A correction for the quit screen CHR problem earlier versions of VT03 Octopus.

The CHR data contains letters for POWER JOY LTD, but the name table data uses empty tiles for something else already.

A later version, found on the "Sports Game 69-in-1" PnP, corrected the problem by replacing the animated faces with boring "Yes" and "No" letters.

This is a repost of a message from late last year that was lost due to the forum having needed a restore from backup.

The common ROM file of the Hummer Team game Titenic is actually an extract from the Super New Year Cart 15-in-1 multicart that had its cutscenes and title screen restored by Санчес. It is not the actual version of the game that was released by ABAB Soft.

The proper version of the game, released by ABAB Soft, does not have the music that would later be heard in Harry's Legend. Instead, it has Hummer Cheng arrangements of the James Horner film score, including the (in)famous Celine Dion song. It also prominently displays the game's name in the status bar at all times.

Find a ROM image of the proper version of the game, as released by ABAB Soft, attached to this message, and stop using the 15-in-1 extract from now on. Watch a playthrough video here.

There are several ROM images of Earthworm Jim 2 (Super Game version) out there, something that confused and bothered me greatly. Here are the findings from my analysis:

First, no known ROM image comes from an actual single-game cartridge version of the game. All cartridges that claim to have only this game on them are actually multicarts with the menu disabled via a solder pad on the circuit board. It is possible that no actual single-game cartridge version, that is not a bastardized multicart, ever existed. If there is one, then it has not been dumped.

The earliest ROM image (from 2005) of the game was on the SPC009 "Golden Card 6-in-1" multicart, where Earthworm Jim 2 was one of six games. Extracting the game from that multicart was difficult since the multicart's menu was placed inside the Earthworm Jim 2 part, so that even when the game is extracted, it would still show the menu, but all choices would lead to the same game. Mazhou88 was the first to attempt such an extraction in 2008, disabling the menu by changing two bytes in the PRG-ROM part. It still played the "game selected" sound effect before the Super Game logo was shown, though. This first hack of the SPC009 extract was included in GoodNES 3.23b as "EarthWorm Jim 2 (SuperGame) [h1].nes", and is included in the attached archive as "Earthworm Jim 2 (SPC009 extract)[h menu removed by mazhou88].nes". An unknown person took this hack and further improved it by removing the "game selected" sound effect, resulting in the ROM image included in GoodNES 3.23b under the misleading name "EarthWorm Jim 2 (SuperGame).nes", and is included in the attached archive as "Earthworm Jim 2 (SPC009 extract)[h menu removed by mazhou88][h menu sound effect removed].nes".

The second ROM image was dumped by MLX and myself from what seemed like a single-game cartridge with the code E-W2. Because the PRG-ROM part contained menu code and the game names "The Earth Worm" and "The Booger Man", and the CHR-ROM also contained the Boogerman graphics data, it became apparent that the cartridge was actually a 2-in-1 multicart that merely had its menu disabled. Based on the selection of games, that multicart could only have been the king002 "2-in-1 Super Golden Card". king002 had already been dumped by Sanchez in 2011, but had mistakenly included "J-M2" as the cartridge ID in its filename, even though "J-M2" actually was merely a cover variant of our E-W2 cartridge and so did not truly refer to the menu-enabled variant of the multicart. The king002 multicart ROM image is in GoodNES 3.23b as "2-in-1 J-M2 (Unl) [!].nes". The menu-disabled version found on the E-W2 and actual J-M2 cartridges is not in GoodNES, but is included in the attached archive as "Earthworm Jim 2 (king002 with menu disabled -- E-W2&J-M2).nes" (without the Boogerman CHR data).

A third ROM image can be extracted from the "Super 808 2-in-1" multicart (together with Super Aladdin) that was dumped by Sanchez in 2012 and included in GoodNES 3.23b as "2-in-1 Super 808 (Unl) [p1][!].nes". Since that multicart's menu had been placed in the Super Aladdin part, this particular extract is the most interesting for being the only ROM image of the game that does not have a (disabled) multicart menu in it. It is therefore the version of the game that would most likely be found on any genuine single-game cartridge version, i.e. a single-game cartridge that is not just a multicart with its menu disabled. It is not included in GoodNES 3.23b, but included in the attached archive as "Earthworm Jim 2 (Super 808 extract).nes".

Finally, Mazhou88 also posted an early development build of the game, which starts at a different level than the normal version. This early build is in GoodNES 3.23b as "EarthWorm Jim 2 (Unl) (Test Version).nes", and is included in the attached archive as "Earthworm Jim 2 (Test build by mazhou88).nes".

Recently dumped for MAME, posted here with a NES 2.0 header for new NintendulatorNRS (also attached) together with each single game extracted.

Most of the existing ROM images of games by Mars Production/Union Bond are hacked for mapper 15 and have dumper graffiti in them. I was able to restore the original graffiti-less mapper images for all of them. In the course of this restoration, I also discovered two hitherto unemulated aspects of these games:

• All of them save the game state to a 512-byte serial EEPROM, not to WRAM like most games. They are more similar to the Bandai Dragon Ball games in this regard. EEPROM saving is rather slow; it takes fifteen seconds in Dark Seed.
• Final Fantasy V (G-003), 大話西游 (Dàhuà Xīyóu, Westward Journey, G-004) and 岳飛傳 (Yuèfēi Zhuàn, G-006) offer a notebook (手記/記錄) opened by choosing the bottom option from the SELECT button menu. In order to display it, the games make use of a previously-undiscovered functionality of the Nanjing-variant mapper 164: a 1 bpp graphics mode that effectively allows the entire 8 KiB of CHR-RAM to be used as a bitmap covering every pixel of the screen. The only other mapper with such a functionality is on the Dongda PEC-586 educational computer cartridge.

Neither feature is emulated by existing emulators. The old mapper 15 hacks crash completely when opening the notebook, while the restored ROM images do not save/restore properly in existing emulators, and the notebook is unreadable. The current WIP build of Nintendulator-NRS corrects both deficiencies.

Because game save opportunities are rare in these games, and playing through the random fights just to test my emulation was too painful to do, I have also created "no random fight"-hacked versions and included them as well.

So there are five versions of this "wonderful" game:

• Gardman: Four levels, with cutscenes in-between.
  
• Wonder Rabbit: Only levels 1 and 2. dreamGEAR's version further hacked to replace SELECT with A+B.
  
• Monster Brother: Levels 2, 3 and 4. Original version on 120-in-1 multicart. Further hacked version in WXN pack, replacing the "Monster" script (except for a tiny blue patch in the top right corner) with a serial number, so that version's title screen just displays "Brother".
  
• Five Kids: Only levels 3 and 4
  
• Diveman: Only levels 3 and 4, different palette. Corrupt title screen.

The wiki and forum posts name Wonder Rabbit as the original version. I would rather say that Gardman is the original version --- it has all levels, cutscenes that actually fit what you're doing, and Diveman in particular has remnants of the original title screen. While Gardman could be a later version that combined Wonder Rabbit's and Five Kids' levels and added cutscenes, the pattern seen with F-22 (cutscenes and levels) and Super Contra 7 (levels) seems to be rather that the full game comes first. Also, Gardman seems to be the only one released on an actual (Nanjing) cartridge.

FCEUX recently added support for "4-in-1 MGC-026". Is a dump of this available?

I am a bit confused about CoolBaby versus CoolBoy. The CoolBoy 400-in-1 multicart shows the characters of Ren Shun at the top, yet the wiki reads as if Fuzhou CoolBoy and Shenzen Ren Shun are separate unrelated companies. Are they?