of lives (set in setup under "8-2.NUMBER OF PLAYERS") each time you start/continue, so if someone walks away, it's easy to kill them off. Of course you just press a button to join in or continue during gameplay.

Anyway, attached is the hacked ROM... burn it to a 27C010 EPROM and swap with the chip at location 15c (labeled J12). You must also set the "7. START BUTTON" setting in setup to "WITH START BUTTONS". This enables shared credits, which is required by this hack. The ROM is fixed to pass the ROM test.

This only works for the 4P ROM set, and it does freeplay only... there is no DIP or menu selection to enable/disable free/coin play.

I've only briefly tested it (both in MAME and on my dedicated cabinet), so if you try it out, let me know how it works and/or if you find any bugs. I probably won't run it start to finish until my next party.

DogP
 

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  • simpsons_freeplay.zip
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Cool... glad to hear others will probably enjoy it too! :)

nice! alot of those Konami 4P games are like that except for Sunset Riders
Yeah, I really wonder why most of them didn't have a free play option.

While I don't have any plans to do others... I may quickly look at some to see if it'd be a simple copy/paste (depends how much code they reused between games). TMNT will probably be the first, since I actually have that PCB, and plan to occasionally swap it into my Simpsons cab.

DogP
 
Just a quick update... I did some more testing today, including playing all the way through the game (rotating around with multiple players, etc), and everything seems to be working as expected. Let me know if you come across any problems... otherwise I'm calling it good. :)

DogP
 
Thanks for this. Will use on my MAME cab as this would be a superior method than manually adding credits when needed.
 
Dude, that's awesome! I'm sure you're going to get a lot of requests for TMNT, myself included. Thanks for doing this.
Heh, yeah... TMNT was the first that came to mind. Gauntlet and Gauntlet 2 were the others that always ended up with tons of life when someone would just walk away. I don't have a Gauntlet anymore though.

DogP
 
I haven't messed with this yet, but I will. Are you saying that it doesn't have the ability to switch between coins and free play?
Correct... it's forced to free play only. If you really want to have coin/free play switchable, you could use a 27C020 and burn the free play and original ROM concatenated... and have a switch on the high address line to switch between the two.

DogP
 
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