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Messages - BigFred

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1
Game Boy / Opening Sachen Carts
« on: August 20, 2017, 05:52:26 AM »
Ok here is the video. No audio included so I will explain a bit.

Sachen Video

There are four "pins" holding the cart together - two at each side. You need to put the tip of a file in the gab between the two parts of the cartridge on the connector end as shown in the video. Then you push it upwards as far as possible. Gently lift the file like a lever and the lower pin will pop out.

Now you will need something thin and flexible enough to put into the gap and slide it along the way to the upper pin and to not damage the shell. The file can damage the shell so don't use metal. Plastic and cardboard are better options. Usually the upper pin pops out pretty easily when the plastic goes behind it but not in every case. That piece of packaging for tablets was the best I had at hand when developing the method but I guess you could fine something better. Unfortunately there are slight differences between the Sachen carts. Sometimes the upper pin is longer and holds the shells together more tightly. For the Mighty Mix for instance I really had to pull a lot and had real trouble to open it. You could try something like a Nintendo eshop cart that might be thin enough and that is a bit more inelastic which might help seperating the shells more efficiently.

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Game Boy / Opening Sachen Carts
« on: August 16, 2017, 04:46:44 PM »
I found the video but I'll have to downconvert it first. It's a bit too big.

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Game Boy / Opening Sachen Carts
« on: August 11, 2017, 01:33:58 PM »
Hi everyone. I know this thread is old but I thought you might still be interested. You know I'm working for No-intro and in the past few years Tauwasser and me have found and dumped nearly all Sachen releases for the GB + GBC. His dumping skills are truly awesome.

During the initial phase of this project I developed a quite simple method of opening Sachen carts without causing damage that only takes a few seconds. I made a little video of this and if I find it again I'll maybe upload it. You will need a file and some piece of thin plastic for this.

4
Game Boy / Sachen "alt" 31in1 and 6in1?
« on: August 10, 2014, 04:49:32 AM »
Thank you so much for the confirmation - this helps a lot. Really strange that Sachen couldn't even get their facts right. When this 31in1 is around I'm pretty sure also the 6in1 can be found somewhere.

The 31-in-1 Mighty Mix just got dumped by Tauwasser. Sorry to ask but finding those games is really a nightmare sometimes: Are you willing to lend Tauwasser your game for dumping purposes? Should be easy now unless they changed something for whatever reason. He appears to be very reliable and communication is easy (we are both at no-intro forums). If opening the cart is required: I have found a pretty good method to do so within seconds without causing damage in most cases (I have made a video but need to find the link again where I uploaded it). Most means the shells are a bit different and some are harder to open than others which means it could cause a small white mark in the plastic on the side (which appears when it's bent too much) but not more. In approx. 8 out of 10 cases there is no damage at all. And for the remaining cases I might be able to find an improved method.

We are also desperatly looking for both 16in1, the 6in1 mentioned above and the last single game release 2002 Gedou Zhanlue.

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Game Boy / Sachen "alt" 31in1 and 6in1?
« on: August 09, 2014, 04:17:35 AM »
Hello everyone. I'm still wondering about Sachen's Game Boy library. You all know the 31 in 1 Mighty Mix including Thunder Blast Man and Jurassic Boy 2. However you can find a few pictures of a 31in1 cartridge with a different label.

bootleggames wiki Rocman

If you scroll down you find a picture and the description
Quote:
 
A 31-in-1 Sachen multi featuring the Rocman X Gold version and cover art that was not used anywhere else.[/quote]

Now I wonder: Where does the information about the inclusion of Rocman X actually come from? A bit more research made me discover this old order list from sachen.com.tw available at Nintendoage:

Sachen-Order

If you scroll down you can see the box and cartridge of this version. However in the game list they mention Thunder Blast Man and if you zoom in you can make out "Man" and two words written above which might be Thunder Blast but no chance this is Roc. So the only way this contains Rocman is a mistake on the label/description.

Does anyone actually own this version or did anyone ever see it in the wild at least other than this order list?

Even weirder they also list a Super 6 in 1 (6B-001) I see mentioned nowhere else but they show a real picture of boxart and cartridge. Nintendoage actually included this version in their game list probably due to this picture. Again did anyone ever encounter this release in real life? The fact they show this in their doc-files doesn't automatically mean they actually ever sent it out.

On another note: Currently a portion of Sachen's library is being accurately dumped (not by me) and there were amazing discoveries made during this process. As soon as this is done I will post about it.

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Game Boy dumps / Rocman X - Sachen
« on: April 30, 2014, 08:24:21 AM »
It appears I managed to dump Rocman X from Sachen which uses different graphics than Thunder Blast Man. However I encountered a huge surprise.

Link to my original post:

http://forums.no-intro.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2219&p=14011#p14011

Let me just mirror my message here:

Now I have a rare one - the elusive Rocman X from Sachen which took me years to find.

This is really a strange one. A sidenote: I realized the dump of Thunder Blast Man I put into the dat which is basically the same game is probably underdumped. The file should be 1MiB as only this appears to contain all unique data. However strange enough the first 256k appear to contain the full game - the same size of the scene release from the old days. I will change the dat however since we have no risk to lose anything as long as the max sized version is included. I don't know the purpose of the other data.

Now what about Rocman X? Well overall the 1MiB version is quite different. However the first 256k (see above) differ in only a single byte from TBM. This made me wonder what is going on. I confirmed that Rocman X is on the cart by playing it in my Game Boy Color. It did not work in any emulator out there unfortunately. But the fact alone should tell you that TBM and Rocman are more or less the same and the single byte might work as a trigger.

