Handheld Underground

new dump! Story of Lasama

posted by taizou @ 2012-08-21 02:00:31 Dumps

Hey it's another dump! Well I never. Presenting the long-lost (not really) mono Game Boy game: STORY OF LASAMA (拉薩瑪傳奇). It's a fairly generic little platform game, developed, I think, by some people connected to Vast Fame (although they seemingly hadn't gained a decent musician at this point) and published by Gowin, a Taiwanese company who released about 17 games total across both mono and color Game Boys. (If you want to read some more about this game, and you know Chinese, this here archived page on Gowin's old website might be a good place to start)

Five of Gowin's other mono games - Rainbow Prince (which is excellent), Fire Dragon (which has excellent music), Prince YehRude (which is weird), Magic Ball (which is a thing) and Lost Trip/Losing Trip/Puzzle Path/Mi Tu De Lu/Top Secret (which has too many names) - were dumped and cracked by one "GYY Game Unlock Team", who also saw fit to hack their own name into the games - I've done no such thing here, so you can enjoy the game in its unmolested glory. The raw dump is 4mb 128kb and contains a good chunk of Magic Ball, for some reason, but the fixed version is a mere 64k and actually works and stuff.

Incidentally, this is numbered GS-04, and while GS-02 and up are accounted for, I've never seen a GS-01 and neither was one ever listed on Gowin's website. the fact that this one's PCB has "No3" written on it in black marker makes me think there never actually was one (or if there was, it was cancelled) ... But you never know.

La Sa Ma Chuan Qi - Story of Lasama (Unlicensed) [Raw Dump].zip (updated 2013-05-09 to proper size!)
La Sa Ma Chuan Qi - Story of Lasama (Unlicensed) [Fixed].zip

14 Comments

Comments

1posted by codeman38 @ 2012-08-21 05:32:01

Although there's no copyright date, I'm pretty certain, given the ROM's header title, that Story of Lasama can be dated to somewhere around September 20, 1993.

(The title in question: "GOWIN LASAMA 930920".)

2posted by taizou @ 2012-08-21 23:21:14

Interestingly Rainbow Prince and Magic Ball have the same date, even though Rainbow Prince actually says ©1993, 1994 in-game. Dunno what's up with that.

4posted by taizou @ 2012-08-27 11:42:58

Couldn't agree more.

5posted by ? @ 2012-09-12 17:41:47

well, quite often the actual release happens months after programming is complete (e.g. because the manufacturer is slow in producing the pcb or the cart)

or they have reused portion of the earlier game (Lasama) in the later ones, including the 930920 string

hard to know without contacting someone involved in the programming

overall, thanks a lot for the dumps

6posted by jdg @ 2012-10-10 20:30:44

When you boots this on a real gameboy does it display a Nintendo logo or a Gowin logo?

7posted by taizou @ 2012-10-11 13:06:43

Gowin. It also doesn't work on a GBA (not sure about GBC, I'll have to double check. It does work on the "GB Boy Colour" clone though)

8posted by jdg @ 2012-10-11 19:48:08

Thanks, then they were using one of the 'evil' nintendo logo overlay tricks to display their own logo but still make the cart pass the unit's nintendo logo check. Several Sachen carts seem to use a similar trick.

9posted by taizou @ 2012-10-11 23:55:27

Yeah, lots of unlicensed games do, I wrote something about it here:
http://fuji.drillspirits.net/?post=87

(Also just for the record it does work on a real GBC. A few of Sachen's mono games don't, which is why I was checking)

10posted by ? @ 2012-10-12 17:25:42

It is interesting that it works on both dmg and cgb because the order in which these 2 copy logo contents to vram and the checking of the logo bytes is different.
The dmg first copies the logo contents to vram, does the logo animation, and then reads the logo bytes again to verify them.
The cgb first copies the logo bytes to high ram (ff80), then copies the logo contents to vram, does the logo animation and then verifies the logo bytes stored at ff80.
That is also the explanation why some of those Sachen mono games do not work on a cgb.
(btw, I'm currently looking how I could add support for these unlicensed games with differing logos to mess)

11posted by jdg @ 2012-10-12 17:26:30

forgot to tag my nick with that last post ;)

12posted by Joselu bodon @ 2017-09-06 18:36:25

A mi siempre me gustan mucho, los videojuegos desde que yo era muy pequeño y primer videojuego, que yo jugué fue el Sonic 1 de la Master System II y al Sonic 2 de la Mega Drive.

13posted by guyzis @ 2020-05-31 13:54:09

My dump of Super Fighter S also happens to have that GYY logo in it.

14posted by ankos @ 2021-10-16 18:58:21

Does your emulator have support for the raw dump of this game? I know you've added support for many of the games on this website, but I can't seem to get the raw dump to work

15posted by Love @ 2022-02-20 22:23:03

I love this site thanks for posting this