Not so long ago Hokuto left a comment on the Namco System 2 Keycus Hacks page regarding a problem with the hack for Valkyrie No Densetsu : the keycus protection chip was also used as a random number generator in the game, leading to strange behaviour alteration …
One of the baddies (Arijigoku aka Antlion) is supposed to throw round projectiles around him, in a random pattern, as you can see in the following Mame capture :
My hack consisted in removing all keycus memory area calls and replacing them with the “no operation” instruction. It works well when the chip is just used as a protection (check Namco System 2 keycus hacks for more info), but it completely defeats its role as a random number generator. With my hack, the projectiles are thrown in straight lines, as you can see below :
In order to restore correct throw behaviour, I created a pseudo random number generation routine in 68000 assembly that I added to the program rom, and replaced previous keycus calls used to get the numbers by a call to this routine.
I had to tweak the code a few times to achieve a good enough result (ie fast and with no visible repeat pattern) as it’s not possible to have a real random number generator. It involved intensive testing in Mame as there’s no savestate available for this game, meaning that I had to speed run the first part of the game to get to the point where the problem appears at every code update …
As you can see below, it works quite well 🙂 (sorry for the animated gif size)
You can grab the updated files in the Namco System 2 Keycus Hacks page.
