2420 ROM Pack V - Camera repair cart

Got something a little bit unusual this time:

Looks like a prototype cart, and hardware-wise it pretty much is, but its purpose is something else entirely!

There isn't much info on these things at all, but from what I can ascertain it's from a series of carts distributed to camera repair shops for camera diagnostics/adjustments/repair. Presumably at some point the camera manufacturer wanted to create a portable diagnostic tool and decided to base it around cheap commodity hardware - the Game Boy - rather than spending time and money on developing their own machine or using something more expensive and unnecessarily sophisticated for the job.

I only have this one cart, but Steven Seventyeight on Youtube has a bunch more, plus a modified 4-player adapter which was presumably used for connection to the cameras. I have neither the corresponding camera nor the adapter, so mine is not much more than a curiosity at this point.

The original assumption is that these were likely for Ricoh cameras given Nintendo's history of working with them (e.g. for the chips used in the NES), but codeman38 identified some of the cart numbers as actually corresponding to internal model numbers for Minolta cameras. This document lists a bunch of them; the cameras seem to date from the mid-90s so presumably these carts would have been made around the same time.

As mentioned, the case and PCB seem to be the same ones used for Game Boy prototypes; the PCB is Nintendo-made, labelled DMGC-MBC1-512K-EPROM1-01 and it has a 512kbit (64kbyte) EPROM installed stickered "2420V" (although the ROM is only 32kb and doesn't actually require the MBC at all). However it has a black plastic cover over the EPROM which I haven't seen on any existing prototypes, so it may have been custom-made for these carts to prevent damage to the chips.

Here's the menu:

Without a camera connected you can't do much - most actions will lead you to this "I/O Error" screen.

There isn't much in the ROM pointing to who programmed it, although there is an unused(?) 8x8 font that also appears in some early Taito games. However it feels more like it was programmed in-house by Minolta rather than outsourced to an experienced Game Boy developer; the UI is very 90s-camera-menu-like and its unusual use of the Game Boy's controls (Select to select menu options; A, B and Start are unused), plus it redrawing the whole screen on every button press, gives the impression of a programmer not used to working with the system. So the font may have been a leftover from them studying existing Game Boy software to figure out how it works.

Download: 2420 ROM Pack V.zip

let's get hitek

Yet another unlicensed GB protection system has fallen hell yeah~
As you may have guessed based on my last hhugboy release, this time it's Hitek's turn!

Hitek (or Gaoke) was a Chinese company that released several Game Boy games developed by Ruanxin, a team containing several ex-Waixing staff, some of whom would later go on to work for Jungletac. (Ruanxin isn't explicitly credited in-game, but you can find a bunch of little references here and there, like the boot logo of these carts being "GK-RX" for "Gaoke-Ruanxin")

Their protection is almost identical to BBD's, but they make much better use of it (they switch modes while the game is running, while BBD just sets one at the beginning and that's it; also the cart initialises in a mode that prevents the entire ROM from being read, similar to VF's GBA games), so it's not so easy to hack out. Hence why only Li Cheng ever did it, I guess. So, for now, these games will only run in hhugboy v1.1.8 and up.

Terrifying 911

This first one comes thanks to Ryan Silberman who lent me the cart!

This is probably the most infamous unlicensed Game Boy game in existence - incredibly bad taste presentation hiding an EXTREMELY faithful port (..except the music) of the original Metal Slug. It's a world away from those Sintax/BBD "Metal Slug"s which are basically generic shooty-platformers with sprites from the NGPC Metal Slug games; this is an actual port from the actual Neo Geo.

I previously dumped the Li Cheng release, which was a hack of the Chinese version; this is the original English version complete with fully translated pre-stage shit-talk between George W Bush and Osama bin Laden.

download: Terrifying 911 (Unl).zip

Shuihu Zhuan Zhi Qunmo Fengyun Lu (水滸傳之群魔風雲錄)

A port of Chuanpu's Mega Drive strategy RPG "Shui Hu Zhuan". Again, this was only previously dumped from a Li Cheng cart, in which NPC boundary checking was completely broken (resulting in them wandering through walls or into buildings). Now you can enjoy the original non-glitchy version!

download: Shuihu Zhuan Zhi Qunmo Fengyun Lu (Unl).zip

VAST FAME GBA RETURNS!

