Life is finally returning to normalcy (whatever that is) after moving into my new house. And that means back to hacking old games in my spare time! Today we’ll look at Akamaru Q Joushou, a game you probably haven’t bothered with unless your Japanese is pretty good. At its heart, it’s a quiz game, but it also has a variety of simple action and word games as well to make things interesting. It has one hell of a collection of debugging tools… and a very interesting developer easter egg!

In Part 1 we examined the disabled Tool Menu, and now we’ll look at the variety of debugging tools left in, plus a couple mysteries. And then I’ll finally be done with this game… for now.

Kyukyoku Sentai Dadandarn, meaning Ultimate Battle Squad Dadandarn and called Monster Maulers in the West, is Konami’s homage to/parody of the sentai genre of TV shows, movies and comics. It’s a solid game and pretty fun; Hardcore Gaming 101 has a good review. And I got way more than I bargained for when I started taking the game apart: so much more that I’ll be making splitting this into two posts. Here we go…

Yet another adult arcade quiz game, this time with some pretty well-drawn and amusing artwork by eromanga artist Miyasu Nonki! A while back I found the text for an alternate test menu, with object and background checks. I could never really track it down properly with the standard MAME disassembly. Maybe I just wasn’t trying hard enough, because when I gave it another go yesterday, this time in IDA, I was finally able to find the routine as well as the non-hacked method for activating it.

I’m pretty burnt out on tackling Super Gem Fighter / Pocket Fighter right now. I took a little break and did some more research on something quite interesting I had found a while back: English text in Koutetsu Yousai Strahl, a horizontal shooter and a favorite among shmup fans.

EDIT 2018-11-28: As of MAME 0.203, there is a world region dump of Strahl. It contains the English text that was found in the Japanese version, making this article relatively useless. Oh well.