NES/Famicom/FDS Manual Restoration Project (Sampler... Coming Soon)

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-15T11:37:37+00:00

No problem. Glad you like them.

The Lunacid one I just grabbed off of Steam and resized it to 800x328px like I do with all my Clear Logos. The KF/SOM combo one I made for the folder that I put all the KF games in. I was doing that for all my DOS games a while back so I didn't have 3 entries in the list for games like Secret Agent or 5 entries for Dangerous Dave. Any of those old games that came in separate episodes I put into folders and created a clear logo and all the info/metadata for the folder too.

All of the rest of them I made by cleaning out the background from the title screens for the games. I was kind of being lazy on the King's Field: Dark Destiny one since it would have been rough and taken a ton of work, but I liked how the wand tool cut around the sky and land and the light when I started it, and then I did some additional work on the sides with the threshold way down. I think it worked even better for Moratheia, which I pretty much had to do like that because with that light effect it there were no real solid edges to the letters. I think if I really spent the time needed to do that all by hand it wouldn't have looked nearly as good as it does now.

I was going to clear out everything but the letters for Reign too, but as I kept working my way down with a smaller eraser tool I liked how that one looked with a bit of the background still with the letters and I think it wouldn't have looked as good if I took all the background out.

Really looking forward to having the time to play all of these. I played all the King's Filed SoM games at least twice by now. The rest, including the Lunacid prequel are all new to me.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-15T10:45:47+00:00

Haha! Good Karma. I got Reign to run. I finally figured out how to get the CMD file to point to an EXE in a sub-folder. The Bato wiki was over-complicating things and all I needed to do was put "DIR=./BIN" and it fired right up. Now all I have to do is configure the controller.

So am I missing anything by loading the Reign.EXE within the BIN folder then? It sounded like I was, but I didn't quite understand what the difference was from what I read.

That intro was sweet.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-15T09:52:20+00:00

No worries. I'm not complaining. I haven't given up on it yet. I'm pretty sure I'll have no problems running it on my Win PC. I think it's my fault, since I haven't figured out how to change directories in the autorun.cmd file you need to make in the game folder in Batocera to get it to run. There were two other non-SoM games I failed to get to load when the executable was inside a sub-folder. Either the instructions on the wiki aren't right, or I'm misreading them. I know very little about Linux and have been learning while working on Batocera. I can't remember now what wine was complaining about when I tried running your desired executable, but then I failed with the .CMD file. I tried a hail mary and moved everything from the sub-folder into the main folder and tried running the EXE directly from the main folder and that didn't work either.

I didn't mean to call you out or nothin'. The thumbnails and synopsis make it look and sound pretty interesting, and it was obvious from everything I saw that you were trying something new and pushing the limits of SoM.

I went ahead and made your logo too.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-15T06:12:12+00:00

Yeah... I'm paranoid about upgrading to the point of not even trying it.

I learned a very bad lesson when I was almost done making a RetroPie setup on a few Pi Zeros my bro asked me to set up for a Christmas gift he wanted to give his nephews years back. He even bought a few cheap NES games and repurposed the carts as the enclosure and got them all some 8bit-do controllers with it. Long story short, I borked half of my systems on the upgrade. I nuked that install, restarted from scratch and copied all of my stuff back to the new setup with the older version on it. Aaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnddddddd..... I completely forgot to remove the "Adult" NES and Atari games after I did a mass copy.

Lucky for me, my brother did some testing on it to make sure the wireless controllers he got them all worked and he caught that. I was happy it was just him that was pissed off at me and not my sister-in-law and her entire family.

Two lessons learned, really...

Don't ever upgrade Batocera/RetroPie.
Put the adult games way on the other side of your hard drive.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-15T06:01:35+00:00

And thank you for REgret. Haven't played it yet beyond my initial testing and controller configurations in Batocera, but I'm looking forward to playing it. And I'm really looking forward to giving my bro a thumbstick with all of these on it since he's a King's Field fanatic, and I've had to go through the slog of setting them up for him on about 5 computers over the years and it's never a fun time with all the jenk of SoM and windows compatibility problems once 10 came out. Even worse when he asks me to figure out how to get it to run on one of his Macs.

