Comments

oh yeah and I haven't updated my dumping project page with these ones yet because it's tedious and I'm going to bed

First, thanks for the dumps, and second, Zook Hero 1 needs to be translated, you, who dumped the rom, you could make an translation tool for it? I can translate based on the english version.

I'd rather try to figure out the protection on the actual English release tbh. If you really want to translate this version it should be possible with standard romhacking tools though.

Digimon Pocket's music is the same three tracks from Shui Hu Shen Shou that Digital Monsters 3 used, and it's a shame since both SHSS and Digimon Pocket's original soundtracks are really good (and the former's quite large; they easily could've had actual battle themes for this version.) I'm curious if this one's an older revision between that, slight changes and a missing NPC character.

Taizou, you could send me the rom with protection, will not try to figure out the protection, just to get the texts and codes to be able to put in the rom without protection. I believe this will help me a lot to translate the rom.

Take a look:
http://i.imgur.com/5baIRKp.png

I am not able to follow up with the translation because you need to change other codes besides the texts pointers.

Nice work! Can't wait to try these out!

Nice. Maybe someday the English versions of some of these will see the light of day.

I think the only one with a 100% confirmed English version is Zook Hero Z. I've seen boxes for potential English versions of Digimon Pocket (as 'Digimon Adventure Pocket') and Zook Hero 2 (as 'Rockman Zero') as well, but it's probably fairly unlikely that stuff like their original RPGs or the Richman games were ever released in English.

Hey, speaking of Vast Fame, I apparently found this on Google. Not sure if anyone has posted this or pointed it out, but....

http://datagovtw.com/company.php?id=16884040

It's in Chinese, but apparently it's company data on Vast Fame. Even though it disbanded, the data's still there on this website. From there, we know that it was established sometime in April 2, 1999, but had its disbanding sometime at around January 2, 2004. Its company registration authority is the Taichung City government (though TCRF already noted somewhere that Vast Fame resided in Dali City). And its whole headquarters is a single rented office room in a building somewhere.
And under the "所營事業資料" section it has "F119010 : electronic materials, wholesale trade. F219010 : electronic materials retail. F118010 : IT software wholesale trade. F218010 : Retail software information. F113050 : Transactional equipment wholesale industry. F213030 : Transactional equipment retail." I don't know if I'm translating this right or know much about Taiwanese business law, but I tried my best in interpreting as much as I can.

And I managed to find Vast Fame's former headquarters just by using the information provided by copying and pasting "臺中市大里區新里里大里路六二號一樓" on Google Maps. Here is the result, you can even use Google Streetview on the thing for a better look: https://www.google.com/maps?q=%E8%87%BA%E4%B8%AD%E5%B8%82%E5%A4%A7%E9%87%8C%E5%8D%80%E6%96%B0%E9%87%8C%E9%87%8C%E5%A4%A7%E9%87%8C%E8%B7%AF%E5%85%AD%E4%BA%8C%E8%99%9F%E4%B8%80%E6%A8%93&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiY_5-8lJjPAhUM34MKHR18D-0Q_AUICCgB . The address translates to "No. 62, Dali Rd, Dali District
Taichung City, Taiwan 412" in English.

I hope this is as much help to you, Taizou and other Vast Fame fans looking to find more info on them.

thanks for the info, questionmark person!

Sadly, that information has been known for years:

https://fcgamer.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/harpooning-a-whale-vast-fames-zook-hero-2/

"Armed with only the company’s address and a fat wallet, I would later pay a taxi driver to take me to the former site of Vast Fame. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when the cab driver pulled into a residential area chalk full of apartments. After snooping around the area and confirming the address, I came to realize that Vast Fame’s company must have been headquartered in a small apartment of sorts, which suggests the size of the company itself. Not one to give up though, I went to a nearby convenience store and grabbed a couple of beers, before checking out a small game shop that had been around back in the day."

Nice to know that people aren't reading my blog. :(

Either way, seeing screenshots of these games bring back good memories of three or four years ago. I used to play these games all the time, on a beat up Game Boy Color machine. Sadly, these days I am usually busking rather than gaming, and thus my games just sit sadly in the drawer.

On another note, I am on some Vast Fame leads, as one of my friends has a contact that is "close" with them.

haha well I read your blog (which is great btw) and I did already know about that stuff, but I don't want to discourage people coming here with useful info. Makes a change from "when will you dump X" you know.

Interestingly enough, I had visited my girlfriend's area tonight, and we happened to walk right by where the old Vast Fame company used to be. It was evening though, so no pictures this time ;) My girlfriend had then seen the shop I had stopped by four or five years back, and mentioned it to me, and I recounted the story how the shop keeper had no idea about Vast Fame, despite selling gaming products. Hahaha, really makes you wonder.

