SUDDEN DESU

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.

The Atari File Management Subsystem (FMS) is the filesystem on an Atari 810 floppy disk.

The 720 sectors of the disk were numbered from 1 to 720, but (perhaps due to poor communication between the different development teams at Atari) the FMS filesystem was designed to support sector addresses in the range from 0 to 719, which meant that sector 720 was not addressable but a nonexistent sector 0 was. This resulted in the filesystem only using the 719 sectors in the overlap between what is addressable and what actually exists, so sector 720 is unused (a waste of a perfectly good 128 bytes).

I noticed this menu a while back in Magical Error wo Sagase, a puzzle game where you search for differences between two images. In the past I was able to load the routine, but I guess the stack wasn’t set up properly, and it would reset the game immediately after the text appeared. I took a second look at the disassembly tonight and had much better success.