Has anyone ever fixed the palette bug in Back to the Future Part III?

[goldenband]

The title says it all. Well, that, and the following link:

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2009/1...ad-the-future/

(Credit should go to chessage, who first posted the link here.)

Could this bug be fixed? I know the game will still suck, mind you, but even so a fix would make the world 0.000000000001% better.

[cleeg]

You can fix that bug with a hammer.

[tomaitheous]

Oh, nice find. Are you sure there aren't different revisions of the rom that fix this already?

Edit; I took a quick look at this. The palette data that I looked at, is all uncompressed. But the there are multiple routines that read the palette into ram (for modification). So there isn't just one centralized one you could simply add a hook to, before the writes to $c00000. I was able to locate the palette blocks for the opening images, but the rest of the palettes for the levels and what not - are stored in different areas. So you could either hunt down all the palette read routines and write hooks for them (reshift the palette data to the correct locations on the fly), or brute force scan the rom file for strings of data that have the highest nibble clear and the rest of the nibbles high bit clear too. It's not a guarantee that you won't accidentally get false positives and overwrite important data.

I'll write up a small util for the brute force method and convert the data, if someone is willing to test it out for me (I don't have any intentions of playing through this game).

[goldenband]

Cool, and thanks for looking into this! AFAIK there's no "fixed" ROM out there. I look forward to seeing the results of your inquiries.

[Furnessly]

I would like to see if there is any progress made regarding fixing this bug.

Anyway I did a little bit of research by compare the values from a savestate and looking up the values via the ROM, just by going through the attract mode (in the case of the Game Over screen, just playing the 1st stage and dying). There are most likely some palettes missing such as the Ending but the game is too hard for me to past the first 15 seconds of the game.

Back to the Future Part 3 Palette addresses (this is for the [U] ROM, the second address is where the palette block ends) that might come in handy:

Arena logo - 20CA
Probe logo - 202A
Title Screen - 206A
Stage 1 Intro - A0D4
Stage 1 - D730-D7AF
Stage 1 Game Over - A155-A193
Stage 2/ Stage 2 Intro - 2DE58
Stage 3/Stage 3 Intro - 42E8E-42F0D
Stage 4 Intro 53B4E
Stage 4 5A6C8-5A747

In the ROM, you can edit the text of the game (and it shows both the Imageworks and the Arena copyright text, despite the former not shown in the US version) and it displays some sort of sound driver info.

[LinkueiBR]

This game like Batman Returns uses strange color values for a Genesis game.

I'd love to see a color fix for this game.

[Lastcallhall]

I know Pyron already has a shit ton of things to do, maybe Barone can also look into it (with all due respect to Tom, of course - I don't want to cheapen his contributions at all).

[tomaitheous]

I know Pyron already has a shit ton of things to do, maybe Barone can also look into it (with all due respect to Tom, of course - I don't want to cheapen his contributions at all).

This would be a perfect project for Pyron. I actually coded the util I talked about, but I don't remember if I gave it to anyone. Though I doubt Pyron needs it (it's just a search util).

[Barone]

Isn't this game a complete POS?
I mean, I'd have no problem wasting my time with something like this but wouldn't it be better to focus on games which are actually better?
Or is this game any good and I'm actually mistaken?

I'm genuinely questioning 'cause I really haven't played it more than 10 seconds and all that I've read about it says it's an awful game.

[cabear]

Isn't this game a complete POS?
I mean, I'd have no problem wasting my time with something like this but wouldn't it be better to focus on games which are actually better?
Or is this game any good and I'm actually mistaken?

I'm genuinely questioning 'cause I really haven't played it more than 10 seconds and all that I've read about it says it's an awful game.

it's pretty bad. the first stage is really difficult, then the rest of the game is fairly mundane. Your efforts are probably better spent on a better game of your choice IMHO haha

[goldenband]

I haven't played the game for more than 2-3 minutes, but I assume it's as bad as everyone says. The thing that's interesting to me is that it's a Genesis game that shipped with a major, identifiable, and unambiguous bug that keeps us from seeing the game as it was intended -- and, if someone's willing, it can finally be fixed after all these years. There are some other games in the same boat, e.g.:

Sector Alpha and Victory on the ColecoVision (major ROM corruption in two games, caused by production issues)

Fixing Startropics (music bug)

BTW here's an Archive.org link to the original page, which now redirects elsewhere:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100817...ad-the-future/

[Wesker]

It's a dreadful conversion from the Amiga version which has a crisper color palette, some additional overhead sections in the first level, an extended ending and maybe some other things I conveniently forgot.



I can understand noone is willing to look into it.