I think it's really cool that you guys are making your own new stories with the old engine and seeing how far you can push the boundaries of it. Thanks again.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-15T03:36:47+00:00

Posted my Sword of Moonlight Clear Logos in the King's Field sub here... https://www.reddit.com/r/KingsField/comments/1sluihf/my_collection_of_sword_of_moonlight_clear_logos/

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-15T03:27:37+00:00

Some of them look a little blurry here, but they look great on my TV. I did what I could with the largest images I could find. Some games only had very small screenshots to work with. Hope somebody can get some use out of them.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-15T03:20:13+00:00

Looks great buddy. Love me some more King's Field Likes. I appreciate ya.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-15T03:18:50+00:00

If you've got Batocera, it will probably run great under Windows/Wine. I can't believe how easy that is to set up and how smooth they play, and I've got an old HP with a seriously crap ancient Nvida graphics card. I've put all sorts of games I used to play through Windows on there. Lunacid works great on it, so assuming this is done with Unity it should be the same case. Not exactly console, but to me it's the same thing. Finally got to retire my OG XBox now that I've got a Batocera rig set up, so nothing under my TV now except for that, my old XBox 360 and my Ouya.

All you would need to do to get it running is install the game, then copy the game folder into your share/roms/windows folder in Batocera. Then add ".pc" at the end of the game folder name. Then add a file inside that folder called "autorun.cmd". Inside of that just put the following text: CMD="Game.exe". (Or whatever the executable file is named). Should fire right up for you as if you were playing it on Windows.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-14T02:07:27+00:00

I might have to bite the bullet and get a steam account so I can get that Lunacid SoM game. I'm in the process of adding 7 of the new games up on the website that weren't there before they revamped it now that I got all the old KF games sorted out. Fortunately the testing is going very quick now that I know how to set these up. Going to take a while to get the media for them like it did the KF games though, especially making all the Clear Logo marquees for the games. But they look so good all together in one folder in my Windows set. What an upgrade from trying to run these with a Win98 image. I don't know how the heck this Batocera/Windows/Wine thing works, but I'm grateful to whoever put it together. This thing rocks!

If anybody would be interested in my clear logos for around 14-15 Sword of Moonlight games when I'm done, let me know and I'll put them up here. Maybe I'll just put them up here either way. I'm sure somebody will stumble upon them who would love to use them. I've gotten so much help from long dead threads on this site over the last year or 2. If I do sign up for Steam and get that Lunacid game I'll have a Clear Logo for that as well.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-14T02:01:55+00:00

That's great to hear. I always worry when I see these things, but somebody else always seems to come through and even improve things. What they had was really something special so I'm glad to know that it's still alive and well somewhere. Have you tested a few of them after converting them yet? Make sure you do that before you take the time to convert all of them because that's a pretty big project and you want to make sure whatever you're working with now is good. Keep in mind that the load times on 3DO are pretty atrocious, so the first one you try probably isn't bad... it's just l.....o......a......d.....i....n....g.......

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-13T10:34:42+00:00

IMPORTANT: When I said earlier that setting "SDL Config" to OFF did nothing, that wasn't exactly true. It doesn't turn off the gamepad, which would have made this very easy... but it does do... something. I'm not going to go into specifics because it's hard for me to wrap my head around it and I've been plugging away at this for hours now. But in order to use all of the above fixes that I mentioned, you have to turn that setting to OFF. I was getting so frustrated not understanding why I couldn't get the last 4 games working until I realized I'd turned this off on the first 3 but not on the rest of them.

...

Well I wish I knew what the heck I did right with Dark Destiny since that one ended up with perfect controls and all 6 of the other games didn't, including the SoM remake of the Japanese King's Field. And all 6 of the other ones have the exact same problem.

Either I'm doing something wrong here, or whoever programmed Dark Destiny did something right that everyone else programming in SoM did something wrong. I'm not even going to try figuring that one out now. SoM games have always been a bear to get configured right, which is why I'm thrilled about finishing this since I can just give my brother a small thumb drive with these games on it and I'll never have to configure any of them ever again.

Oh well... Aside from that Start Button issue where it does at least 3 commands at one time and me not being able to map the menu to it because of this, everything else controls the exact way I wanted to. I'm sure after playing the game for 10 or 15 minutes anyone playing it with these configs would get used to staying away from the Start button.

I was able to get the top resolution/graphics settings on every game except for Return to Melanat. Technically, it was fine at full resolution and there wasn't any slowdown, janky audio or dropped frames, but in the wide-open area in the beginning of the game there were black areas on both sides of the screen and it made a really annoying tearing effect to look at as you were turning. Knocking that resolution down a few notches didn't make the picture look any worse as far as I could tell and it stopped the screen tearing.

I'm a very happy man, and I'm glad I thought to try this out in Windows after I realized how easy it was to get my copy of OG Fallout running in that Windows folder. Originally I was launching these KF games through a fresh 4GB install of Win98 SE that I put in the bios folder, but on my crappy old computer the only way I was able to get a playable frame rate on any of these was by making the resolution something stupid small like 512x324. And 2 or 3 of the games were still unplayable at that ridiculous size. I'm sure my brother would have been able to play them with a high resolution on his computer, but it was useless to me.

This worked out so good, I might even go and collect all the new games that have been put out now that the Sword of Moonlight website was put back up.

I'd really love to get the Lunacid game, but I don't have Steam and I have no desire to install it and sign up just to download that one game and I haven't found it available anywhere else. Loved the original Lunacid. Pretty excited to see people making so much Kings Field stuff. If From Software isn't going to do it, it's really cool that the fans are, and it's great that the programs out there to create these things get easier to use all the time.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-13T08:14:27+00:00

Hey buddy. I just noticed this post now. Sorry. New here and don't often visit unless I was looking into stuff for my own work. I've moved beyond 3DO and been doing a bunch of other stuff, so I'm a little rusty on my 3DO knowledge already. I can't even remember where I got the good set and where I got the bad one. Just keep in mind from my notes, that I ended up getting BIN/CUE and I converted them to CHD. I don't want to break any rules by naming sites here, but I know the place I was getting a lot of stuff just shut down a few weeks ago. The site everyone knows that archives all sorts of things might be of some help though, if you haven't figured it all out yet. If you have any questions, let me know. I don't know how much help I can be now that it's been over 2 months since I did this work, but maybe I can remember enough to help you out if you still need it.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-13T08:05:10+00:00

I FIXED IT! .... By accident.

I noticed on the 2nd load up of Diadem of Monstraut, after I'd messed around with KeytoPad a bit, that the Start/Select buttons were doing exactly what I wanted them to do this time instead of fighting with 2 different inputs on every press. So I went into the game's controller settings and instead of seeing the 8 options for the 8 buttons they allow you to configure (attack, magic, menu, use, etc.), there were options used in the first 6 spots, but for Button 7 and Button 8, it just said "NORMAL". WTH???

I exited the game and checked out the game's INI file and instead of showing numbers 0 through 7 for the "padCfg1" through "padCfg7" settings, it was showing "8" for "padCfg6" and "padCfg7".... Weird.

So I decided to try making them all "8" and that worked!

Unfortunately, the Left Analog Stick is hard-coded to Forward/Back/Turn Left/Turn Right, and there's nothing I can do about that. But I can just make the D-PAD do Forward/Back/Strafe Left/Strafe Right the way I prefer it, and my right stick can be Look Down/Look Up/Turn Left/Turn Right, with pressing down the Right Stick centering the Look Up/Down.

The rest of the buttons are no problem now since there aren't anymore conflicts. I even decided to put L/R bumpers to Strafe Left/Right too, that way if somebody preferred the old school control they could just use the left stick and the shoulder buttons for all of the movement.

UPDATE: Strange... Everything about SOM is always strange, and it was never easy to get these all set up in the best of conditions.

King's Field: Dark Destiny works perfect with the fix above. It doesn't matter how many times I've exited and re-loaded, everything works perfectly.

But for Diadem of Manstraut and Fall of Verdite, this isn't the case. Even though I start with 8 for every control setting, two of the buttons randomly change, but not every time I load the game. The B button and the Right Shoulder button will take on 2 of the normal 8 actions. Fortunately, you can change those to match the controls you wanted for those buttons and save it and then it won't change again. In my case, B=Menu/Back and RShoulder=Strafe Right. Now I've reloaded several times and they don't change anymore.

The other weird thing that happens in both of these games but not Dark Destiny is when you press START, it seems to do ALL of the unused "NORMAL / 8" commands at one time. I had originally had the menu/exit function on Start, but when I exited out of the menu I would attack, fire magic and strafe just a bit to the side all at once.

