Tiny Toon Adventures 3 + ROM

[Barver]

Not sure if this worthy a bump, just was thinking about how this game and Squirrel King have similar IDs on the side. Tiny Toons is MT-601, Squirrel King is MT-602, my guess is that the original version of Lion King Ii has MT-603 on the side of the box. Anyway I tried figuring out what MT could possibly stand for, and then it hit me that it's not necessarily anything to do with the developers, but probably the manufactures. So I'm guessing it probably stands for Ming Technology.

[taizou]

yeah, that makes sense - they could even fit in with the GM-95 series if you look at it that way. theres 401-403 and 701 but no 500s or 600s that I know of.

[Barver]

Finally got my cart dumped guys Have at it.

Still got more to come as they hopefully get cracked.

[Awesome Panda]

Judging by the header, I wouldn't be surprised if that's actually a pirated version of it. XXXXXX Ltd. is mostly likely supposed to say Gamtec Ltd. in another version or something like that.

[codeman38]

Cheetahmen

Jul 27 2011, 10:14:07 AM

Judging by the header, I wouldn't be surprised if that's actually a pirated version of it. XXXXXX Ltd. is mostly likely supposed to say Gamtec Ltd. in another version or something like that.[/quote]Yep. There's a very similar header ("All rights reserved of Gamtec Ltd.") in Super Magican (a.k.a. Elf Wor).Also, this is definitely the Shi-Kin-Joh sound driver, not the Wonder Boy 3 one.Oh, and finally: assuming the header hasn't been tampered with further beyond the un-Gamtec-ifying, this was apparently made on March 4, 1996.

[taizou]

hey awesome, it's dumped
Maybe Gamtec themselves took their name out of it for some reason? they might have been a bit worried about leaving a company credit in less legit games like this one. Although in Squirrel King it's right there in the ending so who knows.

[Awesome Panda]

I doubt it, I think it's more likely that another pirate company rereleased the game without the copyright notices. If Gamtec were worried about copyright, they probably wouldn't have put Chip and Dale in Squirrel King.

[Barver]

I'm really doubting it's another pirate mostly based on how no other copies have turned up. Usually when piraters re-pirate something it will look a bit different, but all seven copies I've seen so far look exactly the same. That's my logic anyway =p I don't think everything they've made has had their name in the header anyways, such as Lion King II and Super Bubble Bobble, so I wouldn't use their name being absent as a basis to assume this is not an original cart.

Anyway, the 3rd and 4th levels have some cool chiptune-ish music, am I right?

[Awesome Panda]

Well I didn't have the patience to play that far, but what I heard was pretty poor in comparison to their other Mega Drive games in my opinion. :X

[Barver]

Yeah, the majority of tunes aren't as good as Lion King 2 or anything. It's only those two tunes I mentioned that really have stuck in my mind.

[codeman38]

On another random note, I love how the attract-mode demos all seem to have Buster Clever randomly running off a cliff.

Edit: ...actually, it's like the map isn't fully loaded into memory or something in the demos, because the platform just ends. Weiiiird.

[Azathoth]

Barver

Jul 27 2011, 08:19:23 PM

I'm really doubting it's another pirate mostly based on how no other copies have turned up. Usually when piraters re-pirate something it will look a bit different, but all seven copies I've seen so far look exactly the same. That's my logic anyway =p[/quote]Not to sit here and pontificate, but if your unlicensed 16-bit game doesn't have a copy protection routine, then it's counterfeit. Or a "pirated pirate", the equivalent of buying a pirate of Tengen's Tetris.

Not even taking into consideration using other's IP's without permission, these companies were in this to make a profit. They were all based in areas where pirates were more accessible than original carts. They wanted to make sure that when they put out a game from their plant, every Tom, Dick, and Harry wasn't playing it on their copiers instead of buying one of their carts. And they really didn't want a real counterfeit outfit churning out their game left and right.

Look at MD pirate market today for unlicensed stuff. There's literally about two dozen titles that are always the same ones circulating and these same titles weren't manufactured 15 years ago, they were manufactured like last month. They're always loose carts and have label art taken from new sources. Why is the Mario Bros. Squirrel King hack all over the place, yet Super Mario World 64 is like hen's teeth? Because it hasn't been cracked and posted in Chinese-based forums where these modern-day counterfeit plants get their ROMs from. Top Fighter was some exotic thing that wouldn't even work on emulators and went for hundreds of dollars several years ago. Then the [f1] version popped up and made its rounds; now you can buy Top Fighter carts all day long with no end in sight.

There's a few exceptions to this rule. Most of the Russian hacks don't have any protection, but most of them were just simple hacks made for their portable Mega Drive system (MDP) and eventually put on carts also. I don't think those outfits could even program copy protection like that if they had it. Most of the original stuff using the Tomsoft SDK (Iraq War, Death Caliber, etc) just has TMSS issues because they were designed with clone hardware in mind due to the market.

Why is the SNES/SFC market so small and the ROMs not over the place? Hell, until D4S cracked those handful a year or so ago that copy protection hadn't been broken by anyone anywhere for over 15 years! The pirates just didn't have anything to pirate! What didn't have protection is either all over (Sonic 4 anyone?) or has been dumped for years but just not pirated due to lack of customer interest (Street Fighter II:CE, Street Fighter V).

[Barver]

I dunno, at least for me I'm not totally convinced it's a pirate of a pirate we've got here, but I can't completely dismiss the possibility. I don't think there's any way to know 100%, especially since the game did have a form of protection, however small and fast it was cracked. The important thing is it's dumped so meh.

I was taking a look in VRAM and noticed that there's more text that's unused in the intro. The story cuts off at "comes out to fight with Prince of Darkness for justice to rescue" with no period or anything after "rescue." Here's what's in VRAM.



It possibly was meant to say "rescue his disappeared friends.." There's also the text "A journey," who knows what that line was supposed to be.

Edit: On second it looks like the text would have been "A journey in Imaginable Island begins.."

[codeman38]

Probably "rescue all his disappeared friends", given the stray "ll" in there.

I'm guessing there's probably an entire fourth screen of text that got chopped out, since each story screen is four lines. Still curious what "Hwevbat Dkssalloudsl" is supposed to be. "However" something "Darkness"...

[Azathoth]

Barver

Jul 27 2011, 11:12:02 PM

I dunno, at least for me I'm not totally convinced it's a pirate of a pirate we've got here, but I can't completely dismiss the possibility.[/quote]Oh no, I'm in agreement with you that it's a first-run original and not a pirated pirate. The PCB could probably tell a lot, but it it doesn't have screws in it so there's a good chance the case would be damaged if it was pried open. I don't think I'd risk that. I guess I could have avoided writing a thesis paper and just said that if the game has a copy protection routine, you can almost 100% bet it's original. Most of these even have additional hardware on the PCB just for the copy protection routine, and you know cheap pirates aren't going to fool with reproducing that!