Mega Man 3: My Little Pony: Dr. Discord's Conquest

This ROM hack of Mega Man 3 completely redesigns the game to resemble the world and characters of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, with new graphics and music from a wide range of games. Enemy and Boss AI is also altered as well as the control scheme (no sliding like in Mega Man 2)

The evil Discord has once again returned, and it is up to Twilight Sparkle to stop him as well as her rampaging friends!

This is a ROM hack of the NES game Mega Man 3.

You can either use the executable file to patch the ROM file put in this folder, or you can use the .ips file and a patching program to do it manually.




Story
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The evil Discord has once again returned to the peaceful land of Equestria! All of Twilight Sparkle's friends have gone berserk for some reason and there's noone but her left to stop them and Discord from destroying everything!



EDIT: 5. January 2014.

I was asked to tell a few things about the development of this hack, so here I go!

But first, let's get a couple of things out of the way!

Tools used:

- MegaFLE X - Stages, Graphics, Damage data, etc.
- Tile Layer Pro (TLP) - Graphics
- Capcom Sprite Assembler (CSA) - Sprite structures, Graphics
- YYCHR - Locating CHR banks for CSA
- Famitracker - Preparing NES covers of the music
- Cygnus Hex editor - Music hacking based on my Famitracker covers, AI tweaking
- Translhextion - Text editing
- MM3tedit - Text editing

Documents used:

- Matrixz's updated Capcom sound engine document
- An .xls file by me to make converting music sequence data from Famitracker for the hack by hand easier
- A TON of stuff left for people to use by kujakiller

Music used:

Title - 8-bit remix of the Friendship is Magic theme
Password - Akumajou Dracula (FDS): Name entry
Stage Select - Megaman 8: Stage Select
Stage Start - Custom tune
Applejack - Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (GEN): Hill Top Zone
Rarity - MediEvil (PS1): Crystal Caves
Trixie - Akumajou Densetsu (FC): Rising
Pinkie Pie - Megaman & Bass (GBA): Magic Man
Rainbow Dash - Megaman X6 (PS1): Rainy Turtloid
Fluttershy - Kirby's Adventure (NES): Forest Trail
Princess Celestia - Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex: Wizards and Lizards
Princess Luna - Ninja Gaiden (NES): Unbreakable Determination
Secret Island 1 - Ufouria the Saga (NES): Hebe's Underground
Secret Island 2 - Akumajou Densetsu (FC): Nightmare
Secret Island 3 & 4 - Megaman 3 (GB): Wily's Marine Fortress
Secret Island 5 & 6 - Megaman X6 (PS1): Gate's Lab Stage 3
Boss - Jungle Book (NES): Boss
Final Boss - Akumajou Densetsu (FC): Big Battle 2
Weapon Get - Megaman X (SNES): Weapon Get
Stage Clear - Standard Megaman Clear theme (different from the original MM3)
All Clear - Custom Tune
Credits 1 - Crash Bash (PS1): Credits
Credits 2 - Credits 1 Channel A solo

Listing all the sources for the graphics would take 13424125125 years approximately according to my calculations, so I'd rather pass.

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A little history of what I actually remember...

I started making this hack in November 2011, not much after I watched a couple episodes of the show, which was a positive disappointment. At the time I really was into hacking, and Megaman hacking to be exact. I thought the ponies were a great concept for a Megaman hack, so I started working on the first stage, Snakeman/Fluttershy.

I wanted to make sure to find the right games to rip graphics from, to fit each boss. (You might be asking why Trixie lives in a factory from Chip & Dale 2, well I always imagined her hiding in some Laboratory of magical experiments or something to create new tricks and whatnot)

At first I was planning to make this a MLP - Megaman crossover with Wily using a device to travel to different universes and ending up trying to conquer the pony world with Robot copies (All the bosses were supposed to have a metallic look)

But since Season 2 of the show had a pretty "badass" villain for a cartoon like that, I decided to drop the crossover idea and wipe out all the connections to Megaman story-wise.

And...that's about it for the desing really, I have no idea which stage was the second or the third one... What I know for sure is that the music was a pain in the ass. I had two summers during development and that's when I was working on the music, because a single song took hours and hours and hours to be implemented, IF I was paying enough attention to what I was doing and didn't screw up any of the data pointers or the sequence data bytes. "Translating" every single note and effect from the famitracker window into hex, using an .xls table file day and night was literally hell.

I rewrote about 20kB of data by hand for the music, and that's not counting all the songs that I later decided to replace, so altogether it was probably about 30kB if not more. Some of the tracks I actually regret having replaced. The was going to be a Mystic cave zone music, and Banjo-Kazooie music too. There's also an unused song still in the hack, but I'm not going to spoil what it is. If you're having a really boring day, you might find it yourself with a little looking around.

Point is, around September 2013, the soundtrack was in its final state.

I still have dozens upon dozens of backup copies, some of them still have the old music tracks. You might be able to find them on Youtube or Soundcloud by the time you're reading this.

It might not be the best hack there is, but... I'm a single person, and I was doing this because it was fun for me, not because I wanted to try to show something better than Rockman 4 MI for example. That's a mission for die-hard programmers, not me.

Thanks for playing, hope you'll enjoy the game, or you might be reading this afterwards, or not at all!

Contacts: None, because I no longer want to be associated with anything My little Pony, and I also want to give up hacking. Nothing lasts forever.

November 2011 - January 2014

Country: USA
Original Bytes: (length=393232)
CRC32: 452d8089
MD5: 75b924155cafee335c9ea7a01bfc8efb
SHA-1: 53197445e137e47a73fd4876b87e288ed0fed5c6
SHA-256: eddbe571cf0a201ba9d090fbace9843c9c9dd4053051649f2575b088752f4675

Mega Man 3 (U) [!]