Gradius III Display Widgets Mod Released

[alamone]

Hi everyone, temporarily back from the dead. I've developed a mod for Gradius III (JP) that provides the following:

- A numeric lives counter, so you actually know how many lives you have (normally, the game just shows a modulo of your lives to fit on limited screen space)
- Display current loop and stage on bottom right
- Skip to the next stage at anytime by pressing Service + 1P Start (this is a built-in function, but it normally requires setting all odd DIP switches on - now any DIP switch setting is fine)

Tested working on a real PCB and of course works fine on MAME.

Patcher w/ source code on my github:
https://github.com/alamone/gradius3-widgets

 

[ShootTheCore]

Excellent work! Can you mod the game to allow you to continue? That's my number one flaw with the game personally.

 

[alamone]

It's possible, but might be a bit of work since it looks like continue feature is not natively programmed in. If you want to practice, the easiest way is probably to just do a level skip.
The level skip sets your lives to 0x90 or 144 lives, which is why the sample screenshot above says 99 (I capped it to display up to 99).

 

[ShootTheCore]

The level skip sets your lives to 0x90 or 144 lives, which is why the sample screenshot above says 99 (I capped it to display up to 99).

Ah, that makes sense. Thank you for explaining that to me.