StarTropics is an action-adventure game for the NES that plays something like a cross between The Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quest. Players control American teenager Mike Jones, whose uncle Dr. J has gone missing from his laboratory on C-Island. Mike sets out to find his uncle, taking his ship/submarine on a journey across a tropical island archipelago.

Designed especially for international NES players, StarTropics is notable for being one of the few first-party NES games to never be released in Japan. One of its more innovative features at the time was requiring players to interact with a physical note included in the game box to progress in the story.

Two of the music tracks in StarTropics are slightly broken, the island map music, and one of the ending tunes. This patch fixes them both.

I've also created a fully labelled disassembly, and complete description of the StarTropics music format. For anyone looking to hack new music into StarTropics, this will be a good guide.

[list]
[li]IPS patch: startropics_music_fix.ips[/li]
[li]NSF music: startropics_music_fix.nsf[/li]
[li]Source code: startropics_music_fix.zip[/li]
[/list]

Some emulators, notably Nestopia, do not support modifications to the StarTropics ROM due to a conflation of the MMC3 and MMC6 mappers as iNES mapper 4. If the emulator has to use a CRC check to select MMC6, it may have problems running the patched ROM (e.g. audio will be silent, and name registration will fail). Newer emulators may instead support or require updated ROM headers for Startropics. To fix this, you can try one of these two patches (but not both):
[list]
[li]Mapper Fix - iNES 2 header for newer emulators.[/li]
[li]MMC3 - Converts MMC6 to MMC3, for older emulators.[/li]
[/list]

Startropics (U).nes
CRC32 a02323b3
MD5 f7033465443b9c21cdc128d281b14af5
SHA-1 ce4daff535a847e5b47aff49381f3b0e76eb3295
SHA-256 dbdde8f9c73188fadaf6482111b085cfc91aa22f61a71e844fbf1fc99466a11a
-
Startropics (Europe).nes
CRC32 3fc29044
MD5 fcd4c76357c780a01093a9e199d94089
SHA-1 7f78375d7ecf05e9c177b33e36e34addd3daed44
SHA-256 3a48ffe57f8a7501a8f4cd4efdb8070c8cec39d91dfaa9c468d7c2b9f0e1ebc9