Yeah, it seems like their fame was never all that vast, even on their home turf, sadly. At least they've now gained some kind of late recognition among the (admittedly small) group of people interested in weirdo unlicensed games though.

Got any cheats for zook hero?

yes i do!
in both address/value and gameshark/action replay format:

FFD2=14 / 0114D2FF - max health
FFE0=09 / 0109E0FF - max lives
FFDE=09 / 0109DEFF - max H-tanks
FFDF=09 / 0109DFFF - max S-tanks
FFB9=01 / 0101B9FF - have boots upgrade
FFBA=01 / 0101BAFF - have blaster upgrade
FFBB=01 / 0101BBFF - have armour upgrade
FFBC=01 / 0101BCFF - have helmet upgrade
FFB7=xx / 01xxB7FF (where xx is a number between 00 and 06, anything higher will crash the game) - change selected weapon

oh on the subject of zook z, i noticed the header in this version is "ROOK" whereas in every standalone version i've seen it's "ZOCK2000 V FAME"
in both cases they managed to mix up Rock and Zook, but in different ways each time..

Thanks for taizou's post. I always try to find Zook Hero Z recent years. For this game, it's one of my best memories GBC game when I'm in high school. Now I finally find it on your page. Many thanks for your working on this~~~

I beat Prince YehRude a little over a month ago (I kinda liked it, and I didn't think it was that weird, aside from the four times it digresses into a random, arbitrary mini-game), and I was wondering: do you have any idea where the music is from? The only thing the bootleg games wiki says is "The song is children music." but that says nothing about which songs are which, etc. Could some tracks even be original compositions?

Yeah I think the music in YehRude is original. Can't 100% guarantee it though. Those mono Gowin-published games had a couple of different composers working on them, one was Gamtec regular Hanmin Liao, but YehRude doesn't sound like his work and I'm not sure who it was.

Hello everybody/anyone!!^^
Where can I find dump of this 'Spatio Monoster' game or more information about it (with original title/transcription maybe)?
Thnx in advance!

dude, spatio monster is just shi kong shi shou.

There are Gowin games that have dates on them that date back to the early 90s. The multicarts that are shown here show games with copyright dates that are from the early 2000s. Are you sure Vast Fame released their version's first?

Here is an archived listing of Magic Ball's English box:

https://archiwum.allegro.pl/oferta/magic-ball-na-game-boy-rarytas-i7168766474.html

Notice how the copyright suggests Gowin released this version in 1994?

On the subject of why the Vast Fame versions would be buggier than the Gowin ones if they were actually newer releases, I have no idea.

The ROM for Zook Z seems surprisingly large. It is quite a bit larger than the Li Cheng version, and the ROM for Zook 2

I wonder why?

Downloads seem to be broken sadly, fix please

I heard that the VF multicarts lack custom boot logos, but your new update to the emulator shows a different reality. If the unlicensed protection mode is set to Sintax, these boot with the V. Fame logo, however the Gowin stuff seems to have other weird looking logos. Soul Falchion has the logo "SOUL". Zook 2 uses a regular VF logo, but West Story has one I haven't seen and Devil Island uses a TD Soft logo. Do you know if these appear on actual hardware, or if this is just something that messing with the emulator setting dug up?

I can't seem to get a boot logo out of your dump of Digimon Pocket. I am making a spreadsheet of all the VF boot logos to post to the wiki and was wondering if you knew if Digimon Pocket uses the italicized DIGI logo, or the non0italicized one with a period at the end. I was also wondering if you knew what boot logos for Pocket Monster Ruby and that Lord of the Rings GBC game VF released looked like. Thank you for reading

Most of the logos you describe are the ones from the single cart versions and do appear on real hardware when playing the original single carts, but don't appear on the multicarts. The logos are only displayed if the cartridge hardware actually swaps them into place when booting the game (which the multicarts don't), but they are usually left in the ROM in the same spot even in multicart/hacked/whatever versions, and since Sintax carts have the same kind of logo swap, the emu will display them in that mode.

I don't know about Digimon Pocket or Pokemon Ruby, sorry, I don't have original copies of those. Lord of the Rings might be TD-SOFT since it's based on Devil Island but I would have to double check

Ah, thanks. To my knowledge NGCA versions of Vast Fame games also have custom logos that only boot when using an unlicensed compatibility mode that forces the logo swap. That I found when trying to see if I could force a logo to appear out of my Digimon Saphire cart

>inb4 commenting on an years-old post, but thank you for the mofa qiu dump! i’m crazy about clever and obscure puzzle games and this one is instantly addictive :)

ZOOK HERO Z PASSWORDS

_=BLANK
B=BODY
L=LEGS
H=HEAD

LB_HLB
BLHHHL
BLL_HH
LBLBHL

This takes you to the last stages in Zook Hero with 9 Lives, 9 Energy Tanks and 9 Weapon Tanks

i hope english release of zook hero will be fixed as well

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