posted by taizou @ 2020-06-01 09:54:52
Dumps
The Sintax games just keep coming! Three of them this time, because that's just the way the chips have fallen. On the ground, with seagulls pecking at them.
X-man - Armour of Might / X-men (X-мен)
First of all, one based on X-men, or maybe just the one X-man. Another reskin of the same game as usual, of course. This is another Russian version, and similar to my previous Russian dump, Rayman 4, the only thing translated is the title screen; the label and box are both still in English. Unlike Rayman, they didn't concoct a separate E12-Rxx ID for the Russian version - it just uses an English ID.
I've also taken a picture of the back of the cartridge here, because it reveals a bit of interesting historical context around the release of this thing.. which is maybe more interesting than the game itself at this point.
The seal covering the screw is marked "AM", which is a SUPER common type of sticker seen on pirate Game Boy Color carts all around the world; I assume this must indicate some large Chinese distributor or wholesaler of such carts. It also bears (🐻) the year 2005, with months between April and September; this doesn't necessarily mean the game was released in mid-2005 (it could have been in print for multiple years, or have been an older cart that was stickered or re-stickered later), but does mean it couldn't have been released after mid-2005.
The other sticker is from "vikart.com", which was a Russian wholesaler of game consoles, accessories and games. Presumably they imported cartridges from "AM" into Russia at some point. This sticker is dated January of 2006, which would probably have been either the date they stocked it or the date they sold it. Here's a roughly contemporary copy of their website. Unfortunately, by 2006 they weren't maintaining a public list of GBA games they offered; they had one around 2003, but it was removed and not updated, and only the first page archived. Same goes for their Game Boy Color list, but that at least has some interesting multicarts listed upfront.
Download: X-Man - Armour of Might (X-men) (Unl) (Rus) [YJ restored].zip
Ultraman - Confrontation Between Justice And Evil / Ul'traman - Konfrontatsiya mezhdu spravedlivost'yu i zlom (УЛЬТраман - Конфронтация между справедливостью и злом)
Next up: Ultraman! Even if the title screen depicts some kind of Power Rangers. I've been, I guess, "generous" in transcribing the main title with the proper Cyrillic characters; what Sintax has apparently done here is attempt to approximate Cyrillic letters using a Latin font, resulting in something more like "YJIbTpamaн".
The stickers on the back here.. actually make no sense. The AM one is from January-March 2006, while the Vikart one is from August 2005?!? Why would the Chinese sticker be newer than the Russian one? I notice there are remnants of an older sticker under the AM one... maybe it got returned as faulty, repaired and restickered and sent back out? Or maybe someone in Russia had a supply of "AM" stickers to reseal carts after opening them. Or one of the parties just used a sticker with the wrong date on it. Many possibilities.
Download: Ultraman - Confrontation Between Justice And Evil (Ul'traman - Konfrontatsiya mezhdu spravedlivost'yu i zlom) (Unl) (Rus) [YJ restored].zip
Digimon - Rudy and Sapphire / Digimon - Ruby and Sapphire
As you'll know if you have been following these posts, all of Sintax's GBA games so far have been derived from their original "Digimon Adventure" game, ported from the SNES. And now, after dozens of reskins covering everything from Mario to Shrek, they've come all the way back around to Digimon again. The circle of life. The cartridge calls it "Rudy and Sapphire", while the title screen has "Ruby and Sapphire" - so I've gone with the latter for the ROM name, since the former was obviously just a typo. Probably. Or maybe that's Rudy on the label, in which case I offer my sincerest apologies to him. he seems like a fine gentleman.
Anyway: instead of starring Agumon as Digimon Adventure did, this game features a Guilmon sprite ripped from Digimon Battle Spirit (or maybe Vast Fame's own Digimon Sapphire, which also ripped its sprites from Battle Spirit? Hmm!)
This cart came to me from the Netherlands, but I don't know if it was originally sold there - I never considered the Netherlands as a particular pirate hotspot. But maybe it did make its way there to some flea market or sketchy game shop... or maybe it was just bought on holiday or from eBay.
On the back: only remnants of the seal remain, but it looks like it once said "EMR" and maybe "2005-2006" - so again that lines up with the carts above, indicating 2005-2006 was probably when these later Sintax carts were on the market around the world. Also "Wouter E" has left his mark. I wonder what he thought of this game.
