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), 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
