Hack Name:  The Death And Return Of Superman (PAL Crash Fixed) For PAL Regions
Platform: 
Genre: 
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Status:  Complete
Patch Version:  Final JUE (W)
Last updated:  June 28, 2025
Type of Hack:  Bug Fix
Downloads:  35

The Death and Return of Superman is a 1995 beat-’em-up for the Sega Mega Drive and Sega Genesis console by Blizzard Entertainment and Sunsoft tying into ”The Death and Return of Superman” comic book arc.

I’ll get straight to the point of this patch.

The original PAL release of The Death and Return of Superman removed the region lock of the North American version but inadvertently added a glitch which appears randomly while playing through the first two Superman levels, locking up the game. If the player manages to get to the third level (the first Cyborg level) without triggering the glitch, it disappears for the rest of the game. It is very unlikely not to come across it, though. Acclaim (being the publisher of the PAL release) never issued a bug-fixed version of the game for Europe and Australia; instead, it simply halted its production, making the PAL version a rare and sought-after game in the Mega Drive library.

So here I attempted to fix the random crashing of the PAL version by using a very simple method. I grabbed a copy of the USA version and removed the region lock in it completely making it region-free so it now plays in PAL 50Hz Mega Drive, NTSC-U 60Hz Genesis and even NTSC-J 60Hz Mega Drive. The music plays slower in PAL 50Hz but the official PAL release played the music slower anyway so it’s identical. Playing the NTSC version in PAL even has the cram dots on the bottom of the screen just like the official PAL version. It’s the same and plays without crashing or freezing.

I want to thank Youtuber (Mike) Retro Gamer Boy for pointing out the bug in one of his recent Mega Drive videos where he found an official PAL version boxed with manual and cartridge for a bargain, although the bug has been reported for many decades, I just wasn’t aware of it and was unfamiliar with this game, until now.

I can confim that this USA version now a (World) version plays perfectly on a PAL 50Hz original Mega Drive model 1, I played it on my EverDrive and made it all the way to stage 4 without any crashing or freezing, on the PAL official version I barely made it to stage 2 where it crashed multiple times and after each crash I had to start the game all over again from the beginning, I eventually used save states on the EverDrive to work around the crashing but it still got very frustrating and I ended up giving up and playing the USA version.

Looking at the ROM header of the official PAL version it seems that instead of doing what I did which was simply to remove the region lock entirely of the USA ROM and ship the game as the PAL version, Blizzard, Sunsoft or Acclaim messed with the ROM unnecessarily and changed something in it which triggers the sporadic crashing.

CHANGES:

  • This patch works perfectly in PAL 50Hz
  • The date in the ROM header reads the original NTSC-U release being Aug 1994 instead of April 1995. This is how you can tell it’s the USA version made region-free. 1F JUE
  • Works 100% on real hardware.

Everything else is exactly the same as the official PAL version and it can still be played in NTSC-U as it was originally meant for.

INSTRUCTIONS: 

Inside the ZIP file you’ll find the IPS patch, it is in Lunar IPS format and needs to be patched to the USA NTSC-U Genesis version of ”The Death and Return of Superman”.

Don’t patch it to the European PAL ROM!

Happy gaming!

Hashes: 
Filename: Death and Return of Superman, The (USA).md
CRC-32: 982242d3
SHA-1: 3534d17801bd5756b10a7f8d7d95f3a8d9b74844
Staff/Credits: 
Special Thanks: Retro Gamer Boy (Mike)
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