Download: Digimon - Ruby and Sapphire (Unl) (Eng) [YJ restored].zip
posted by taizou @ 2020-05-25 01:53:25
Dumps
Got two more Sintax GBA games dumped by RibShark today. These are definitely two of the most-wanted Sintax games, being attached to popular series and also being some of the earliest ones to be documented in video form. And they were both games I don't own. But fortunately Rib came through! Thanks once again for allowing me to repost these here!
Crash Advance IV
Everyone's favourite jorts-wearing bandicoot makes a return visit to Sintax-land. You may remember their GBC game 2003 Crash II Advance, which featured a similar title screen to this game (both being based on the one from the official GBA game "Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure"). Unfortunately, the similarities end there - while Crash II Advance was a decent attempt to recreate Crash Bandicoot's gameplay on GBC, Crash Advance IV is just... well, it's just this again.
A video has been posted purportedly showing another Sintax Crash GBA game called "Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped", but the level shown also appears later in Crash IV, and no cartridge nor title screen has yet been sighted with the Crash 3 title, so nobody is quite sure if that version really exists or if it was a mistitled video of Crash IV.
Download: Crash Advance IV (Unl) (Eng) [YJ restored].zip
Sonic 3 - Fighter Sonic
You all knew this was coming. He's the world's most famous hedgehog. Sintax would never turn their back on that kind of reflected glory. They even pre-empted Sonic 4 in taking the series back to basics; there's no Tails, no Knuckles, no Johnson the Octopus, not even my boy Big the Cat - the only playable character is ol' Blue Bollocks himself. So how about Sonic's trademark speed? Did Sintax buck expectations and stick a rocket up the arse-pipe of their tired old engine? Well... you know they didn't. Sonic just strolls along shooting out spin-dash sprites and it's just like every other one of these games. But there's Sonic!
The title screen just says "Fighter Sonic", but the box and cartridge call it "Sonic 3: Fighter Sonic", which probably means it came out between Sonics Advance 2 and 3 and they were trying to pass it off as the real third game.
Download: Sonic 3 - Fighter Sonic (Unl) (Eng) [YJ restored].zip
posted by taizou @ 2020-05-20 02:58:47
Dumps
Sintax GBA time again! There are so many of these. Dumps will probably come a bit slower from now on, since most of everything I have left has the second-version protection with trap addresses, which takes a bunch of trial and error to work around.
The Lord of the Rings IV - The Fellowship of the Ring
Cartridge ID: E12-U15
Today's "new" game comes with a loose Lord of the Rings theme. And this game has the music bug, despite being a fairly late-on ID. There really isn't that much rhyme or reason to which ones have the bug and which don't.
Overwritten header bytes are 90 AE 4B 4A 59 4A - but after some investigation I've found it doesn't really have any protection-related significance, since I have another game with the same bytes here but completely different trap addresses and mirroring. I've also found another location where this data is stored, scrambled, so maybe I'll stop noting them here for now.
Download: The Lord of the Rings IV - The Fellowship of the Ring (Unl) (Eng) [YJ restored].zip
Rayman IV / Rayman - Sunshine of Trip
This one was dumped by RibShark who kindly allowed me to repost it here!
I previously dumped the Russian version, and here's the English. The only in-game difference seems to be the title screen.
Interestingly, unlike the Russian version, this one did have trap addresses, making it trickier to dump. This difference seems like it may be accounted for by different PCB revisions rather than per-game - so different printings of the same game may exist with different "levels" of protection.
Download: Rayman IV (Rayman - Sunshine of Trip) (Unl) (Eng) [YJ restored].zip
posted by taizou @ 2020-05-09 00:08:17
Dumps
Hey who's ready for some more Sintax GBA games?!?! I have two this time! These are basically the same game as the previously dumped Super Mario DX, but with different graphics, reordered levels and a few bug fixes. Some of the reskins also have all of one different level layout (but I honestly can't be arsed to go and check if that's the case with either of these).
These two were much easier to dump than most YJencrypted games, because they didn't have any of the "trap" addresses that lock out further reads - in general that seems to be the case with earlier releases, but one of them has a later ID than Mario DX, which had the most bastardly version of the protection, so... it's not an exact science.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 (Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles II)
Cartridge ID: E12-U2
Turtles in a turtle shell! The ID of this one presumably indicates it was released earlier than Mario DX, but I think Mario DX was actually made first, because Turtles 2 fixes some of the more egregious bugs present in that game (which were carried over from the prototype Digimon Adventure).
