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After over 2 years in the making, it’s finally here! A complete revision of the Famicom/NES game developed by Workss/Bits Laboratory in Japan in mid 1986. Only 33 years ago.
This is a rom hack that changes and fixes too many things to count. The whole idea is to make better use of the NES capabilities and to make the game playable today, but I have prepared a small list of key differences:
– Overhauled graphics: 99% original. Character sprites and slimer adapted from The New Ghostbusters 2 (Famicom).
– Doubled performance on many sections of the game.
– Much improved gameplay/controls everywhere.
– Heavily rebalanced game design.
– Countless bugs fixed.
The ROM has been expanded by 32000 bytes just to accomodate for the new “Ghostbusters!” yell. Otherwise it is exactly the same tech and size as the original cartridge.
I did the hack mostly by myself, but there are some important things to note about this:
- A lot of the original game is still present. The things that worked, some good ideas, and the music.
- The title screen was created by acclaimed romhacker Macbee. It takes into account CRT distortion so the GB logo appears perfectly round on CRTs.
- tepples from nesdev helped with the new PCM code.
- NewRisingSun from VGMRips created the PCM sample with amazing quality and volume.
- Maybe more? Sorry if I forgot anyone! Let me know.
If you’ve played the original game you’ll notice some differences in how the new version is played. The original game is really short, it can be finished in under 10 minutes, so I made some design decisions to give some feeling of progression. In general, these are the key things to keep in mind:
- If the PKE meter reaches 9999 it’s game over.
- Earn money first by catching roaming ghosts on the streets.
- Buy the Capture Beam and capture ghosts in buildings.
- Upgrade to Hyper Beam, which doubles the cash earned on buildings.
- Buy the anti-ghost suit and enter the Zuul building (you also need to have a beam).
- Climb the stairs and defeat Gozer!
The zip file contains a more throrough instructions manual in plain txt format. As usual, I only provide the patch, the user must use their own ROM and apply it.
Patching Instructions:
1-
Download The Real Ghostbusters Remastered version 1.1
2- Get your Ghostbusters USA ROM (please legally own the game). Make a BACKUP of it!
3-
Download Lunar ips
4- Open lunar ips, click “Apply IPS Patch”. Locate the ips file contained in the zip.
5- Locate “Ghostbusters Remastered (The Real).ips” to apply the patch.
Done! Now play it on your NES emulator or an everdrive n8!
– Nesrocks
Changelog
v 1.1:
Download The Real Ghostbusters Remastered version 1.1 (same link as above)
– Added cheat code for easy mode (start with $10k) and easy mode ending. A+B+Start at the title or lyrics screen. A sound cue replaces the Ghostbusters yell, confirming it.
– Added visual feedback for PKE penalty when a ghost enters the Zuul building.
– Updated title screen to include “The Real”, “Visit” and version number.
– Code for building infection completely rewritten for stability, realiability and balance.
– Fixed correlation of blinking buildings and buildings that contain ghosts.
(buildings used to secretly have ghosts and not blink)
– Slightly reduced ghost speed on higher PKE levels.
– Can’t enter Zuul building just by reaching 9000+ PKE anymore.
– Fixed fuel barrel hitbox.
– Better car control.
– Slightly increased sound generator efficiency.
– Faster parking on GBHQ.
– Marshmallow Man’s animation speed increased when destroying buildings.
– Fixed sign graphics for floor 16.
– Ghosts inside Zuul move a lot faster towards food now.
– Fixed bug where you could “enter” a road, loading to the gas station.
– Proper graphics for destroyed buildings after coming back to the city map from another scene.
– City buildings color coded: purple buildings (non destroyed) can be infected.
– Some items are now fully refundable.
– Added “REFUND” subtitle under respective items.
– Fixed the bug where the game would pause when holding the B button on the map. The unexpected pause looked like a crash.
– Fixed HUD glitch when reaching the top of Zuul Building.
– Can no longer enter empty or destroyed buildings.
– Fixed bug where it wouldn’t refuel at the gas station if on zero cash.
v 1.0:
Download The Real Ghostbusters Remastered (outdated, scroll up for 1.1)
– First public release.
– Overhauled graphics. 99% original. Character sprites and slimer adapted from The New Ghostbusters 2 for the Famicom.
