Bootleg Games Central Forum
Pirate Discussion => Famicom/NES => 2000-present => Topic started by: forgotusername on August 06, 2022, 06:32:59 PM
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Fairly recently, a bootleg plug & play was produced called the Game Station 5 (or "GS5"); modeled after the PlayStation 5. I've known of this console for a while now; but watching videos, it clearly just had that one overabundant 200-in-1 menu (with a basic Nice Code-Inventor mix), just with the first 40 or so games replaced with actual NES titles.
Apparently, however, there are two Game Station 5 models; one with the 200-in-1, and a seemingly less common 1280-in-1 (model no. "NX-85"). Judging by video footage, on the 1280 game model - thrown in the "Etc. Game" category at #305 - is a game labeled "Pikachu5".
Pikachu5 appears to be the long-lost Pikachu version of Wonder Rabbit; which I've... literally been actively trying to find for like, half a decade. The preview image definitely looks like Wonder Rabbit (matching colors etc.), and shows a Moai head which is visible in Wonder Rabbit's CHR data. However, I can't find any videos of the Pikachu5 game being played; and the console itself, while common-ish, poses the risk of me accidentally buying crappy 200-in-1 versions trying to obtain it.
Does anyone here have further information on "Pikachu5", be it from owning this console or somewhere else? Picture of menu attached (sourced from https://youtu.be/0QWX8AZDc8s).
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https://twitter.com/taizou_hori/status/1473295793616527369
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The PnP has been sent to TeamEurope for dumping, but they reported difficulty reading the ROM content, so they have forwarded it to Sean Riddle.
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Thank you for securing the console. Here's to hoping the dump is successful; but I'm glad the game is now properly documented in the first place.
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I'm interested in this and have tentatively sourced the "Game Station 5 1280-in-1" just in case.
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I hadn't mentioned it here yet, but I did actually get a copy of the console as well. I don't have the ability to dump it or anything, but I recorded a full video playthrough of Pikachu5, which can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlXWPTYA-_c (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlXWPTYA-_c) (Part 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5zR70RhBFw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5zR70RhBFw) (Part 2)
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Many thanks for uploading the video. It is like finally watching the original uncensored version of a film that for decades was only available in edited form. Unfortunately, I have no news about the dumping status.
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I hear there should be an update on that at the weekend or next week.
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https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7129/
Hack test, based on YT video.
Not perfect but good enough until the actual thing is dumped.
Added 16x16 block title screen, which was a bit of a chore.
Couldn't get a perfect scale-down from the Youtube video, so the graphics are only sort of right, but you get the basic idea.
Database match: Gardman (Asia) (Unl)
Database: No-Intro: Nintendo Entertainment System (v. 20210216-231042)
File SHA-1: 5E707B25BC69C2342B01163F147536B6BF6E6365
File CRC32: 956A2EE5
ROM SHA-1: 46900B667F4149444063F798C7C1744D5695170D
ROM CRC32: 7B40535C
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Sean Riddle writes: "I dumped the Retro Station NX-85 1280-in-1. Along with the normal 44 pads, there were 3 more address lines at the top. They aren’t marked, so I have 8 dumps but I don’t know what order they should be in. I assume Haze can figure it out by examination or trial and error."
https://archive.org/details/retro-station-nx-85
(This is a 1280-in-1 system so there's a lot of data in here- 256 MB in fact- but the Pikachu Gardman game should be in this dump .... somewhere. It appears to mostly be alphabetical in the data.)
(Logically it would be in mw9298.bin, which contains other "ETC" category games listed around the same point, like "New York Nyankies," "JB Harold Murder Club," "Panic Restaurant," "SD Ultraman," and "Utsurun Desu." If so I haven't spotted it.)
Many NES graphics are visible in the binaries, but sometimes they appear to be bit-shifted in some way, like the attached picture. Searching the hex for some of the hex of the Pikachu/Gardman graphics turns up no results.
177300 in the 97 binary is Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular, and 1c6ABf0 is Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle -- in both cases these are very glitchy in YY-CHR, suggesting bit shift or bit reversal.
