You've played the first three Mega Man titles, packed in with geod's amazing 3DSen emulator. Now I continue the tradition with the next three entries. Behold...Mega Man 4.
It's the year 20XX and the world has been at peace since Dr. Wily's apparent death after the destruction of Gamma. Household robot siblings, Rock and Roll enjoy the peace in the lab of their creator, the brilliant Dr. Thomas Xavier Light.
However, history repeats, and Light's other former colleague, Dr. Mikhail Sergeyovich Cossack has surfaced and he's thrown down the gauntlet; having created 8 new robot masters to challenge Mega Man to combat for supremacy. Seemingly suffering from a bruised ego of being ignored in the wake of Doctors, Light and Wily, he's ready to fill the void of mad scientist trying to take over the world.
Mega Man sets out for battle, riding a bullet train straight to Siberia, Russia. This time armed with the new Super Mega Buster--an enhancement to his main "lemon shooter" arm cannon to allow him to charge his shots for greater attack damage. Rush is back to support his master with his transformations from last game. Now he is joined by Eddy "Flip-Top" who will teleport to key locations in certain stages to dispense power-ups to Mega Man at crucial moments.
Eight new stages in various parts of the world include Toad Man's "Station One" water reclamation facility, Bright Man's "Lightning Control" stage, Pharaoh Man's crypt in Neo Cairo, Ring Man's space telescope observatory, Dust Man's junk-crushing/burning waste disposal plant, Skull Man's bone bridges over an archaeological site, Dive Man's underwater magma-pumping facility at a harbor, and Drill Man's underground mining tunnel. Make it through all that and Dr. Cossack's Siberian Citadel awaits.
But could it be there's more to the story than meets the eye?
Play through Mega Man to get to the truth of why Light's old friend has turned foe.
FINAL (foreseeable) UPDATE!!! With this last batch of fine-tunes and corrections, the profile should be 100% complete, though insignificant issues and errors may still be present. That said...this should be the last round of fixes. If any more need to be made, let me know. And so...
Mega Man 4 Profile (Dropbox Mirror)
Mega Man 4 Profile (OneDrive Mirror)
* Profile maker's note: Sometimes loading custom profiles, specifically Mega Man 4 and Mega Man 5 results in a glitch in which 3DSen doesn't load all the textures and colors into the RAM fast enough and it can result in scrambled graphics. Most of the time this can be remedied by opening a pack-in profile ROM; CastleVania 1 usually works the best, then after it's loaded up, immediately re-load Mega Man 4 or Mega Man 5. It may also help to increase the priority to 3DSen in Task Manager or close other programs. Firefox and Chrome are especially resource-hungry.
Out of the three, this is is USUALLY the most cooperative with few if any graphical issues. While glitches can occur, they are far more rare than Mega Man 5 and Mega Man 6. This one is probably one of my favorites but took the most effort to clean up after several conflicts and shared assets.
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Second update:
Third update:
Fourth update:
Fifth update:
Sixth Update:
Seventh Update:
Update 8:
I present the finished prototype. While still riddled with flaws and probably some undiscovered glitches and issues, for the most part I'd like to consider it a solid A minus work. If anyone can fix the issues and problems and/or clean it up, please by all means fix what I have. Anyone and everyone is welcome to polish and overhaul it or even go through and painstakingly make all of Mega Man and the boss characters into 3D models.
Rest assured I made my best attempt to put everything else in 3D, but some things such as the Metool Daddy boss in Dr. Wily's stage proved to have too many issues with shared assets and other unforeseen problems. Most strange of which is a layer of the floor that does not seem to show up, making Mega Man and the boss and its minions seem to float.
Good luck to all who can make what I've put together better. I leave it all in your hands now. Just be sure to credit me as the maker of the original profile prototype if you modify or upgrade it.
Post Profile Updates:
Bright Man Stage:
Finally, this stage meets all of my standards. After a long time of experimentation with 3DNes coupled with a lot of trial and error with 3DSen, I've finally cleaned up and polished a version of Bright Man's Lighting Control plant that I've been aiming for for ages. It honestly looks and feels worthy of the quality Mega Man games should carry. Several mismatched and substituted tiles eliminated, several holes filled with tile merging, several tweaks to the background, fixes to cables and light fixtures for the lights-out-darkness effect to look proper and all kinds of performance issues corrected without causing too much conflict with other shared tile areas.