I've named the ROM after the title from the cartridge label here; the title screen uses the "Hero Turtles" title, because it's taken from the European version of Turtles in Time with the brightness turned way down (on an original GBA it's almost invisible!) but I figured the label title is probably the intended one and it's not worth doubling the filename length to work in the alternate one.
As with all dumps from YJencrypted carts so far, this is a 32MB ROM despite only 4MB of actual data being present. It required no data to be skipped and patched back up, only the Nintendo logo in the header. The overwritten-and-maybe significant bytes in the logo were 90 AE 4F 4A 59 4A.
Download: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 (Unl) (Eng) [YJ restored].zip
Rayman IV / Rayman - Puteshestviye Solnechnogo Sveta (Райман - Путешествие солнечного света)
Cartridge ID: R12-U14
This is a Russian version! But only the title screen. Even the box was just the English one with a Russian sticker on it - and while the cartridge label actually has a Russian flag printed on it, it still just uses the English "Rayman IV" title. Minimal effort translations right there. Russia was apparently a big market for these games, though, and a lot of the later ones have so far only shown up there and in China. Again, this one fixes some of the bugs from Mario DX.
All the same ROM stuff applies as with Turtles 2 - it's 32MB, no skipped/patched data. Overwritten header bytes: 90 AE 5F 4A 59 4A (it's a little bit different!?)
Download: Rayman IV (Rayman - Puteshestviye Solnechnogo Sveta) (Unl) (Rus) [YJ restored].zip
posted by taizou @ 2020-05-04 14:08:38
Dumps
So I mentioned in the Pokemon Sapphire post that that cart used the same protection as GBA Sintax games. You probably see where this is going.
These things have eluded dumping for YEARS - well, get ready to get extremely bored of them because there are like 20 and most of them are exactly the same!
Basically, they're all reskinned versions of the "Digimon Adventure" game that has been floating around for a while; but Digimon Adventure was a leaked dev build and is much buggier than the released games. Which is saying a lot, because the released games are buggy as fuck.
Digimon Adventure itself is a port of a SNES game, supposedly made by Sintax with help from Vast Fame (borne out by its use of Vast Fame's music) - but Sintax themselves clearly had no idea what they were doing on the GBA once Vast Fame was out of the picture, hence them putting out the same broken game over and over again with different graphics.
This particular iteration is "Super Mario DX", aka just "Mario DX" on the cartridge, and its cartridge ID number is "E12-U8".
Most of its graphics are from Super Mario Advance 2, at least to begin with, so you could almost mistake it for Super Mario World in stills. Until you see the second level and its subsequent boss fight, anyway.
In common with other early games in this series, it has a tendency for the in-game music to randomly cut out and then later be replaced by a different track when certain enemies appear on-screen - this due to a bug with how sound effects are handled, which was at least fixed in later entries. You can also experience such niceties as platforms with no collision detection, bosses whose behaviour can be charitably described as "arbitrary", and many many more?!?
This was ALMOST dumpable using the same technique as Pokemon Sapphire, EXCEPT that one of the "trap" addresses which locks the cartridge from further reads was placed in the Nintendo logo in the header, meaning that any attempt to reboot the cartridge would lead to it being locked out. How in the hell do you solve a problem like that when your entire dumping method is predicated on rebooting the cartridge? Well... you need to somehow disconnect the data lines from the cart to the GBA while retaining power. And it just so happens that there are ridiculous, bulky "game switcher" devices which do just that!? So the process becomes a bit more awkward and convoluted, but I got there in the end.
As with Pokemon Sapphire, this ROM was dumped with addresses skipped and patched back up from repeated data; and, again, the ROM is 32MB, when the actual game data is only 4MB, since the data is mirrored in weird ways that the game relies upon. I've also patched up the overwritten bit of the Nintendo logo in the header; the bytes that overwrite it here are "90 AE 4B 4A 59 4A", with only the middle two bytes being different from Sapphire. It's gotta mean something? Maybe?
Anyway: here is the ROM
Super Mario DX (Unl) (Eng) [YJ restored].zip
Thanks to SuperRetroGamer2741 for lending this cart! He's also done a full playthrough of the game:
