A fully playable translation of Rent a Hero has been released last month. Let’s transfer it to a Mega Drive cartridge using this tutorial.
First, you need a cheap donor cartridge with SRAM memory, e.g. World Cup USA ’94, and remove the mask ROM. If the battery cell is empty, remove it too:
Then, patch the Japanese Rent a Hero ROM with the translation IPS. Don’t forget to correct the checksum. The translated ROM is bigger than the original ROM (~1.2 MB) and it will fit on a 2 MB EPROM (27C160). Before burning the EPROM, make sure to byte-swap the ROM; it should read “ESAG” instead of “SEGA” in a hex editor:
Before soldering the EPROM to the donor cart, you need to bend two pins:
- To use the SRAM save feature, connect pin 32 of the EPROM to pin 5 of the TTL (the 74xx chip)
- To use a 2 MB EPROM on a 1 MB donor cart, connect address line A19 (pin 42) to the 8th connector from the left
Why do you need the line for the SRAM? Is it at a weird address or something?
It’s been a while – I actually just followed the instructions linked above.
I got around to doing this cart mod on a cheap original cart today. 27C160 is bigger so I had to do the line for A19 but after checking the pinout I didn’t feel the SRAM line was necessary and it seems to save and reload ok without it. I’m not saying the original tutorial is wrong, but for other folk finding this post maybe question if you need it depending on what your donor is.