Hokuto No Ken 2/Fist Of The North Star NES OVERHAUL Patch

This is a patch for the Bandai/TOEI game Hokuto No Ken 2: Seikimatsu Kyūseishu Densetsu for the Famicon, released in the US as Fist Of The North Star.  It's a complete overhaul to graphics and gameplay that fixes glitches, makes cheat codes and deathblows easier to achieve, and restores lost content.

Included are two patches, one for the original Famicom game, and the other for the US NES version. For the sake of transparency, the patch for the NES version literally just turns the US version into the Famicom version and then applies my patches on top of it. The US version can't actually handle a lot of the changes I make to this ROM, because so much of the original game's code was altered or removed.

This patch is built on top of my full game translation of Hokuto no Ken 2. If you would just like the translation (with some debug features restored), you can find it on my Ko-Fi here:

https://ko-fi.com/s/e206aa2802

Also included is an NSF sound file of my re-arranged soundtrack.

Things that have been changed:

OVERALL:

• Full English translation of stage names and in-game text. Special Moves have been replaced with graphics depicting the recovery of Yuria's Necklace or fighting-game style announcements of the player's victory or defeat in boss battles.

MUSIC:

• Entire soundtrack has been rearranged. Drum sounds have been modified to be more audible, basslines have been dropped an octave, instrumentation has been re-assigned and additional harmonics have been added to make these short phrases of music feel less repetitive.
• The music for stages four and six have been swapped because it made no sense that the shortest stage in the game got the coolest music and the longest stage in the game got the most potentially-annoying high-pitched song,

GRAPHICS:

• Custom fighting-game style defeat portraits for all of the bosses.
• Stages have been recolored and parts of the player and enemy sprites have been redrawn.
• Completely redesigned title screen, ending graphics, and other splash screens.
• The portraits for the "good" and "bad" ending have been reversed because it made no sense to me for the bad ending to show you the just rescued Lui and the good ending to show you Falco's ugly mug.

GAMEPLAY:

• Death Blows are now automatic, and using pressure point moves are not required. However, using pressure point moves now halves the boss' hit points, so it's still worth practicing them.
• You keep all your power-ups, fireballs, and rank when you die. You still lose everything when you continue.
• You continue the game when you lose all of your lives by holding Down and pressing Start at the title screen.  This can now be done from any stage of the game up to and including the secret final boss that you can normally only reach by not continuing. Continuing on the secret boss gives you the bad ending.

ADDITIONAL:

• Restored Debug cheat codes:
  1) Hold B and press Right at the title screen to skip stages, then hit Start while still holding B to go to that stage.
  2) Hold A at the title screen and press Start to begin the game fully powered up. This can be combined with the level skip *and* continues. Sometimes you also wind up invincible using this code, which may or may not also be what you want.

THIS IS NOT A GAME ROM. It is a graphics and code patch authored by me which must be applied to a file owned by the downloader. You can find this game at many classic NES game online stores. Enjoy!