In 1992-93, Namcot planned an RPG for the Nintendo Famicom / NES, based on its Splatterhouse horror series, which was popular in the arcades and on the PC Engine (or Turbografx-16). They had previously released "Splatterhouse: Wanpuku Graffiti," a side-scrolling game which took a comedic approach to the series, and this was a sequel to that. The game was never released, since Namcot was no longer releasing many games for the Famicom. The game was also considered lost until this week.
I am still working on my personal project, and that got me back into NES Romhacking this month, for the first time in awhile. I decided to take a little detour from personal work, and do some work on Splatter World. There is a Namcot Youtube video which goes over artwork from the Splatterhouse series, including this game. From this video, I upscaled the key art and manual art using Topaz, and then redrew sections of the manual art which are not clearly seen in the video, such as the right side of Jennifer Willis. This involved actual paper and ink, as usual. I also drew two takes on an English logo for the game, curving upward and downward.
I then hacked the game ROM to display an English logo. This required a little bit of fiddling in the hexadecimal code, since this section uses "2C" and "2D" as commands for simple RLE compression. I couldn't use my "2C" and "2D" artwork tiles and had to write simple "2C" commands for any repeated tiles, such as the all-black tile "00."
"Gideon Zhi" seems to be working on a full translation of the ROM.
Incidentally, I also did a little more work on a "Superman II" edit this month.
Splatter World artwork:https://drive.google.com/drive/mobile/folders/163ys7yfwp91mp490H-1TkyW02ATOHGPW?usp=sharing&pli=1