– Doubled performance on many sections of the game.
– Much improved gameplay/controls everywhere.
– Heavily rebalanced game design.
– Countless bugs fixed.
Known problems:
– After laying the ghost food ghosts will move for a little while before being attracted to it.
– When capturing ghosts on the road section, if the player runs out of gas the captured ghosts will respawn on the map screen.
– On the road section sometimes ghosts or bonus money sprites can get stuck while parking.
– The HUD will not update when a gameover is reached or when scrolling messages. Gameover will trigger on 9999 PKE as normal, though it may not display the updated value in those cases.
For mac users: MultiPatch is great replacement for lunar ips
This one? https://projects.sappharad.com/tools/multipatch.html
Thank you ^^
yes 🙂
Tried it a few times, either got just a grey screen or the garbled intro and map screen with no money.
It’s correct to start with no money.
wow, the game looks incredible.
The colors are eye popping, and the Ghostbusters PCM was just awesome.
Now for the few things I did not like.
Having to start the game with zero dollars, and only getting the ghost vacuum sucks.
The PK Meter goes up way to fast.
To make enough to even capture a ghost in a building, you need $4000.
This means you have to make 3 perfect trips between the shop, gas station, and the HQ to get enough money (1600 x 3)
The driving controls are now worse…… on top of the drunk drivers, it feels like I too am drunk.
Stay puft appears way too often and way to fast, probably due to the insane speed of PKE growth
Things are more expensive… but the sound generator is cheaper. Is this really a good balance?
The way the ghost AI player, I have not found a need to ever buy the hyper beam
I died before the PKE even it 9999 (it hit 9773)
There seems to be a glitch where the HQ becomes the gas station if you have no ghosts in your trap.
Please read the instructions, you’re missing important gameplay elements.
I am not missing important gameplay elements, I described my experience exactly as you posted how you believe the game should play.
Sorry, but you clearly didn’t read it. I mean the instructionmanual.txt.
“wow, the game looks incredible.
The colors are eye popping, and the Ghostbusters PCM was just awesome.”
Thanks!
“Now for the few things I did not like.”
Okay, let’s hear it.
“Having to start the game with zero dollars, and only getting the ghost vacuum sucks.”
Okay, that’s an opinion.
“The PK Meter goes up way to fast.”
Okay, that’s another one.
“To make enough to even capture a ghost in a building, you need $4000.
This means you have to make 3 perfect trips between the shop, gas station, and the HQ to get enough money (1600 x 3)”
Yes, perfect.
“The driving controls are now worse…… on top of the drunk drivers, it feels like I too am drunk.”
The other drivers aren’t moving at all, how can they be drunk?
“Stay puft appears way too often and way to fast, probably due to the insane speed of PKE growth”
Another opinion.
“Things are more expensive… but the sound generator is cheaper. Is this really a good balance?”
Yes.
“The way the ghost AI player, I have not found a need to ever buy the hyper beam”
It’s in the manual. The hyper beam doubles the cash earned when catching ghosts.
“I died before the PKE even it 9999 (it hit 9773)”
Half true. It hit 9973 actually. When ghosts enter the Zuul building they add 200 to the PKE meter. Due to how ASM works and how the game’s code is set, It will actually end the game if a ghost enters it making the PKE hit 9900-9999, so I let it slide.
“There seems to be a glitch where the HQ becomes the gas station if you have no ghosts in your trap.”
You may be on to something here. You sure you didn’t run out of gas? What exactly does it mean “it became the gas station”? I know there’s a bug that if you press right on a horizontal street and press A (trying to enter the road) it will go to the gas station. Since it’s useless and it was hard to fix I left it in.
Yes, most of my comments are opinions.
I will not refer to all of them.
“Drunk drivers” was a reference to AVGN Ghostbusters episode.
I am aware Hyper Beam doubles your cash. Hyper beam also costs $15,000. With how easy the ghost collecting is now, it is not worth the $15000 and the distance to the store to get the Hyper Beam. Your biggest purchase now is the ghost suit at $50,000. You get $3000 a building. So 17 buildings. With the Hyperbeam, it is 9 buildings, + 5 buildings to buy the HB. That saves you 3 trips. Now including the other items, I think it ended up saving only 10 trips, but by the time you get the hyperbeam, you are left with a few buildings anyway, so it was easier for me to just sit between three buildings since they kept popping.
