I cut my teeth on game hacking and research in the Sonic communities of the early 2000’s - Area 51, SSRG, CulT - and the Sonic arcade games were always something of an enigma to us. It’s been especially exciting to see that these rarities have been finally dumped, including Cosmo Fighter.

I opened the data not expecting to find much and, unfortunately, I was correct. But there are a couple interesting tidbits worth looking at…

Just a small article this time. I came across an intriguing line of text as I was taking apart Detana! Twin Bee (arcade version) recently. Though part of the message shows up normally at the end of the game, it turns out there’s more to the story…

I’ve had this article half-researched and half-written for more than a year now, just sort of laying around. I’ve lacked the interest in finishing it because, frankly, the game is pretty awful. Well, after months of Donpachi and Dodonpachi, it’s time to take a short break with something easy.

Enjoy, I guess?

And now for the article many people have been waiting for: Dodonpachi! Unfortunately, I didn’t make it in time for the 20th anniversary of the game on February 5th, but oh well; better late than never right? This game seems to have a larger following than it’s predecessor, so I’m sure shmup fans will enjoy the re-enabled debugging tools available to play around with. There’s not much else to say, so here we go!

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…