disassemblies・digital archaeology・data preservation
We have something a bit special today: a prototype of a Mega CD game! (crowd cheers) Unfortunately, it’s one of, if not the worst game for the system: Heavy Nova. (crowd boos) But it does have something pretty interesting within it’s data which redeems its value a bit. (crowd cheers cautiously)
Let’s take a look.
We’ve looked at secrets of the game’s data in part 1. Now let’s look at what didn’t even make it past the planning stage, at what could have been…
Sometimes you begin disassembling some code thinking, “well, there’s not much here, this won’t take long to research and write about,” and then it spirals out of control and takes up all your free time for multiple weeks.
Anyway, here’s more than you ever wanted to know about what’s hidden away inside Magical Crystals!
Just a quickie article so this isn’t lost to the sands of Twitter.
A fun color-matching puzzle game with colorful graphics and cute animations… and bunches of disabled dev functions and unused data!
Ah, Rod Land, the colorful and popular Jaleco platformer known mostly for its home computer ports, especially on the Amiga. The arcade version is the original, though, and has the most content and best graphics.
It’s been more than two years since I first started taking the game apart. I was new to disassembling code at that point and was making pretty slow progress on understanding what I was finding. Every few months I would pick it back up and chip away at it some more, but never formalized anything into an article.
Well, I decided to finally power through it about a month ago, and here we are. This is the most thorough disassembly I’ve done to date, and this article covers all the interesting bits.
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.
Almost two years after its release, we have an update to the Chrono Trigger unpointed text document!
I want to believe…
News was posted today of the finding and dumping of an unreleased vertical shooter by Sega and Santos for the System 18 arcade hardware, called Hammer Away.