So here's a super cool thing - thanks to Shamboozle, we have a new batch of Vast Fame GBA dumps!

As with my previous Vast Fame GBA releases, these will only work in recent versions of mGBA. The two Digimon games work in release versions 0.5.0 and later, but Mo Jie Qi Bing will currently work only in nightly builds from 2016-10-28 onwards, because it uses a previously unemulated feature of the protection system and also isn't picked up by the auto-detection in previous versions.

Mo Jie Qibing (魔戒奇兵)

First up, here's something never dumped in any form before! A top-down shooty-type game loosely based around Lord of the Rings (although outside of the cutscenes you wouldn't really know it).

It uses the engine from Kiki KaiKai Advance (also known as 'Pocky & Rocky with Becky' for its US release), which Vast Fame is rumoured to have obtained legitimately from that game's developers. But overall I found this a more enjoyable experience than Kiki KaiKai, and the graphics and music are IMO better and the environments more varied. They even brought back a version of the raft stage from the (massively superior) SNES Pocky & Rocky, which was not present at all in the GBA game.

Interesting note about this game - its box, which can be seen on Bootleg Games Wiki, bears the number "SLA-001". A number of Vast Fame's Game Boy Color games were published in China under the SL-xxx series, so that would presumably make this the first GBA release from that same publisher.

download - Mo Jie Qibing (Unl).zip

Digimon Sapphire

I dumped a version of this from an unprotected reprint cart ages ago, but that version has Problems - specifically when you finish a level, it will do something wrong; on the real cart it would hang on a black screen, but in emulators it could also just roll the credits or (if you were lucky) proceed to the next level albeit skipping the stage intro screen. But, finally, we now have the original, which works as it should. And it's a genuinely decent platform game which I highly recommend you check out if you haven't played it already.

download - Digimon Sapphire (Unl).zip

Shuma Guaishou - Hongbaoshi Ban (數碼怪獸-紅寶石版)

I've already dumped the English version of this as "Digimon Ruby", and the Chinese title translates to roughly the same thing. Presumably the dialogue in this version makes more sense, although it also has much worse problems with sound channels dropping out than the English version.

download - Shuma Guaishou - Hongbaoshi Ban (Unl).zip

ROCK THE DRAGON

Today I have not one but TWO games called "Dragon Ball Z 3"! Yeah turns out when you're appropriating someone else's franchise no one really cares if you're using the same name someone else already used.

Dragon Ball Z 3 2002 Fighting

If you haven't already guessed from the name, this one is from Sintax. It's developed by BBD as usual for their early stuff (the BBD copyright is loaded with the title screen graphics but not displayed) and stuffed into a fairly generic looking cart, but it boots up with the usual Sintax "Kwichvu" logo and seems to be running on their mapper.

As with many of the games I've released here recently, this does have another version dumped, which is in Chinese and has a pretty ugly hacked title screen. But this is English and at least an original Sintax release (although maybe not the absolute original version? there are lots of variants of this game floating around)

Interestingly this one uses Sintax's mapper in a slightly unusual way, which didn't work with my earlier implementation in hhugboy - so you'll need v1.1.6 to play the raw dump of this game. While this made things harder for me, it actually makes things much easier for people just looking to hack the game and get it working on a generic cart, which probably explains why there are so many pirate versions out there.

raw: Dragon Ball Z 3 2002 Fighting (Unl).zip
fixed: Dragon Ball Z 3 2002 Fighting (Unl) [Fixed].zip

ALSO - WHOA LAST MINUTE RIDICULOUS DISCOVERY

So it turns out the header of this game controls the language it runs in! I found this out completely accidentally while being a hilarious jokester on twitter - the header of the English version is "DRAGON BALLE" but if you change that "E" to any other character, it runs in Chinese mode! Try it! Game Genie code 411-3FF will change an English ROM to Chinese, while 451-3FF will switch a Chinese ROM to English. (but not the "Dragon Ball Z Fighting 2005" dump, which seems to be hacked from an English version and will crash if you try to switch it to Chinese)

The Chinese title screen in this version is maybe incomplete, showing the title 武鬥會, but it uses completely different artwork (probably the original original, as other versions have this art too). The pre-fight quotes are all in Chinese, and seem to be complete, aside from the occasional miscoloured tile.

