While doing some hacking stuff recently out of boredom, I noticed something strange about the game Door Door. As common as it is on bootleg multicarts, every knockoff version of it is...weirdly altered. Most notably, the doors can be opened multiple times after letting an enemy inside; in the original game, they can only be opened once. Additionally, the life counter doesn't appear, and the score resets to zero upon entering a new level. Check any multicart with the game; they ALL do this!

So I decided to put an unaltered Door Door ROM into a multicart menu. At some point in the gameplay, the graphics will completely glitch out, usually after closing a door or touching the candy. For whatever reason, bootleg carts can't handle running the game normally... (I actually have a plug & play that has this glitch in it [Super Joy III variant], so I know its not an emulation error. It always pissed me off as a kid)

My question is: is Door Door just something the crappy multigames cannot handle properly? Or is this a very early form of copy protection, from the developers seeing the possibility of pirates appearing in the future? Is it able to detect if the ROM is above a certain filesize or something, and intentionally breaks the game from there?

Picture attached of glitch results when importing the original version over the bootleg in a multicart.

Does anything in the code seem to be derivative from the 1.8" handheld game(s) that you dumped a while ago? They share many of the same games iirc.

This will probably turn out as a rather annoying post, but I know there are many preservationists and such here so they might be able to answer this question. Over the years, I've found many strange forms of documentation on video games that aren't listed on any major websites. For example, I just randomly found this webpage:

https://www.slideshare.net/JeffBuccellato/jbuccellatotitlehistory

Many of the games here were unreleased, such as Felix the Cat for PlayStation and Namco Collection for Pocket PC 2002+ (the hell is a Pocket PC?). There are no pictures or videos of these games, let alone other text mentions of them, and we can only imagine what they were. And this is literally on some developer's resume, so I'm not even sure if its something I should be sharing around.

My question is, what can I do to get the word out about these things, without creating an obnoxious post like this on an unrelated forum? I know there's the Undumped Wiki, but they disabled the ability to create an account for some reason. I'm not exactly good at talking to people (especially in this scene with my track record), and most just ignore me. The best I can do is make light of one thing that leads to another; for example, I posted the Korean PC version of Pac-Man World on a wiki page, which led to some spiked interest in Korean PC games. I can't figure out any better way...

The roms we have right now are leaked prototypes from the mid-2000s. They were originally posted on AtariAge, but they were quickly deleted by AA themselves out of legal fear (the flashback was still new at this point). All of the games were there, but most were super early, unplayable builds. I specifically remember Food Fight only played the sounds and had a counter in the middle of the screen. All of those seem to be lost to time now, no one ever backed them up...

There's also the Missile Command port which wasn't included on the flashback, only some random 10-in-1 pnp from a few years ago. Not sure why they waited over a decade to release it - its definitely one of the better ports. I'm guessing because its based on the arcade original and not the 2600 port?

It's the 16GB model of PAP KIII Plus btw, I think there's an 8GB model.

The PAP is a multi-console thing right? Do you have the full gamelist for it? There might be (non-plug 'n play) bootlegs undumped in the other sections.

iirc one model was dumped a while back, and it had undumped GBA bootlegs on it. If that was the 8GB model, there might be more on the 16GB. (but I'm not very familiar with those so i wouldn't be good at identifying)

We had earlier agreed that I was going to release the next Project Plug and Play update. I have already started working on it.

You never replied to me originally...I meant more that we would do a collaboration effort, not that you would take over the entire project. Since you never got back to me I figured you changed your mind... (not trying to sound rude here, i'm just confused)

So...is the content encrypted ? I wanted to make a custom rom with official NES games in it , instead of bootleg ones, I noticed that the roms are saved in "banks" , I tried to replace one with Super Mario Bros. 3 but that did't work (I guess the mapper is unsupported?) perhaps with the emulator now I can try the edits before burning the eeprom

To put game inside a multicart slot, you have to match the game + graphics data in the correct place, with the correct size. Mario 3 wouldn't work because its a 384K game, none of which are inside the 240-in-1; Mario 1 would, as many games on the console are 40K. They also can only be mapper 0 roms.

to find the gamedata, take the project plug 'n play rom for the specific title, and search for the first few lines of code in FCEUX hex editor. then replace the code with the game you want in its place. do the same process for graphic data. (does that make sense at all? i'm terrible at explaining these things)

I've attached ROM with Abscondee replaced with Mario 1 as an example.

(also one more sidenote for NewRisingSun - the Nintendulator you posted won't run the majority of pnp VT03/09 extracted roms. is there a reason for that?)

Awesome Panda

Mar 21 2018, 09:41:31 PM

I don't suppose the graphics on that example are broken because Nintendo Tetris is an MMC1 game and the machine is designed to handle a different matter?[/quote]99.9% sure that's the case. Main giveaway is that the 1989 text is intact while everything else is scrambled. I don't think its necessarily a mapper issue rather than the game itself - nes tetris uses a weird graphic method that makes the game hard to clone. its also used in punch-out and probably a couple other games.