Happy New Year! As promised, here is the writeup on the classic Cave shooter, Donpachi. I’ve decided to do something a little bit different here. Instead of spending so much time writing out the technical details of my findings, I’m instead just providing an overview and MAME cheats to access them. I’ll do the same with the Dodonpachi which will follow later. Later this year I’ll finish up with a detailed technical article about both games. I’m doing it this way in part because the two games share a lot of code (as DDP was clearly built off of DP), and in part because I’ll never get this article out the door in time otherwise. I think there’s a bunch of interesting things here that fans of the game will want to play with, so I’d like to get it published sooner than later.

With all that said, here we go…

2016 turned out to be an amazing year for me personally. It was because things were so great that the site didn’t get much love the past few months…

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…

So it looks like after the Waku Waku Patrol Car and the Popcorn Machine dumps, we may have another rare Sonic arcade game on our hands. This one was unreleased though, never making it past the location test stage.