For the gas station,
I will see if it was this right + a bug you are talking about. I could not replicate it on the original.
As far as technical know how, I too am a developer and am familiar with asm, so no need to get layman on that aspect, feel free to explain in technical jargon.
Also, please do not think of my comments as hating, treat them as if I am beta testing it.
OK, for the gas station, it was the right + a bug.
I did encounter another “bug” though.
With the ghost vacuum, if you get to the end and the ghost was not consumed, it will stay on your car during the parking sequence, but I think it gets tallied the next trip you make.
I have managed to fix the defeat condition by branching and doing a few more checks.
About the hyper beam, as you said, it is more advantageous to get it if you’re going for the full set of zuul items. If not, then it may be easier to stick to the regular capture beam, I think that’s balanced. One thing that I’m not sure yet if is worth it is the super trap (instead of having 3 small traps). Due to having to stop roaming ghosts, I think it ends up being worth it.
You mention that you stopped between 3 buildings and waited for them to blink. That may be the entire problem with your opinions on how it’s all too hard. Maybe you didn’t notice that you need to stop ghosts from entering the zuul building. When they do, they add 200 to the pke meter. This was a bug on the original game that added inconsistent amounts, I have fixed it and integrated it to the game design, but admitedly it was missing better feedback. Just having it on the manual is confusing for such a core aspect of the new design. I have managed to add that on the new version, which I’m testing before release. When ghosts enter a red “200” sprite appears.
As for the asm, it comes from having to reverse engineer badly written code. I have now branched and added a series of checks to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore. The HUD still isn’t updated to show “9999” because there isn’t a routine calling it after it enters the gameover state, but at least now it only enters that state when it really reaches 9999, even if it doesn’t show. The only two ways to trigger gameover on the map is passive pke buildup, in which case the last update to the hud will show 9998, or when a ghost enters the zuul building, now with proper range, but it will show anything between 9800 and 9998. It may still confuse people, but I think it’s getting to a point of polish that it’s just not worth the effort for what it is. I have already made 11 improvements to this new version, only remaining is to balance the ghost appearance on buildings in the map, which I’ve detected isn’t working as it should.
And yeah, I have fixed the bug the lets you enter the road horizontally leading to a gas station.
For the three building, it is faster to enter the buildings to stop the PKE from going up then to chase the ghosts on 4 corners to get them to stop from entering the Zuul building.
Perhaps if the cursor moved around the streets faster, it would be better to chase the ghosts instead of hopping from building to building to stop the PKE
I played the game again, and I died on 9770 this time, but you said you fixed this, so I will wait and see.
Well, I entered the Zuul building with all of the best equipments and I had barely over 3000 (not shown in the screenshot), so my statement stands that you’re probably ignoring the ghosts more than you should. https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios/status/1181653664831807489
Yeah, the ghost while parking is a bug present in the original. I’m not sure if it’s tallied, I’d say it isn’t. The same can happen with the “400” sprite, but in that case it’s tallied for sure.
There is another bug that if you catch ghosts on the road, but run out of gas, they will appear on the map as if you didn’t catch them.
I am not sure how you are getting only 3000, it takes me between 800 ~ 1000 PKE before I can even get to buy the capture beam. The fastest I could get it was 600, and that was doing 3 perfect runs, driving at a slow speed, and collecting gas cans. If I continue trying to do the fastest run, the PKE is usually around 1500 when I get enough money to buy the hyper beam. I am not sure if the ghost alarm would make this process any faster. Playing casually, this could take a person up to 4000PKE. (I have hit this mark) considering that they may miss ghosts on the road, run out of gas, hit a few cars, etc. At this point, the casual player is penalized with 4 damaged buildings and fast moving ghosts. Once you hit 5000, forget about stopping ghosts, you move too slow. So your only choice is to building spam to get the money and stop that timer.
I do have to say though, after playing this, it is really hard on the eyes to go back to the original version.