Dragon Ball Z 3

Now here's something you don't see very often (unless Pokemon is involved) - a bootleg translation of a Japanese game into English! This is a translation of "Dragon Ball Z: Goku Gekitouden" and appears to come courtesy of the same people who brought you Pokemon Jade and Diamond (the translations of Telefang Speed and Power versions), judging from the font - and the fact that they literally stuffed a chunk of Telefang into the back half of this game's ROM.

As with Jade/Diamond, the translation is generally comprehensible if a little rough in places, although most of the names are wrong and a lot of the dialogue is VERY truncated due to them mostly cramming it into the same space as the Japanese. Despite having doubled the size of the ROM, they didn't use the extra space for text storage - only a bit of new code, translated graphics and font are read from there, leaving the majority of it literally just filled with useless Telefang data.

Despite being a hack of a regular licensed game, it runs on a slightly unusual mapper allowing for half bank switches, which are used when the extended part of the ROM is accessed. I've implemented support for it in hhugboy from version 1.1.5 onwards, BUT hhugboy's Super Game Boy support has problems with this game, resulting in bad colours in various places. So, it's fine if you want to play it in mono mode, but in SGB mode it's going to look a bit weird.

Fortunately for you SGB-lovers, I've also hacked a version to run on other emulators. Unlike my usual Sintax/BBD fixes, this one involved actually overwriting some data (albeit useless banks of Telefang sprites) and modifying a bit of code, so it is very much a hack and not just a rejigged/decrypted version of the original. Note that VBA(-M) also has the same Super Game Boy bug (because hhugboy is derived from GEST, and GEST was derived from the Game Boy portion of VBA), but other emulators should run it just fine.

raw: Dragon Ball Z 3 (Unl).zip
fixed: Dragon Ball Z 3 (Unl) [Fixed].zip

Thanks once again to Svetlana for helping me get this one!

BBD = Big Bunch of Dumps

If you've been following my previous dumps here, you maybe know BBD best as the developer behind many of Sintax's earlier (and better) games, which often bore a "COPYRIGHT © DESIGN BY BBD" notice on the title screen. But before hooking up with Sintax, they put out a bunch of stuff under their own name too! They were seldom explicitly credited in-game - although sometimes the name appeared on packaging - but their games usually featured a custom "BBD" boot logo which gave away their involvement somewhat.

These games also employed protection similar to Sintax's, but simpler - probably indicating that BBD had a hand in designing Sintax's protection system too. And Sintax's wasn't all that tricky in the first place (I mean, even I could crack it), so you know BBD games got pirated 80 different ways the moment they hit the shelves. And, accordingly, all of these games have been dumped in some form already. But many of the existing dumps were sourced from aforementioned pirate versions, or at least versions in some way removed from the ones I have here.

As with the Sintax games I've released previously, I'm putting out both 'raw' and 'fixed' versions; the former are compatible with hhugboy 1.1.5 or later, while the latter should run in just about any Game Boy Color emulator you care to mention.

Digimon Adventure 2001

This one has been a target of mine for a while. I dumped a version of this game back in 2012, but it was in Chinese and suffers from a pretty sloppy title screen hack; now you can enjoy the original version with the story in English!

I'm a big fan of the graphics in this game, especially the spritework and especially the cute idle animations. The levels also feature a bunch of nice touches, like the falling leaves and layering effects in stage 1, or stage 2's transparent water (actually achieved by rapid flickering, but it looks transparent on a Game Boy's LCD - hhugboy supports frame mixing to simulate this effect, your mileage in other emulators may vary). I'm not sure who was doing graphics for BBD at this point, but they had some talent.

Note that the first enemy in the first level is invisible in hhugboy the first time it appears; this is an emulation bug (it doesn't happen when running the fixed version in other emulators, unless you have some old version of VBA) but not something I could fix just yet, sorry! See this issue on GitHub for more info.

