Articles with tag `Easter Egg`

I’m a sucker for games with 1990’s cutesy anime girls, especially when they are paired with hi-tech elements like piloting ships in an STG. Burning Force, which we looked at more than a decade ago, is a great example of this, as is Plus Alpha, a silly and saccharine shooter from Jaleco.

A Tecmo game featuring boobs? Simply unheard of!

WARNING: This article is slightly NSFW. Turn back now if you’re in a sensitive area or are offended by low resolution pixel breasts.

One of the most loved games by fans of the legendary Neo-Geo has a boatload of debug tools and a hidden mini game…

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.

Whoa! The website (in its current form) just passed its one year anniversary! I figured after a year it was FINALLY time to give the design a little refresher with better support for mobile devices, so I spent some time redoing the layout with Bootstrap as well as fixing up some of the design. I think it came out pretty well. Aside from that, I’ve also been hacking on a new game…

I took a look at Tinkle Pit a few months back, and recently I’ve tried tackling it again to see if I can’t get that wonky Level Select working. While I’ve made some progress with that (maybe?), I also stumbled across some interesting name substitutions in the High Score Entry screen.

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!

Still hacking around with MAME games, and I’m having a blast! This time I opened up Ojanko Yakata (roughly translated as Mahjong Girl Mansion), one of the many, many adult mahjong games to grace game centers of the past. I spotted some ASCII in the memory dump that looked like a hidden developer credits screen and investigated…

I’ve been playing around with the MAME debugger recently. I loaded up Tinkle Pit, a cute, simple (at first…) maze game and started playing around with altering memory values. I found what appeared to be the value for the current game mode, and after poking it for a bit, I came across an odd screen…

This is a fascinating older post made by the NYC Resistor group detailing the technical data behind the images left behind in the Apple Mac SE ROM<. As the ROM only used 89kB of the available 256kB, the original development digitized pictures of themselves and hid them away in the remaining space. The article goes into some interesting details about the image format and CPU opcodes.

Damian Ward has also posted some nice shots of the images on hardware: here, here, here and here.