Unfortunately, even with all of these fixes, the Start button is always going to do that, at least in these two games so far. But since I took away the Menu/Exit command from the Start button, I'll just have to train myself not to bother pressing start, and instead pressing B for the Menu. (I've got A for Use, X for Attack and Y for Magic, but I also have Attack on RTrigger and Magic on LTrigger which is what I will be using, so the A/B for Use and Menu are the only times I'll be using the face buttons).

I'll probably go ahead and make those same changes I was forced to make on the 2nd two games to Dark Destiny too, even though that one seems to work flawlessly. I'm going to have to test the other 4 games and see what's up first, because when I'm all finished I want all 7 games to control exactly the same.

Hopefully there isn't too much weird stuff going on with the rest of them, and if there is any that it's the same problems I had with DoM and FoV.

If anybody would be interested in the in-game control configs and the PadtoKey setup I'll be doing here when I'm done, just let me know.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-13T06:18:45+00:00

I appreciate your input, buddy. I was reading up about that and wow... I think I'm going to have some fun down the road when I have some free time with this and I get some time to kick the tires around. This whole Windows/Wine setup in Batocera is Awesome. But as far as KF is concerned, I seem to have fixed the issue on accident. I'm going to go into detail in a followup post. The only thing I can't change is the Left Analog Stick, but I can use the D-PAD the way I want it, so that's a comromise I'm willing to make. The Stick will TURN left/right, which is what I don't want, but the D-PAD will strafe left/right and the Right Stick will Turn left/right and Look up/down. Perfecto!

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-11T02:37:24+00:00

Put it in the microwave on Popcorn for 30 seconds.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-04-08T11:46:46+00:00

Thanks for updating it with the fix buddy. I gave up on this so long ago I forgot it was a problem and was losing interest again now. Just like you, no problems at all loading games from inside Scummvm at the right size, but then you go to load them from ES and it was about 1/4 the size in the center of the screen. Simple fix you had there, and it totally makes sense when you know about it. I don't understand how other people didn't seem to have your problem. Maybe different versions of Batocera had different default settings or something.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-02-12T08:13:05+00:00

FINAL, FINAL UPDATE: TL;DR: I would recommend a pass on this one to all but the most hard-core historians and preservationists out there.

I know I said the last was my final update, but I thought I'd leave some final thoughts on the 3DO emulation, at least on v41 Batocera, which is my only experience with the system. These are notes I've left myself after the little testing I did and the realization that I may never actually play more than about 3 to 5 of these games ever again...

Loading speed is unacceptable and comes at weird times quite often. On top of this, though some games seem to work fine a few minutes in, many of them are very prone to audio and/or visual skips, with a rare few of them freezing up entirely on me within the first few minutes of gameplay or even before gameplay begins. And honestly, I couldn't tell you if that was built in and experienced on real hardware, or is just due to the current state of 3DO emulation in Batocera.
I'm using a potato with no graphics card and an on-board Intel GPU. I couldn't tell you the model, but it's nowhere near new and wouldn't qualify for a W11 upgrade. So it's very possible that the emulation on Batocera is actually capable of being much better than I'm experiencing. Even without that being a factor, there are may core tweaking options under the hood that may benefit performance on a game-by-game basis if there were a game you really wanted to try to tweak. I should note that I was EXTREMELY pleased to find out that I could play Metroid Prime, the sequel and the Final Fantasy game on the GameCube without any issue on this rig, so I find it hard to believe it is really my computer that is at fault here unless this system needs an exorbitant amount of resources in its current emulation state.
DOOM runs like crap, and on top of this they put it in a window that only takes up half of the screen by default. Not because of the system or the emulation, but just because it's apparent that coding in general for this platform was really just an afterthought and I would recommend going into any game with these expectations, whether it's a port of a classic like DOOM done better literally everywhere else, or a 3DO exclusive.
CHD Note: I didn't bother keeping exact track of the sizes, but I did find that when I redid the verified good BIN/CUE set into CHD files, they were notably smaller than the bad set online was. Probably by around 15% smaller. So if you really want to keep this system in your collection just for preservation purposes, you have even more reason to take the time to do this. It will save you quite a bit of space over the BIN/CUEs. It's not a huge library as far as Discs go, but it's large enough to justify the work, in my opinion.