Thanks to Svetlana again for her help in obtaining this one!

raw: Digimon Adventure 2001 (Unl).zip
unprotected: Digimon Adventure 2001 (Unl) [Fixed].zip

Digimon Adventure 6 2002

Yeah this is the same game again. BBD reissued their games under different names sometimes. This is one of them! I don't think there are any differences aside from the title screen, but I could be wrong.

raw: Digimon Adventure 6 2002 (Unl).zip
unprotected: Digimon Adventure 6 2002 (Unl) [Fixed].zip

Harry Potter 2 - The black art wtrstle edition

This one is a cute little platform game somewhat based around the first Harry Potter book/movie. It's also another one that was previously dumped in Chinese, but now here's an English version! There are also a LOT of weird things between the language versions of this game which I'm just going to list off right now-

• The Chinese version has an English title, but the English version has a Chinese one
• The English version repeats the ENTIRE intro text for each picture in the intro
• The Chinese version intro has MAJOR music slowdown when Chinese text is being printed
• The English version has these little level-intro screens which are absent altogether from the Chinese
• There's another (undumped so far) English version which changes the font to another font, for some reason
• If you don't continue after a game over, the English version resets to a broken intro (confirmed on real hardware), while the Chinese just straight up crashes (not confirmed on real hardware)

(Also I'm not sure if "the black art wtrstle edition" has any significance, like, is this supposed to be an update of a non-black art wtrstle edition?)

raw: Harry Potter 2 - The black art wtrstle edition (Unl).zip
unprotected: Harry Potter 2 - The black art wtrstle edition (Unl) [Fixed].zip

Garou: Mark of the Wolves 2001 / Elang Chuanshuo: Shiji Zhi Zhan (餓狼傳說-世紀之戰)

A pretty cool fighting game, based on Garou: Mark of the Wolves (but with a few characters from older Fatal Fury games as well) & with sprites done in the Neo-Geo Pocket Color style. This version is naturally way better than the existing dumps, because it has a nice animated "2001" on the title screen!

I have two copies of this - one from BBD and one from Sintax, each with unique label artwork (although both assembled from KOF '99 character art!) crediting the respective companies. But the games are identical, dumped identically, have identical BBD-style protection and startup routines showing a "FIVER FIRM" logo (a leftover from a previous game), and the PCB in the Sintax copy looks like a BBD board rather than a Sintax one. So, in other words, what we have here is a BBD board repackaged and sold by Sintax. And that's interesting! Because it means the relationship between the two companies was more than just "BBD developed some games for Sintax"; Sintax was also apparently in possession of old BBD stock too. Maybe Sintax absorbed BBD in its entirety, or maybe they just bought up this stock via their existing connections. It's hard to say when there's so little information about BBD out there.

Incidentally, this version has an unused "Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves" logo in the ROM - I do vaguely recall seeing a box with this title, so maybe there's another undumped variant out there that actually uses that logo.

raw: Garou - Mark of the Wolves 2001 (Elang Chuanshuo - Shiji Zhi Zhan) (Unl).zip
unprotected: Garou - Mark of the Wolves 2001 (Elang Chuanshuo - Shiji Zhi Zhan) (Unl) [Fixed].zip

Yuenan Zhanyi 2001 (越南戰役2001) / Yuenan Zhanyi: Chong Jian Tian Ri (越南戰役-重見天日)

Metal Slug! This one wasn't protected at all, but it's another Sintax rerelease of a BBD game. In fact, this one just seems to have been restickered - there are remnants of another label under the too-big Sintax one.

The existing dumps of this game are all 1mb, but this one is 2. Not sure what the extra 1mb is used for; a lot of the data is straight out of Poyon's Dungeon Room (which was standard BBD/Sintax practice for a while - for whatever reason, they'd often build their games on top of some other ROM, even when there didn't seem to be any content taken directly from that game) but it does fix at least one bug present in other version, namely the super-irritating incessant pause sound.

Yuenan Zhanyi 2001 (Yuenan Zhanyi - Chong Jian Tian Ri) (Unl).zip