Magical Puzzle Popils (Prototype) - Audio Recreation (NES) Romhack

Magical Puzzle Popils is a puzzle platformer game developed for the NES, with ports for the Turbografx-16 and the Game Gear also being developed around the same time. In the end, however, only the Game Gear port was released, with the other two versions becoming lost media aside of gameplay footage shared by Jun Amanai (the game’s programmer for all versions) through his YouTube channel.

On December 17 2025, the Video Game History Foundation and Hidden Palace preserved and released a late prototype of the NES version of Magical Puzzle Popils. While this prototype is fully playable from start to end, unfortunately the EEPROM chip that contained the sequence data for the music and sound effects could not be found, which means that the game no longer has any audio to play at all. Despite this, however, a lot of important sound-related data (sound driver, ADSR envelopes, ROM pointers, channel assignations) is still present in the other EEPROM chips.

This hack inserts recreations of all publicly available music tracks and sound effects into the prototype. This was done by porting the sequence data of all sounds found in the Game Gear version, along with doing many adjustments (ASDR, vibrato and note transposing edits) to match the audio heard in Jun Amanai’s gameplay videos as closely as possible.

This hack is compatible with both the prototype’s original release and NewRisingSun’s MMC3 conversion hack.

Example of the game's secret sound test now actually playing audio

Hashes:

Filename: Magical Puzzle Popils (Incomplete prototype).nes
CRC-32: 2f451f46
SHA-1: 6618799cc12b46b4108597e94155649588e713a1

Filename: Magical Puzzle Popils (Incomplete prototype) (MMC3 Patched).nes
CRC-32: b4c46ef2
SHA-1: 49e790cb5c51e19c57323b4f86bf9b20d52a5b22

Staff/Credits:

• Mister Man: Hack development.

Special Thanks To:
• VGHF, Hidden Palace, Kak and NewRisingSun: For preserving and releasing this prototype, along with making it compatible with most emulators.
• Ndiddy: Besides helping preserve this prototype, discovered an unused noise channel for the "Demo" music track in the Game Gear version, which was then used for this hack.
• Jun Amanai: For his YouTube videos showcasing the unreleased NES and Turbografx-16 versions, which were heavily referenced for this hack's development.

File download:

Help about patching:

Most of the files you're about to download need to be applied to your game. Here is a list of utilities that allow you to do this:

Online Patcher: Marc Roblero's online patcher. Works with many different file types.
Floating IPS: NWell-known patcher for applying IPS and BPS files.
Delta Patcher: Used to apply xDelta files.
More Patchers

On most files, you can also press “Patch It”, to apply the patch without downloading the file.