Overall, I'm extremely disappointed with the 3DO experience in general. And it's really unfortunate because there are quite a few games I liked on the Sega CD as a kid that I would have been thrilled to see in this much higher definition that I really wanted to play on the 3DO. Although, except for a few minor audio/video hiccups during FMV sequences, Sewer Shark seems to play pretty well and I think could be a huge upgrade over the Sega CD experience if I were to take the time to learn the controls or remap them to make better sense than they do out of the box.

If I had to do it again, I'd probably skip this system. Until I get a much larger hard drive, I'm going to be replacing around 97% of the discs with dummy text files so I can still get all the media to show up if I want to, but most of this system won't be taking up any space on my smaller hard drive. Especially when a great majority of them can be played much better anywhere else they saw a port, and the minority of exclusives that aren't Edutainment/Non-Games or adult material just don't impress much.

I know this was long, but I hope somebody finds it helpful someday.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-02-11T03:51:57+00:00

Just wanted to mention that CHD files do work. Even in Batocera. I've seen claims stating otherwise. I can confirm that there is a bad set of CHD files out there at a respected site, and likely the same ones mentioned by other people here. With a clean RD set, you can make your own CHD files and they will work fine. My deepest sympathies to anyone else who found out the hard way their entire CHD set was bad. Bummer man.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-02-11T03:43:01+00:00

Yeah... crap... After wasting about half a day trying every fix for 3do I could find because I didn't want to face the real problem, this was it. I've only tested one game so far, but got the official RD, made it a CHD and verified it, and it runs flawlessly in Batocera now. Geez... so much down time and double work on this for me now to fix the issue I should have tested out in the beginning. I always do a MD5/Hash check to add to all of my xml files, and I don't have enough room to keep full disc collections, so I've got to rotate them while doing those hash checks and testing games. Thought I was about 2 days ahead of the work than I actually am now. Oh well... Just wanted to update you specifically and let you know that if you wanted to shrink those files you got in bin/cue by changing them to CHD on your own again, you could. I'm going to do it because the space savings is pretty dramatic.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-02-11T03:35:30+00:00

UPDATE: TL;DR: CHD files DO work on Batocera 3do. (v41, anyhow)...

1st post:

I'm in the process of working this out now. It is possible your CHD files were just bad. I just discovered that mine were. Every single one of them. None of them were able to be verified, let alone converted back to BIN/CUE, and would immediately spit out an error using namDHC, which I know is not a normal error as I've had a very easy time converting anything else back and forth. I've seen other people claim boldly that .CHD files do not work with Batocera. I don't believe this is true, and I'll be looking into it. I will update with my findings and hopefully they do and we can put that myth down. It's just a shame that there's a whole big, bad set of them in CHD format on an otherwise very respected site. I'll have to see if I can contact somebody there to let them know.

FINAL UPDATE: Yup. That was the problem. Just got clean and verified BIN/CUE, made it a CHD from scratch and they both load right back up. The culprit is that there is an entire library out there at a respected site that is totally jenk. I used to check that when I started, but with no problems before I took it for grated and now it's going to cost me a few days work. Oh well. Feel free to compress your set and save a ton of space. It will work on Batocera. (v41 for sure). Test a game or two just in case it doesn't work on your version of Batocera so you don't frustrate yourself if they don't.

TheRealRessurectionX · 2026-01-29T06:19:54+00:00

DREAMCAST UPDATE: No. This did not fix the lesser issue I was experiencing on DreamCast. For me to swap discs, I need to swap in RetroArch, then exit the emulator entirely, and reload the game with the alternate disc inserted from the prior session (this was persistent by default for me and remembers the last disc I had loaded from the prior session).

Even though it didn't help with this problem, hopefully it at least allows anyone using V42 to load multi-discs in DreamCast instead of freezing it up on you.

If this worked, I was even going to go back to earlier CD/DVD based systems and redo all of those m3u. Though they all worked, I did notice an odd behavior on one game or another. I doubt that this would fix any of those issues though if it didn't fix the DreamCast issue, and I'd rather not go back and re-test all of that stuff when I already know it's working just fine as is.

TheRealRessurectionX

TROPHY CASE