Sure, 2016 was a steaming pile of disappointment in many ways, but for me personally, it was actually pretty amazing. It was because things were so great that the site didn't get much love this past year...

It's been a while, hasn't it? Some major events have happened in my life, namely planning a trip to Japan later this year and finally returning to college, which have stolen much of my attention. But I still enjoy disassembling and researching old software, and there's still a backlog of content to finish writing and post, so the site is definitely not dead!

And speaking of backlogs, a few months back my friend AJ on twitter asked that I take a look at Neo Bomberman for the NeoGeo after spotting some suspicious text strings. I started the initial disassembly right away, but didn't give it a serious examination until recently...

Originally written November 2013

Eight years ago (!), we were starting to really dig into the Chrono Trigger Pre-release Demo ROM. I was making it a project to dump all of the dialogue from this Demo version for comparison to the final. I wanted to do a full translation and hoped to find exciting differences in the story. I never finished the translation or comparison, but thankfully the Chrono Compendium completed that project fantastically. While identifying the text blocks and dumping them, we found early on that there was leftover dialogue data from previous versions of the game. Unfortunately, the text was broken: the hiragana and katakana were readable but the kanji was wildly incorrect. That broken text has never been given a thorough examination, until recently when, on a whim, I picked up the project again and documented what I found...

Here we are at part two of our dissection of Burning Force. We'll look at some of the less flashy, more technical tidbits I've come across while taking the game apart.

Another game with too much stuff to cram into one post! Burning Force is a shooter similar to Space Harrier, only a bit prettier (and newer, to be fair). In part 1 I'll show a few of the most interesting finds, and then in part 2 we'll look at some leftover debugging tools, bugs and other miscellany.