Now I found a little hack to make it work in emulators - seems an update is required in their code to support the game accurately. Funny enough this means you can also just take TBM from the internet, edit two bytes and it will turn into Rocman X :)

I will include the 1MiB version of the untouched read of course. People will of course complain about a non-working dump so I will also release the hacked version with it.




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Game Boy dumps / Handheld Underground dumps thread
« on: December 23, 2012, 06:52:31 AM »
Great to see all those games dumped and working :) Good work and thanks a lot!

I believe you could also release all non-working games as well as bonus. It's better to have them out and give emulator authors a chance to get them to work.

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Game Boy / Motocross Maniacs
« on: December 09, 2012, 06:25:58 AM »
I don't know an official version labeled Motocross Maniac.

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Game Boy dumps / Handheld Underground dumps thread
« on: November 26, 2012, 02:09:36 PM »
What we really need is proper emulation but I'm not sure who to address.

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Game Boy dumps / Handheld Underground dumps thread
« on: November 25, 2012, 03:51:45 PM »
For sure because it's english (afair) ;) Taizou is working on this but there was a problem unfortunately. I hope it can be solved.

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Game Boy dumps / Handheld Underground dumps thread
« on: November 25, 2012, 06:45:04 AM »
Quote:
 
The one on the net might be a later release. I had an English release I got from Europe that lacked the copyrights (and a Chinese cart that lacked it as well,) but I have another Chinese release that has the Sachen copyrights. They might've removed it to avoid legal issues; I know that another company, Vast Fame, removed their logo/copyrights in some later revisions of their games such as in Zook Hero Z and San Guo Zhi: Lie Chuan. [/quote]

Thanks a lot for checking your carts. This explains a lot. I guess it is safe to assume the one in the net is an "official" Sachen release then as well. My dump(s) will be public within few hours - probably on retroroms first as usual.

Quote:
 
It works, but it can't access the device (at least not on this computer - I dunno if there's some kind of configuration issue here, or if it just doesn't work under 64-bit).[/quote]

I'm using 32 bit so I can't tell - I'm sorry :(

Quote:
 
Yeah, I've dumped the menu already - I'll PM you. I also managed to dump Ganbaruga out of it and its 1:1 identical to the existing Japanese dump, so I guess it should be possible to recreate the multi using the separate dumps of the four games.[/quote]

Thank you for your support - the image was successfully recreated - you got pm ;)

Quote:
 
its the latter - the 2mb dumps are complete, i just have to rearrange the banks in a particular way for it to actually work. also theres some bit inversion going on, in different patterns depending on the game.[/quote]

Very good news. If everything works as expected then a new Sintax game will be available for you all pretty soon :) PMed about this as well.

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Game Boy dumps / Handheld Underground dumps thread
« on: November 23, 2012, 01:36:49 PM »
Quote:
 
whereas I have to boot into a crappy WinXP live CD to use the GB Transferer 2[/quote]

Hello taizou

you can use the GBT 2 software with Windows 7 by choosing the XP compatibility mode. No problem here.

I have a little question: On your hp I read you found two more Mani 4 in 1 carts. Can you do a dump of this one please? http://hhug.me/?post=5
I don't know if it can be fully dumped but if you can read the menu (32k?) it will maybe be enough to reconstruct the complete ROM image. Thanks in
advance.

btw I did redumps of Thunder Blast Man and Jurassic Boy II. I'm not sure if they are correct though. There is a strange phenomenon regarding the Sachen custom
logo which I don't understand yet. The scene dumps do not have a custom bootup logo but contain just the regular one. My dumps actually have both just like the Beast Fighter dump I did earlier. But: There are raw reads of two of the 4 in 1 games made with an EPROM programmer and they do not have the Sachen logo while a read from the pins actually does.
It is possible the custom logo is not stored in the ROM chip but somewhere else on the PCB and mapped into memory by the special mapper they use. So technically
a correct dump would just contain the regular one. I'm not sure though if this is really the case and if it applies to all their releases or maybe just the multigame-
carts.

My dumps also got bad checksums which I think is correct as I don't believe Sachen would care about correct ones. Probably the scene releases fixed these.
Ignoring the header/logo my dump of TBM matches the scene release perfectly. JB II however is different in several places. It might be a revision, an incorrect dump
or the former release was hacked.

Last but not least can you please explain what you did to "fix" some dumps to 4 MB? Did you redump them at 4 MB forced or is there some special sizing-up treatment I don't understand?
Little update: My copy/dump of Jurassic Boy II appears to be different in some way regarding tiles etc. For example the title screen shows Sachen(R) below the Jurassic Boy II title. The dump in the net does not. Can anyone check his copy of that game? I know there is a chinese label variantion of that at least. Maybe one shows the copyright, the other does not. Or possibly the one in the net is a pirate copy.

13
Game Boy / Sachen 4 in 1 4B-003 - does it exist?
« on: April 01, 2011, 02:03:41 PM »
thanks a lot for this picture! I wish I could buy this.

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Game Boy / Sachen 4 in 1 4B-003 - does it exist?
« on: April 01, 2011, 06:49:59 AM »
Your database lists version 3 of Sachen's multigame releases. However to my knowledge it has never surfaced anywhere. Do you have a physical proof of it's existance? Thank you.

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Game Boy / Beast Fighter (Sachen) dumped!
« on: March 31, 2011, 03:12:28 PM »
It dumps as a 2 MB ROM and the hash is the same at each try. It looks promising but doesn't do anything in emulators. Hard to say if this is a good dump. I hope MESS team can help

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