NES

If you've never heard of Faxanadu I'm afraid I have to inform you that you've missed the best game ever produced for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I've been waiting for a sequel to this game for 17 years now but Hudson Soft let me down. Seems like someone else has to produce Faxanadu II and I've decided that this someone is me. Patching an original Faxanadu ROM (the US version) seems to be the way to go.

As a consequence I've strayed away from the good old x86 CPUs in the last days and focused on 6502 assembler which is used by the NES. Now that I've finished my first steps with this system I'm confident that I can program a level editor for Faxanadu which is probably the most important step for modding the game. My confidence is based on a fantastic document written by a guy named Vagla I've found online which already contains an enormous amount of information about the Faxanadu ROM.

Vagla's document is not complete though and that's why I still have to pick up 6502 assembler if I want to reverse engineer the missing information from the ROM file myself. My first attempt was to reverse engineer a part of the game which I assumed to be both easy to locate and easy to reverse engineer because it does not depend on the underlying CPU: The password generation. In Faxanadu you can get passwords (so called Mantras) at certain locations that allow you to continue a game later.
Continue reading "Faxanadu mantras - Part I"