Topic: Alien3

[Will]

Work on Alien3 is quite slow, but its always fun when it comes to the end result of my work. When you're playing the game, the main level layout and the ventilation tunnel layout never show simultaneously, but when I blended those two layouts it fit just like a glove. I'm at Level 8. I hope I'm not asking much, but Maxim, can you do me a favour? Level 8 is incomplete because I am unable to reveal the rest of the lower parts of the level having no way of scrolling or going through walls and floors (no cheat codes for that) so I wonder if you could hack the remainder of the level and give the map a finishing touch. The layout of Level 8 I have done so far is attached here. Thanks in advance.

[Maxim]

I'm looking at it but can make no promises. What emulator are you using? I may need to send a savestate.

[Will]

I am using Freeze SMS. I have since always. Good luck.

[Maxim]

Ack. That's awful. Use Meka if possible.



(I wrote the frontend to FreezeSMS.)

[Will]

I've never failed with the FreezeSMS emulator although it does cause problems with Gamegear roms such as bugged/frozen savestates, freezing problems the moment you switch to something else, maybe thats why its called FreezeSMS. It took effort for me to do Megaman and Ninja Gaiden in Gamegear but I got it done in the end with this very emulator. I'll give Meka a try.

[Maxim]

OK, done



Start y,x positions for level 8 are stored in ROM at location 0x3830. Write values 0x28, 0x02 to start in the inaccessible area. It contains nothing interesting, it seems they just gave up on filling that part of the level.



In Meka, you can do this via TOOLS -> Memory Editor -> ROM -> Goto 3830 -> type 28 02.

[Maxim]

Here's the completed map. I took the liberty of aligning it to the tile grid and filling in the missing pixel-width columns on the left and right (I have a program that does it automatically). I found one incorrect tile but it was very minor.

[Will]

Thanks a lot Maxim. I have sent you a token of gold for the effort and its neat too. Now why would Sega want more area of the level than you can explore? Anyway I'll see how I go along in Level 9 onwards. I'm not sure how many levels there are, even GameFaqs doesn't say.

[Maxim]

The game was a third-party title late in the system's life, and probably a downport from the 16-bit version. The level may have hit some limit and so they closed off half of it.



There are 20 levels in total, including bosses.

[TerraEsperZ]

Still, it's interesting if only from a trivia point of view. I always get a kick when it's possible to access an area in a game that's complete enough to look like it's part of the game, yet isn't supposed to be accessible by the player. It's better than having a bunch of incomplete rooms or garbled tiles at any rate.



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Current projects: Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES), Bucky O'Hare (NES)