Castlevania for X68000 [15KHz Hack]

[rezb1t]

Hello! I'd like to announce my Akumajou Dracula X68000 hack that allows you to play in 15khz on a capable TV/monitor, with a real X68000. I ran through the whole game and didn't see any issues, but it's very possible I made a mistake somewhere or missed something. Included is a BPS patch that needs to be applied to DRA.X, found on floppy disk A of Akumajou Dracula.

DRA.X
CRC32: 84b98e65
MD5: 83883b040d3bba105f8e26917971213b
SHA256: cdb93ac694da97dd11534f32fe79a0cedd1185718d9cd2efd45d038880811387

This hack works great on either floppy disk(replacing the original DRA.X) or you can run it off a SxSI hard drive image. If anyone would like to include this hack in their hard drive image and distribute it, you have my permission!

I've been testing this with my Sony PVM-1953MD and Sharp X68000 XVI Compact. I haven't been able to test any other X68000 models, but every X68000 model should run this hack without issues. Let me know if you have any questions or find any issues.

[X-Col]

Wonderful stuff, looks much better in 15khz :-)

However, I'm not so good at the game. Could you make a patch for DRA_EASY.X

[rezb1t]

Sure! Here's a patch for DRA.X, same base file as in the first post, but this patch makes it into dra_easy.x plus my 15khz changes.

[X-Col]

Marvellous! Just wrote it to disk and playing now.

I can only beat the game on easy mode. Must be my old age, reactions ain't what they used to be :-)

Game now looks great and plays great, thanks for this fantastic patch!!

[incrediblehark]

Really nice work, thanks for sharing this!

[kamiboy]

Oh you wonderful man. I have been wanting this for ages. I never could understand why the developers didn't run in 15khz from the get go.

[Mubo]

Hello, this patch fascinates me and you are swapping files on floppy? I am new to all this X68K stuff and will be adding a sxsi hancho thinger to my Ace however I have been writing floppies with my windows 95 machine with a teac drive. Quite a few work fine but Dracula only plays the music with a black screen for hours and booting off of disk B gives me option to install or make user disk but it won't do that either and both my drives work really well on original and 2 disk copies I've made but some just don't. All that to this question Is Dracula copy protected in some way or are my attempts just failing.
I have another set of 68K floppy drives from an Ace HD and another teac 55FGR I literally received yesterday. I also have a greaseweazle v4 and a kryoflux, neither of which I have attempted to use yet. I've been lurking and reading among many of you. So I ask now for opinions please Thanks

[rezb1t]

Hello, this patch fascinates me and you are swapping files on floppy? I am new to all this X68K stuff and will be adding a sxsi hancho thinger to my Ace however I have been writing floppies with my windows 95 machine with a teac drive. Quite a few work fine but Dracula only plays the music with a black screen for hours and booting off of disk B gives me option to install or make user disk but it won't do that either and both my drives work really well on original and 2 disk copies I've made but some just don't. All that to this question Is Dracula copy protected in some way or are my attempts just failing.
I have another set of 68K floppy drives from an Ace HD and another teac 55FGR I literally received yesterday. I also have a greaseweazle v4 and a kryoflux, neither of which I have attempted to use yet. I've been lurking and reading among many of you. So I ask now for opinions please Thanks

Hmm hard to say what the issue is, I don't think Akumajou Dracula has any copy protection but I could be wrong. I just use Disk Explorer to replace DRA.X on Floppy Disk A with the patched version and it loads with no issues after that.

[LowDefAl]

Hello, this patch fascinates me and you are swapping files on floppy? I am new to all this X68K stuff and will be adding a sxsi hancho thinger to my Ace however I have been writing floppies with my windows 95 machine with a teac drive. Quite a few work fine but Dracula only plays the music with a black screen for hours and booting off of disk B gives me option to install or make user disk but it won't do that either and both my drives work really well on original and 2 disk copies I've made but some just don't. All that to this question Is Dracula copy protected in some way or are my attempts just failing.
I have another set of 68K floppy drives from an Ace HD and another teac 55FGR I literally received yesterday. I also have a greaseweazle v4 and a kryoflux, neither of which I have attempted to use yet. I've been lurking and reading among many of you. So I ask now for opinions please Thanks

When Dracula boots on floppy it plays that tune while loading. The loading process copies the *entire* game to ram and then automatically ejects the floppy disk and displays the classic early 90s Konami logo and plays the jingle (Puyo Puyo is similar for a third party example). It should probably take less than 2 minutes. If the data does not load, the music will never stop playing. I suspect your disks are not being written correctly or are bad files.

If the game is loading correctly you will hear the data being read from the disks from the sound of the drives.

Set up the greaseweazle and try to use that to write the images before you do anything else. 
 

[Mubo]

Thank you both for your response. I will try the greaseweazle or a different 5.25 drive on PC. I see that after the music starts neither drive is doing anything they both just sit green and go no further after initial startup. Literally just plays the music until I reset or turn it off. I have that hxc max coming also but I understand that it can't be disk 0 or 1 without hardware to mitigate or strip other functions.Old hardware addictions are going to be my end