I should compare the hex here to the actual Snoopy ROM. 176B000 is snoopy with his medals, the CHR before the one with Charlie Brown .... this would be 2B010 in the ROM proper ...
03 1F 2F 6F F7 F7
would I think become:
14 97 D6 F6 7F 7F
It's therefore verifiable that Pikachu Wonder Rabbit is in binary 96 from around 135FF00 -- 13A1F00, something like that, but glitched consistently in this way.
1388000 in binary 96 is a glitched version of the HUD used in Pikachu Gardman (my hack) at 048010.
1398000 in binary 96 has the Pikachu player graphics, present in the Pikachu Gardman hack at 058010. It's consistent
1385000 is probably the title screen, matching Gardman at 45010
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Pikachu5 is definitely in mw9296.bin (PRG from 13A0000-13BFFFF, CHR from 1380000-139FFFF). However, I have absolutely no idea what's going on with the graphics; the game does run though, so it's not a bad dump or anything. It can probably be fixed in some way, as it's likely intentional scrambling (for. some reason), though I couldn't tell you how.
ROM attached, with extremely glitchy CHR.
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The CHR can almost certainly be find and replaced, based on a comparison of the data in other games like Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular, seen above. It's clear that every hex number is being replaced with a different "reversed" version of itself consistently.
Partial byte correction table attached for fixing some of the CHRs .... and a complete (?) version by Bavi_H.
According to Sean, bits 0 and 4, 1 and 2, 3 and 7, and 5 and 6 are swapped.
The PRG and CHR are on the same chip and were dumped with the same connections.
I spent ages doing a find and replace and only got partway, but there's an older EPROM Pin Swap Tool here which corrected it.
https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=20122&start=15
via Sean Riddle, Bavi_H, lidnariq, Farid
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Corrected ROM.
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...How did you decode it, out of curiosity? Did you literally do it by hand with the values, or is there some kind of program that can be used? If it's an easy process, there are a few other undumped games on there that should probably be fixed too.
With that aside...with the search coming to an end, I want to thank everyone who worked on this, and just took interest in this silly little game. I truly appreciate it.
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It was an easy process, although it was hours of work before I/we figured out what to do.
As I said, I used Farid's EPROM Pin Swap Tool, linked above, running in Windows XP 3 compatibility mode, and swapped the D pins.
It requires the CHR section of the ROM to be saved as its own file first, then corrected, which only took a few seconds.
I worked on this with Bavi_H. Sean Riddle dumped the ROMs in full and explained which pins had been swapped, probably based on my notes. Lidnariq suggested the program by Farid which switches the pins.
If you have suggestions for other rare/undumped ROMs, post them. That one with an amorous wolf maybe??
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It's a VT32 console, and the bit-swapping applies only to NES graphics, not to VT32 graphics. Guess I have to add another submapper for this to NintendulatorNRS' mapper 296.
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How do I load these in Nintendulator?
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Attached find the full ROM, with additional necessary swapping of the higher address lines and a NES 2.0 header. You must use an updated NintendulatorNRS build (https://unlicensed.games/libg/static.php?page=NintendulatorNRS) to run it. I have not tried every individual game; if anybody does, please note down any glitches and post them to let owners of the real hardware verify that they are not dump or emulation problems.
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Very nice, it works fine.
What are the rarer/undumped titles here?
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I'm unsure if this is needed given it's properly emulated now, but here are most of the undumped (as far as I can tell) games decoded. Games of particular note include Howling Killer (variant of The Lion King 3/5), the "Walt Disney's Crash" Jungle Book hack, and
amorous wolf Story Box. I'm unsure how to rip "TV Baseball" though (#61 in SPG section), and it might be worth checking the Waixing games towards the end of the AVG section; I'm not very familiar with those so I didn't check them.
