Raphaël Boichot reverse-engineered Sengoku 2, the 1993 Neo Geo AES/MVS beat-em-up, to restore blood effects that were stripped before the game shipped. The original release had no DIP switch, no hidden bit, no simple toggle to enable an uncensored mode. The gore was gone at the graphics level, and getting it back meant doing it the hard way.
Boichot's process required swapping palettes and manually editing tilesets, making surgical artistic decisions to add blood splatter without corrupting adjacent sprite and background data. Every change had to be isolated. The Neo Geo's graphics architecture left no margin for sloppy edits. The full project, including documentation and the patched ROM, is on GitHub.
The reason to read the full write-up is not the blood. It is the step-by-step methodology for attacking an undocumented proprietary graphics format with no official tooling. If you work on ROM hacks, retro preservation, or embedded graphics pipelines, Boichot's approach to palette mapping and tileset isolation is directly transferable.
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