Wizardry, FC version different from NES?

[Ghegs]

I've been playing a lot of DRPG's this past year (basically everything available on Switch) so I've been thinking about giving a shot at the grand-daddy of the genre. The Famicom versions all include English, and with the Turbo File I wouldn't have to worry about the cartridges' own batteries being dead since I can just store the characters externally, and I'd be able to transfer the characters from one game to the next. It might be a pretty interesting experience.

Many places online claim that the NES version has a bug where the AC isn't actually taken into account during combat, making the game considerably more difficult. And since somebody made a patch to fix it, I'd say it's confirmed to be the case. So the question is, does this issue exist in the Famicom version?

It also occurred to me that this is a pretty huge bug and it's somewhat unbelievable that nobody caught it during development, so maybe it isn't a bug after all, but the change to the NES version was made deliberately? It wouldn't be the first time a NES game has been made harder over its Famicom counterpart, to battle against the "evils" of game rentals that were a thing in the US back in those days.

[FDS-Hungry]

I played the NES one for a long time, but i dont think I ever beat it when it came out.  I never knew about the AC bug but that may explain why I gave up on a balanced party and made it furthest with a party of all casters taking the glass cannon approach.

[P]

Oh Wizardry, I've also planned to get through these games some day. Prepare for some masochist's dungeon crawling.
Although you can choose English (英語 "eigo" instead of 日本語 "nihongo") for most things, note that not everything in the game will be in English, like the names of default characters and the name-entry characters. But it should probably be playable anyway, especially if you can read kana.

The hacker said that he only changed a single byte, so I took a look at the IPS patch and it indeed only changes a byte $F9 to $FD found at the address $01F8C6 in the iNES ROM image.
Short technical explanation: this changes the instruction "SBC $7DD0,Y" to "SBC $7DD0,X", so the programmer accidentally typed a Y instead of an X, a very simple mistake to make indeed but will break the code none the less.
I then looked into the Japanese ROM and it has things moved around, so the same IPS patch will not work on it unfortunately. But I copied the string of hex values here to see if I couldn't find it in the Japanese ROM as well, and I sure did. It's found at address $01F9FC in the ROM file and it also has $F9 instead of $FD here, that strongly indicates that the bug is present in this version as well.

Anyway, the fix is easily done using a hex editor such as XVI32 (use GOTO and enter the address then overwrite the byte F9 with FD and save the modified file). Alternatively I made an IPS patch for the Japanese version, I'm trying to attach it to this post but Famicom World gives me errors. I'll upload it to an alternate server for now here.
It's entirely untested but hopefully you should notice if a character with high AC gets hit less often.

[Ghegs]

Although you can choose English (英語 "eigo" instead of 日本語 "nihongo") for most things, note that not everything in the game will be in English, like the names of default characters and the name-entry characters. But it should probably be playable anyway, especially if you can read kana.

You can use an English character set to (re-)name characters, just hit Select to change what set to use when in the naming screen.

It's found at address $01F9FC in the ROM file and it also has $F9 instead of $FD here, that strongly indicates that the bug is present in this version as well.

Thanks for finding that out. I was hoping to use original cartridges to play through the games, and having to hack a rom file would rather go against that philosophy. I guess I could just play a hacked rom of the first game on a flash cart and then play the rest with original cartridges, but that begs the question if the other games also suffer from the same bug...

(Or I could just play the games using my PS1 Wizardry: Llylgamyn Saga collection that I got years ago, but dangit, I wanted to play them on the Famicom.)

It's entirely untested but hopefully you should notice if a character with high AC gets hit less often.

Wizardry uses THAC0, right? So high AC = get hit more, low AC = get hit less.

[P]

Oh I see. I guess you probably want to give your characters more personal names anyway, instead of Fighter 1 etc.


Yeah well, flashcarts are the way to go if using hacked ROMs and that's one of their strengths, it's a bit too bad if you got hold of the real cart and won't ending up using it though. But I do this with many of my real carts where the pins are too poor for it to boot without a lot of fiddling or if I don't want to risk loosing data from battery failure, mostly just keeping the cart around for its artwork and the manual of course.


It doesn't use the exact THAC0 rules of AD&D 2E (which is from 1989 while Wizardry is from 1981), but it is of course heavily inspired by D&D and does indeed use a typical AC system where lower AC equals better deflection rate (meaning it's a combination of blocking and evasion). You can easily see this by unequipping armor and watch it go up. Going into battle unarmored should make you get hit more often if the patch works.

[Ghegs]

Found this interview with one of the original game's creators, Robert Woodhead.

...Woodhead acknowledges that the best rendition of the original Wizardry also hails from Japan. "Personally, I think the best version of the original Wizardry ever done was the Nintendo version," he says. "They managed to cram the entire game into a cartridge, and second of all, they leveraged the special graphics capabilities they had to make a really nice presentation. All the people in Japan did just tremendous work--I was really, really impressed."

[P]

Heh that's nice to hear, especially considering that it's a very accessible version of the game compared to the original Apple II version.
There are also Wizardry I-II and I-II-III for PC-Engine and SFC respectively which also looks very good and are very accessible, though I don't know how they compare bug-wise.