In regards to emulation glitches and whatnot...oddly enough, it seems to be the other way around; as in, Nintendulator plays games correctly that don't work on the real hardware. That bizarre Alice Cooper SMB1 hack works fine in Nintendulator for instance, but on the console it freezes instantly. The emulation seems basically perfect though, I don't see any issues or anything.
(minor addendum: it seems like the end of "tennis ball" chr glitched out or something. they were blank bytes in the dumped "tennis" revision so i guess that threw something off?)
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Thank you, very good work. It looks like they had access to alternate versions of some Nice Code / Waixing bootlegs which weren't public previous to this. It's not uncommon for Nice Code to do graphics swaps and I hadn't seen these.
The last few CHRs in "Tennis Ball" have the pin-swap problem, or pin-swap in reverse. Maybe they're from another game and not used. Maybe they were pin swapped and didn't need to be. Should look at that code again.
"Dringle" has misaligned graphics (!) and some broken code.
"Spider-Man 3" is the Nice Code game with "Spider-Man" on the title screen, which was not undumped but a little hard to find outside of this forum. Their "Spider-Man" (1) is not present.
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ETC Game (524-in-1)'s game #456 "Dringle" has corrupt graphics in emulation, please check on real hardware.
SPG Game (171-in-1)'s game #43 "Rad Racer 2" has incorrect mirroring in emulation, please check on real hardware.
The menu stores the position of the last-selected game in WRAM ($6000-$7FFF). If a game uses WRAM itself, or otherwise messes with the data there, the menu will not return to its previous position after a soft reset.
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speaking of nice code, game 248 on the ETC section that claims to be bomberman 2 is actually a rare version of their bomberman clone. has 3 selectable characters, a map screen and bossfights (in which you fight the same boss 3 times)
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Oh wow I didn't catch that Bomberman... I've never seen that at all, decode attached.
I checked the Tennis Ball data again, and it seems that the glitched area is... unscrambled CHR from another game?? Not sure if it's unused data or part of an actual game in the menu; I attached the raw .bin of the unmodified area just in case.
I can confirm Dringle and Rad Racer 2 are like that on real hardware, exactly the same way it looks in Nintendulator.
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https://tcrf.net/Pikachu5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h91KNaaXxw
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I should add that there is a version of Gardman that is omits the cutscenes and is therefore just 128k/128k in size on the XB805 72-in-1 multicart (https://unlicensed.games/libg/index.php?entry=Worldwide-selection). Comparing the various offsets in the fixed bank, it seems to be recompiled from source code rather than a simple binary hack of Nanjing's release. I have attached it.
I would assign the various hacks to the different publishers:- Gardman for Shenzhen Nanjing Technology, part of a whole series of old Dragon Co. games receiving similar story-panel treatment;
- Wonder Rabbit and Diveman for Trump Grand Manufacturing, a.k.a. Power Joy;
- Monster Brother and Five Kids for Fuzhou Waixing Computer Science & Technology.
I would also highlight the fact that Wonder Rabbit+Diveman, and Monster Brother+Five Kids,, having a complementing set of two levels each, should be considered as pairs, not unlike how another Dragon Co./Nice Code Software game, Tom&Jerry 3, was split up into "Primitive Man" and "Primitive Woman".
There is a later title screen hack of Monster Brother that adds a Chinese copyright office registration number to the bottom of the screen, stealing tiles that had been previously used to spell "Monster", so it just says "Brother 2007SR02108".
Finally, I wonder whether the "5" of "Pikachu5" is not merely a result of this particular PnP console having another "Pikachu" based on Tetris, and so not truly part of the game's name.
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Interestingly there's a Nature Color Game copyright in that XB805 version... the CHR for it is blacked out, but filling it with letter tiles spells it out automatically. I'm inclined to say that this version still postdates the Nanjing release; as it has the updated tutorial screen text seen in Wonder Rabbit, while the Nanjing version doesn't (note the tutorial only displays in the multicart for some reason, not the extracted rom)
I'm unsure whether to consider Pikachu5 the "official" name or not; I write it that way mainly to avoid confusion with similar games. It would make sense as a title I feel, since the "5" presumably relates to there being five characters. I put a redirect on tcrf for "Pikachu (Nice Code)" toward the Pikachu5 article, so it is still categorized by both names.
