Proto:Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals

In July 2012, ASSEMbler games forum member Jackhead purchased a Japanese Estpolis Denki II prototype PCB from famous prototype collector DreamTR. While attempting to dump the chips with a Willem EPROM programmer, at least one of the chips suffered corruption. With no way to undo the damage, Jackhead resold the prototype to Trevormacro. With some examination of the crash logs, enough of the corrupt bytes were identified to get the game up and running. After documenting a mostly complete playthrough of the game in a forum thread, Trevormacro released the prototype along with an .IPS patch file on July 12, 2013.

The unmodified corrupt prototype has a size of 2,621,440 bytes / 20 megabit (same as final) with the following MD5:

The prototype contains significant differences. A textbox displayed during the game's ending includes a date of 7/18/1994, indicating that the build is from that date or later.

Corrupt Bytes
A list of known bytes damaged. See the Notes page for more details. EPROM writing clears bits; the corrupt bytes will have a lower value than their original state.

EPROM 1
0x000000 0x00 -> 0x78 0x004000 0x02 -> 0xFA 0x004400 0x02 -> 0x03 0x006600 0x00 -> 0x51 0x016600 0x01 -> 0x69

EPROM 2
The corresponding locations of those seen on the first chip don't seem to be affected... More research required.

Known Bugs
A list of currently known bugs. If the game crashes it has the potential to erase the save data, be careful.

Lake Cave / Sundletan Shop




The shop referenced above sells a glitched/unfinished item "F", and simply opening this shop menu overwrites Maxim's name. If you attempt to rescue Tia in Lake Cave following this, the game crashes while attempting to process the player name:



This bug affected Jackhead's initial playthrough attempt, before the EPROM corruption occurred.

Lake Cave Entrance
If you save the game inside Lake Cave, the puzzle at the entrance is reset. Maxim is unable to leave as the water level is lowered and the wood planks are on the other side of the water. Likely caused by the puzzle solved flag being stored to a temporary address in RAM which gets cleared, instead of a more permanent address that gets saved to SRAM. You can walk through walls with the debug mode to leave.

Alunze Castle B5 Underground Waterway Barrier


When stepping on the switch pictured above after the thieves are washed away, the barrier is lowered but it still acts like a solid wall that can't be passed. One way to bypass this is to enter Pro Action Replay code, step on the switch, and then disable the code. Or, use the walk through walls function of the debug mode.

Tarantula Boss Battle
The bottom edge of the spider boss in Ruby Cave has glitched graphics while in its idle animation, and while attacking. It seems that when an enemy sprite has a y coord too close to the bottom half of the screen, it interferes with the battle GUI. This is also seen with the Gades boss battle (exists in the boss data, but not yet implemented into event data) which uses an extra large sprite. Not believed to be a corruption issue.

Underwater Animations
The final "PS" tile animation packet located at offset (SNES address ) used by four underwater locations is incomplete and will freeze the game a few seconds after entering the screen. This can be worked around by changing the entries in the animation pointer table to, which toggles animations off.

ID refers to the location index affected. The final column contains PAR codes to apply the fixes without having to make permanent changes in a hex editor.

Talking To Enemies
In dungeons, if you run away from a battle, then attempt to talk to the monster sprite you just ran from, the game crashes.

Staying At Inns
If you stay at an inn that charges money, the game doesn't check if you can afford it before subtracting the amount. If the result is less than zero, the total gold amount rolls over, giving you a ton of money.

Debug Mode
The debug mode buried in the retail version exists in this build and is accessible without game enhancer cheats, but is in an earlier state with less features, and some other changes.

To enable it, in a location, press Y + Start + Select and you'll hear a confirmation sound effect. To disable it, press L + R shoulder buttons (a sound effect will play for this, too.)


 * Hold Y to dash and walk through walls.

Locations
(...)

Submarine Shrine Floor Tiles
The programmers forgot to update the reflection on the floor when the wall design used in prototype version was changed.

Hidden Tiles
There are several invisible event and exit tiles located one step down from Maxim's position in the screenshots below.

Elcid (water)


Executes this event script starting at offset (SNES address ):

2B01          Add Selan 2B02          Add Guy 2B03          Add Artea 351A F201     (chrnum 26 in location index F2 related) 3529 F401     (chrnum 41 in location index F4 related) 16F2 6301     Warp to location index F2 Doom Island

The destination:



(take a few steps down for the entrance event)

Also tacked on the script above are some commands used to instantly finish the game:

1A83          Set event flag $83 (destroyed Mystic Stone 3) 16F6 0207     Warp to location index F6 (final room) 00            end

However, there's no known way to reach this part of the script.

Elcid (tree)


Either of the two tiles behind the tree executes this event script starting at offset (SNES address ):

2B04          Add Tia 1A0A          Set event flag $0A (this is the same flag set when entering Tia's shop at the beginning of a new game, so no effect) 00            end

WMAP (Nikoru)


An entrance to an unused village!

WMAP (water)


Step on any of the top three dark blue edge tiles to warp to Doom Island location index.



Unlike the Elcid hidden tile, no party members are added.