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Bisqwit 90   Level: 22      Posts: 2/94 EXP: 55468 For next: 2882 Since: 03-12-12 From: Finland Since last post: 8.5 years Last activity: 6.6 years 
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| In the last few weeks I have invested some time in doing something I have never done before: Dumping a Famicom/NES ROM.
It is the only NES game I have ever owned, a 5-in-1 pirate multigame cartridge. I recently covered it on my YouTube channel. 
To that purpose, I bought an Arduino compatible board (and a solder sucker) and programmed the Arduino into an EPROM/ROM dumper. 
Since it is a bit off-topic, I won't cover the rest of the dumping process here (it is already described at the NESDev board), but what is interesting is what's in the games. Apparently, they messed up when making the multigame cartridge. When burning the graphics for Arkanoid, they inserted Arkanoid's graphics... and graphics from a completely different game, Argus, that is not even found in the cartridge. 
(Left: Original graphics; Right: NTDec graphics) As a consequence*, though the game can still be beaten normally, the graphics in the final stage and in the ending are broken. Admittedly, pretty much nobody can beat the game, so the chances of that mistake ever coming up barring ROM dumping were slim, but it is still a mistake. *) They are also broken because the game does not even attempt to switch to proper CHR-ROM pages, meaning the CHR-ROM contents of the wrong game are not seen.  
Also, because of the special bootstrap mechanism the game uses to launch Galaxian (which resides in the same memory page as the main menu, requiring special maneuvers for the reset&IRQ&NMI vectors), the music easter egg does not work in this version of Galaxian (despite the game program code being identical to the real Japanese version of the game, barring the removal of copyright strings). More information: http://nesdev.parodius.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?p=96455#96455 I don't know how it goes with the copyright policies of this board, but for comparison, here's the graphics of the other games (real and pirate) side-by-side. You can also see the modified title screen (where all copyright & company logo strings were removed). Legend of Kage:   
The Goonies:   
Note the clever use of 1bpp overlays to increase the mileage of the CHR-ROM in the bottom left corner (title screen graphics). Urban Champion:   
Galaxian:   
They removed the company logo (NAMCOT) in Galaxian CHR-ROM. Odd, because they did not do so for any of the other games. |
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