Ring Man Stage:
A COMPLETE overhaul and upgrade of the screw-cut crystal pillars and layout that makes up the bulk of this stage. Better cyclinder and alpha effects lead to convincing transparency and gives Ring Man's space telescope observatory tower the overall appearance that is befitting of the Mega Man 4 game. A re-done hippo mid-boss with cleaned up pedestal platform (Now appearing as an oblong/oval platform instead of a circular drum) and new machine-filled crystal flooring. For minor tweaks, planets were now given proper black shadow area to form complete sphere objects. And lastly the machinery and walls of Ring Man's stage were merged, cleaned up and polished to eliminate performance issues.
Dust Man Stage:
Dust Man's industrial junk-crushing incinerator turned out to be a surprise source of performance issues. Glad I nipped this in the bud before it became a huge problem. Sometimes the best overhaul is the one that you can't tell if anything's been changed. Most of the upgrades in this iteration were done to improve performance while retaining the look of the original version 1.0. Several tiles merged into singular patterns, several assets reworked, and a lot of makeshift patchwork to fill gaps (a problem that made Bright Man's stage easily a pain with empty spaces and shared tiles). Rework of the square presses and several revisions of the pipes and press shafts. Overall, looking and playing better.
Skull Man Stage:
I apologize for the thumbnail being lit up during a Flash Stopper use, but finally I was able to eliminate the accidental cylinder pattern texture on the sky and do some serious cloud tile merging and fixes to get the stage to scroll as smooth as butter (despite my PC's and laptop's limited specs. Skull Man's bone bridge archeologic dig site has some improvements on the bones and elbow joints in combination with multiple tile merging to reduce the number of rendered object and present a more cohesive rocky terrain. Initially I had greatly expended the depth of the rib-cage bridges, but that revision was lost in another profile brain-fart that erased my work. So I reverted back to the current setup. Overall I like this stage a lot in 3D.
Dive Man's Stage:
Dive Man's magma-pumping water ocean base (a predecessor to Launch Octopus' turf?) was the cause of many performance issue headaches. To the point it nearly crashed the emulator at some points or slowed it down to unbearable levels and of course riddled with audio static and pops on my PC and laptop due to their unimpressive specifications. But, the challenge of doing more with less presents many opportunities to find new work-arounds and new ways to correct old problems.
I've since doubled down on the assets of Dive Man's stage, doubling the depth, though I've had to tweak the sky background, delete and re-merge tiles repeatedly until I got a working solution that didn't cause any immediate problems in the rest of the game (thus far).
There are still problem areas with slowdown during the first narrow gap slide (under the large overhang between two sky assets and a numerous drop-claw enemies) and the open area with the lone "Jumbig".
But now the whales have been improved to a noticeable degree and the Wire Adaptor area now features expanded plumbing since my version 1.0 build. After a set of refinements, Dive Man's stage is now very playable.
Any future updates to this profile will be intended to correct lingering issues and graphics problems in Dr. Cossack's and Dr. Wily's stages.
Stay tuned. Just because the profile is complete and in the Profile Repository doesn't mean it can't still get later updates and polishes. For now the priority still goes to Mega Man 5. But you never know when a new fix will show up for the Mega Man 4 profile...
UPDATE:
And now new fixes and polishes for Mega Man 4 are up but still more remain.
Finally I can show of the Cossack stages in action.
Cossack Citadel, Area 1: Scaling the snowy outer defense wall:
Cossack Citadel, Area 2: Inside the Citadel, approaching the main computer:
Cossack Citadel, Area 3, Above the Citadel, around the minaret and towers:
Cossack Citadel, Area 4, Into Dr. Cossack's underground warehouse:
What may be the final post-profile update...
Wily Fortress mk IV, Area 1, Through the castle's water-purifying and pumping station:
Wily Fortress mk IV, Area 2, Passing through Wily's Robotics Research Server Farm:
Wily Fortress mk IV, Area 3, Entering the Dr. Wily Teleport System version 4.0:
Wily Fortress mk IV, Area 4, Dr. Wily's underground bunker and secret lab, Ending, Staff Credits & Thanks For Playing final message
Thank-you for sticking around to see the development run its course. See you in Mega Man 5!