If I could make an aesthetic comment, I would recommend in the driving scenes to have roads with crossing paths, so that it does not look like I am driving through a tunnel the entire trip. Also, on the map screen, is it possible to make HQ, the gas station, Zulu, and shop a different color? It looks like it is only using 3 of the 4 palettes.
Might just be my emulator but when I’m at the driving section, there seems to be a big delay when I press the right key compared to left direction
It’s some inertia the car has. I’ll look into that.
Awesome ! Very awesome! Pero debieron haber dejado el dinero en el principio!
Felicitaciones! Excelente trabajo! Podrian hacer una version en español?
Out of curiosity, would it be possible to mount the game on a NES cartridge and play it on a real console? I’m not as big on using emulators as I used to be.
Yep, one can use its new mapper (I don’t remember which is it), or the ROM can be trimmed (banks 2 and 3 I believe) which will remove the new ghostbusters yell but will keep it in the same mapper and size as the original game. I’m not familiar with ROM burning, but someone contacted me saying that they didn’t know the PRG was expanded, burned it to an originally sized PRG chip and it worked. The program must have ignored the expansion, and the way I programmed the bank switching made it just work. I can’t guarantee though, ideally you should trim the ROM before burning, or going with the new mapper.
When I start the game all I get is a grey screen. What’s going wrong??
Hard to say. Probably used an incompatible ROM file. Use a checksum utility to see if it matches the one required.
As someone who actually plays and enjoys the NES original, I think this remake is brilliant. It adds real tension to the game and requires skill. As proof of that, I just finished the game with the ghost suit, sound generator and ghost food (while others whine that the game is unplayable). The issue is that so many bash the NES game (because AVGN made it cool) without even learning how to play it.
The fast PK meter adds real tension.
The sense of progression is awesome.
I think this remake is pretty much perfect. I love all of the changes made, and this is now my favorite version of the game.
Thanks! It’s my favorite too 🙂
I don’t understand. My game is a .nes file. There is no zip? How do I apply the patch?
At which step of the instructions did you get stuck?
Having a strange issue making the game unplayable. Game starts as expected but whenever I press the A button, a blank white box opens on the Ghostbusters player icon on the main map screen. I guess this is supposed to open a menu of some sort.
Tried the game in both Mesen and Nestopia and the issue occurs the same in both.
Since I can\’t include a screenshot here, I\’ll post URL in the Website field.
Sounds like you’re using version 1.0. Use version 1.1
That is the game’s inventory menu which sometimes also pauses the game when pressed and held. Unpause by pressing the pause button (there’s no feedback when doing so, but try it), then press A again to close it. This is a bug in the original game and was fixed in version 1.1 anyway, which is the recommended version.
Has anyone gotten this to play on the legends ultimate arcade? I’m having trouble.
I don’t know that machine. If it plays NES games, and you can insert any NES ROM into it, then it should work.
It works and is wonderful. The NES was frustrating but my favorite. This version has quickly become my favorite game. Great job and thank you. You also introduced me to the “new Ghostbusters 2” nes which is also fun. Wonderful job. Thank you!
Great hack!
I didn’t like the quick appearance of Marshmallows man on 999 PK Energy. If possible, it is better to change this as on most ports so that the first appearance is when reaching 4999 PK and then every 500.
Ghosts on the map from the very beginning fly too fast towards ZUUL. This is best left as in the original rom.
wheres winston and name needs changing to zool instead of zuul and spelling mistake at end need changing
can you buy at game cart for this game?
I have never played the original before. Do you use Retro Arch to play this or just any emulator, or can you not play it on emulator? One more question: Is it worth playing?
Maybe I’m a dork, but the damn Zuul building fills up with PKE way before I ever even get enough cash for really ANYTHING, and when I finally DID get enough to buy a normal capture beam…. none of the remaining buildings would blink… like I had hit a point of no return.
I read the instructions, was apparently doing it correctly (going between the three available buildings after getting the ghost vacuum) and at times didn’t even get squat for cash.
Am I doing it wrong?
It is not super clear to some people that you shouldn’t allow wandering ghosts into the Zuul building. Could that be the case? You need to be really careful to stop and catch most of them throughout your game. I did add a visual feedback when they reach the building, but maybe it was not enough.
Main downsides – music. Final boss, terror dogs, and scene overall don’t look really good.