Hrrrrnnggh Colonel, I'm trying to infringe copyright but I'm dummy thicc and the clap from my ass cheeks keeps alerting the lawyers

Is everyone bored of Sintax GBA games yet? I know I am!!

Then, instead, let's look back a few years and one console generation... to when Sintax was good. Sort of.

Many thanks to NewRisingSun for providing this cart!

This is Matel Gear II, the English version of Hei Jing Zhuan Bei II, which I dumped a long time ago. And yes, in a practically unprecedented bout of consistency, it's spelled that way on both the label and title screen. It had also been listed by Sintax in some places as "Eraq War II", but I've never seen a cartridge under that title.

Basically, this is Metal Gear recast as a kind of beat 'em up with RPG elements. Absolutely zero stealth here. But it uses the same decent beat 'em up engine from Sintax's Three Kingdoms games, so it remains pretty fun.

As with most games on this engine, it has four playable characters, meaning all of your Metal Gear faves make an appearance:

It's been a while since I've released something for a non-advanced kind of Game Boy, so here's the drill ROM-wise:

• "Raw" is the ROM as dumped from the cart, no modifications. Emulators may run this if they can detect the Sintax mapper somehow. hhugboy does this.
• "GBX" is the raw dump in the GBX format, which adds a footer specifying details about the ROM, meaning emulators do not have to heuristically detect the mapper, because doing that actually sucks. hhugboy supports this.
• "Cracked" is a version with the protection removed so you can play it in Literally Anything

Raw: Matel Gear II (Unl) (Eng) [C] [Raw].zip
GBX: Matel Gear II (Unl) (Eng) [C] [GBX].zip
Cracked: Matel Gear II (Unl) (Eng) [C] [Cracked].zip

Sintax stays home

Once again, today I'm bringing you some Chinese-language versions of GBA Sintax games I previously dumped!

Thanks again to a123_ddd for providing these dumps, and to the individual dumpers credited against each one.

(Small administrative note that probably nobody cares about: as of this release I've switched to romanising Chinese titles spaced per-syllable instead of per-word. The reason for this is it avoids me having to exercise my non-expert judgement on how to space things, which can lead to inconsistencies, and hence the per-syllable approach is better for library-esque usage (at least according to a post I read somewhere))

X Zhan Jing (X战警) / X-man

Chinese version of X-man: Armour of Might. Has a very colourful English title logo in place of the bronzed Russian one, I don't know if the English version is the same.

Dumped by 侵蚀你的私处

Download: X Zhan Jing (X-man) (Unl) (Chn) [YJ restored].zip

Gu Huo Lang 4 (古惑狼4)

Chinese version of Crash Advance 4. This one has unique translated level names.

Dumped by dcillbleed

Download: Gu Huo Lang 4 (Unl) (Chn) [YJ restored].zip

Ren Zhe Shen Gui 2 (忍者神龟2)

Chinese version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. Again, there are unique translated level names.

I've also seen this one under the title 超級忍者龜2 (Super Ninja Turtles 2), which was the name used on old Taiwanese copies of Turtles games for the Famicom.

Dumped by yy小龙虾

Download: Ren Zhe Shen Gui 2 (Unl) (Chn) [YJ restored].zip

GBX tool beta release

I said a long-ass time ago that I would make a tool for managing the file footers on GBX ROMs and I absolutely never did

Anyway the other day I decided to learn Python and do it, so here it is!

The latest (and only) release as of this writing is v1.0.0-beta.

It can add, edit and remove headers, and also hash ROMs. It's still in a beta state, so I wouldn't call it robust exactly, but I've tested the various operations against some test ROMs and got the expected results. You should definitely verify its output in a hex editor if you're using it for a ROM you plan to release though.

You'll need to install the Python 3 interpreter for your platform to use it. Then, just download the source code zip from the beta release and run gbxtool.py as per the instructions.

Eat your leafy greens

Got another YJencrypted GBA cart here, and it's not a Sintax game!! Yeah!!

Pokémon: Pokemon: Pokémon: Leaf Green!? You guessed it (maybe (or maybe you saw the screenshots I tweeted)) - it's another bootleg translation!

This is a weird one for sure! They seem to have taken things like names, and parts of the system text, from the official games - meaning a lot of things are more correct (albeit abbreviated) than you'd find in other bootleg translations, except for the cases where they inevitably pasted the wrong name in the wrong place. The dialogue was mostly translated from scratch, and the writing would have been okay, by the standards of these things, if not for one very strange flaw: half of the text in the game just... cuts off, mid-sentence, and sometimes even mid-word. It's as if they completed the translated script, realised too late that they didn't have enough space to insert it into the ROM, and then just indiscriminately trimmed the strings down to cram them in. It makes for some interesting dialogue.

The original cart seems to use a 128KB SRAM chip, which nothing emulates; it's similar to Pokemon Sapphire's problem, except doubly so, since it seems to use some custom banking and there aren't any emulators that "accidentally" emulate it, unlike Sapphire's 64KB SRAM. So that means you will not be able to save your game normally under emulation in any current emulators, and will have to use savestates instead. Sorry about that.

Pokemon - Leaf Green (Unl) (Eng) [YJ restored].zip

Sintax comes home

So far, all the Sintax GBA dumps I've posted here have come from English or Russian-language releases. Sintax being a Chinese company, though, they also released Chinese-language versions of their games for the local market. But, unlike GBC (where probably the majority of my collection is Chinese in origin), I've never really tried to source interesting-looking GBA carts from China, and hence I've never had any of those versions to dump.

But, fortunately, some dumpers from China have picked up the slack, so today I can bring you Chinese versions of a couple of games I previously dumped in other languages.

These ROMs were kindly provided to me by a123_ddd for distribution here.

Leiman IV - Guangming Zhi Lü (雷曼IV 光明之旅)

This is the Chinese version of Rayman IV, of which I've previously posted the Russian and English versions here. It seems to be the same as the other versions, aside from the title screen.

Amazingly, this is not the last remaining language version - there was also a German release. Rayman is truly gaming's Mr. Worldwide.

Dumped by 侵蚀你的私处

Download: Leiman IV - Guangming Zhi Lv (Unl) (Chi) [YJ restored].zip

Chaoji Maliou DX (超级玛莉欧DX)

And this is the Chinese version of Super Mario DX. This one at least has unique translated level names, so there's a bit more of a difference between the language versions.

Dumped by yy小龙虾

Download: Chaoji Maliou DX (Unl) (Chi) [YJ restored].zip