ROM Hack Lunar Knights screen swap code?

[emcintosh]

Has anyone successfully swapped the screens of Lunar Knights (ideally EUR, but as I'm playing in English, the US version would work as well) so the action happens on the top screen? I would like this partly because I am used to games' primary display being the top screen, and partly for use with Sono's widescreen TWPatch.

I have played the GBA Boktai games in widescreen with mGBA and think it actually improves their appearance - the games are presented in 'military axonometric projection' where any horizontal surfaces are rotated 45° but are undistorted, but vertical surfaces are significantly skewed, whereas when stretched horizontally they appear closer to isometric, where horizontal and vertical surfaces are equally distorted.

I understand that swapping the screens may make some parts harder e.g. the rail shooter sections, in which you touch enemies on the screen to shoot them, but this seems acceptable as the way it works in the base game seems like cheating - shots home in on enemies even if they change their position as they come towards you. There are also menus that *can* be activated by touch e.g. the world map, but they also accept button input. The transformation modes also have a touch button to activate, but it's clear which corner of the screen you need to touch.

I have tried these codes (switching which rendering engine displays on which screen), and found them not to work for this game:
14000304 00000FFF as suggested by Fast6191 in https://gbatemp.net/threads/action-replay-code-to-switch-screens.355486/
14000304 0000020F and 14000304 0000820F as suggested by habababa in https://gbatemp.net/threads/is-ther...e-the-ds-switch-display-screens.274089/page-2

@Sono, what is the state of the screen-swapping function of your scaling patcher? You mentioned in March in https://gbatemp.net/threads/twpatch...lters-and-patches.542694/page-59#post-8972416 that you've disabled it because it wasn't working well, especially combined with widescreen.

 

[Sono]

what is the state of the screen-swapping function of your scaling patcher? You mentioned in March in https://gbatemp.net/threads/twpatch...lters-and-patches.542694/page-59#post-8972416 that you've disabled it because it wasn't working well, especially combined with widescreen.

Because I went with the easy way, you can only use the screen swap code with widescreen if you also enable the GPU scaling patch, which is really unfortunate, because I broke GPU scaling + widescreen combo while working on mode800.

Because I don't have free time at all, I can't fix the broken widescreen patch, so you're out of luck from my side, sorry!

 

[FAST6191]

Most people that make such codes to work on hardware do in turn release them.

Between the hardware tricks ( https://gbatemp.net/threads/ds-phat-screen-swap-physical-switch-top-screen-kept.542995/ ) and ease of screen replacements most do not bother to make such things though.

The simplistic stuff you have there will be OK in emulators but hardware first appears to need a bit of gentle soothing before you can flip the screens around (hence the longer cheat from [cracker] later down in the mario kart thread).
I have not properly looked into it but I doubt there will be a generic case like you have for backlight cheats, or indeed even the language stuff (though that is a different matter as it tends to be a firmware settings dump). To that end you will probably want to find a suitable intercept/hooking point and then add a small routine to check button states (or maybe something else) and then do all the sweet nothings the hardware wants to swap things over. I have even less idea what will go with compatibility layers, though if you can get a game specific cheat working like the hardware working one mentioned then it should be fine -- the DS itself does not really care what goes on what screen and several games have the option, I can however see things being stacked on top of some of the fiddlier graphics mods to do on more advanced hardware making things rather unstable.

 

[emcintosh]

Has anyone successfully swapped the screens of Lunar Knights (ideally EUR, but as I'm playing in English, the US version would work as well) so the action happens on the top screen? I would like this partly because I am used to games' primary display being the top screen, and partly for use with Sono's widescreen TWPatch.

I have played the GBA Boktai games in widescreen with mGBA and think it actually improves their appearance - the games are presented in 'military axonometric projection' where any horizontal surfaces are rotated 45° but are undistorted, but vertical surfaces are significantly skewed, whereas when stretched horizontally they appear closer to isometric, where horizontal and vertical surfaces are equally distorted.

The solution is to use NDS-Bootstrap & TWiLightMenu++. It is possible to swap the screens by holding L+R+up+X. This can get reset by screen transitions (e.g. entering buildings/caves in Phantom Hourglass).

The Rosalina-style in-game menu actually offers a persistent way to swap screens in the ‘Options…’ section, by changing the ‘Main screen’ from ‘Auto’ to ‘Top’ or ‘Bottom’. IIRC Lunar Knights needs this on ‘Bottom’ to show the action on top and the weather / terrennial & weapon below, while the Zelda games need ‘Top’ (and rapidly alternate both screens’ images anytime the game causes a swap e.g. title screen intro sequence, Collection screen when you swap pages).