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!