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Well, the dump we have of it is from a console which called it "Pikachu5."
I think that's a useful name, for the same reasons mentioned. There are five playable characters and it differentiates it from other games called "Pikachu," such as the Tetris knockoff.
The music is a problem in these Nice Code games ... very repetitive.
Other thread about the Retro Station Generally.
http://bootleg.games/BGC_Forum/index.php?topic=3084.msg22119
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Attached find the full ROM, with additional necessary swapping of the higher address lines and a NES 2.0 header. You must use an updated NintendulatorNRS build (https://unlicensed.games/libg/static.php?page=NintendulatorNRS) to run it. I have not tried every individual game; if anybody does, please note down any glitches and post them to let owners of the real hardware verify that they are not dump or emulation problems.
Act Game's 93: Kafeku Kun and one game like this (i forgot the game name.) can't run.
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This version of ACTION 93: Kakefu-kun no Jump Tengoku: Speed Jigoku works for me fine in NintendulatorNRS.
It's also not a rare game if you need to seek out other NES or Famicom dumps of it.
https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/Kid_Kool_and_the_Quest_for_the_Seven_Wonder_Herbs?TheOrder=1
I note that some of these games have had minor hacks done to them -- the Bugs Bunny games both become "Tiny Toons" here on the title screen -- but most are untouched.
Howling Killer features an infamous suicide ending upon Game Over.
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(note the tutorial only displays in the multicart for some reason, not the extracted rom)
The multicart version had been patched so that some selections of the multicart menu go directly to later levels, skipping the tutorial for those later levels. The ROM I posted partially undid that by restoring the memory initialization -- otherwise the game would crash immediately if the emulator initialized memory to anything other than $00 -- but I had not undone that alteration. Now I have; I have attached three ROM files: the original raw extract that will fail in the aforementioned conditions, an update to my previously-posted ROM that now restores the tutorial as well, and a third, based upon the second, that incorporates the "Nature Color" copyright restoration already demonstrated above. I am a bit skeptical about the font choice though, given that the "START" uses a different font. Tile $A8 is empty right now, but apparently contained something meaningful. I shall go through the existing "Nature Color" ROM files to see if any of them have a "double-height" © symbol.
Edit: corrected another mistake, reuploaded.
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It appears yet another Pikachu5 variant has surfaced... appearing on some other random console ("MGT" Console de jeux), listed in the menu as "Teamboys". It's not really that much of note, I'm just shocked to see there are still even more of these. Going solely by stock images, the entire HUD seems to be removed...
It appears I never posted the TV Baseball ROM here; I did actually figure out how to find it, so I've attached the belated download (alongside a Teamboys picture).
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It appears yet another Pikachu5 variant has surfaced... appearing on some other random console ("MGT" Console de jeux), listed in the menu as "Teamboys". It's not really that much of note, I'm just shocked to see there are still even more of these. Going solely by stock images, the entire HUD seems to be removed...
It appears I never posted the TV Baseball ROM here; I did actually figure out how to find it, so I've attached the belated download (alongside a Teamboys picture).
Cool blimey! i wanted that Baseball game for Ages, but now i have it. :D
Thank you ever so much Forgotusername, this is very much appreciated.
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I was looking through the My Arcade "Pixel Player" ROM and, for whatever reason, Teamboys is in its coding unused. I kind of expected it to be hacked from Pikachu5 directly, but it actually just seems to be Wonder Rabbit-derived...all graphics for levels 3 and 4 are just blacked out in the data, along with (as I assumed was the case) the entire scoreboard. Download attached (note that it seems to only function on Nintendulator)
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It is that pesky memory initialization issue again. The game expects the multicart/plug-and-play menu to fill memory locations $07FE and $07FF with the starting level number. Depending on how the emulator fills memory on start-up, those memory locations will either contain $00, $FF or a random value. I have modified the ROM file to assume values $00 for both.