I know that some games are dual-language: Nemesis 1/2/3 and Vampire Killer

I use japanese MSX machines, mostly Panasonic FS A1WSX. Is there some sort of hardware hack to make games think they are in English (european) computer?

I have replied in the other thread, but here comes to my mind another solution:

1.-Make a dump of the ROM that you want to play.
2.-Disassemble the ROM to find the routines that deal with ROM addresses corresponding to MSX ID bytes. Force them to return always the "non-japanese" value.
3.-Load them using a Flash cartridge or a good ROM loader program.

Regards,

Ed Robsy

Thanks Eduardo,

This is a soft hack

It should be possible to do it in hardware. Here are my idea:

- burn english bios in eeprom chip similar to the one already on board;
- cut the power pin of bios rom chip;
- solder new chip on top of the old one, pull the power pin to a side;
- solder three wires: one to power, and two to power pins of the rom chips;
- add a tiny single pole two position switch;

not sure if something like this actually works...

Yes, that should work. You can soldate one EPROM over the other one and switch only the ENABLE signal. It is also good to switch between different MSX versions.

I used to boot my VG-8235 MSX2 with the SONY HB-101 and it worked fine, just booting like an MSX1 system. Anyway, your solution is more elegant.

Regards,

Interesting project: fake all the EPROM chips and map all the reads to areas of a flash memory chip - sort of like upgradable bios in PCs