Nice Code "Go Retro Portable" copyright restorations

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On several recent plug & plays featuring the Nice Code VT02 library, the original copyright notices for the games (Power Joy Ltd, Nature Color Game, etc.) are intact on the games' title screens; such notices are almost always blanked out on older consoles. In particular, this includes the Retro-Bit Go Retro Portable, as well as an uncommon My Arcade 220-in-1, which was seemingly only released on the European market.

The consoles with the copyrights intact have not yet been dumped; though since the differences in these ROMs effectively only amount to the copyright notices, I attempted to restore a large majority of them. Using preexisting copies of the games (with the copyrights erased), I restored the copyright notices based on screenshots of the title screens. In most cases, the blank space is directly coded to fit the specific copyright byline, indicating that these are fully accurate in coding - or at least very close to it. The secret Power Joy screens (accessed via the code Up, Down, Up, Left, Right, Left, B) are also retained when possible.

In total, 47 games have had their copyrights restored here, out of around 55 unique copyright variations seen on the new plug & plays. Games which already had an identical copyrighted version available in ProjectPnP (as well as a few NX-85 rips) have been skipped; though games with a tilde ("~") in the ProjectPnP filename, from what I recall, indicated an unverified copyright restoration, so the copyrights have been visually verified for those games. See the included .txt files for additional info; download attached below.

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The My Arcade 220-in-1 I mentioned here was just dumped, so I ripped a few additional copyright variations from it, including restoring their two-player modes (as the 220-in-1 removed them). I also compared my prior copyright restores with some of the games featured; the majority of them ended up being byte-for-byte identical, with a few oddball exceptions (namely, Contest 2004 had a single different byte that wasn't related to the copyright...) There are lots of other alternate Nice Code revisions on this console, though for now I just ripped the games I had already studied previously.

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Here are copyright restorations for two VT03 Nice Code games: Twin Fish and Speed Man. A few early Nice Code VT03 releases originally had copyright notices, though the majority of them never had copyright notation to begin with. However, finding VT03 ports with their copyrights intact is even less common than the VT02 versions, so only these two are present for now. Note that Speed Man's fine "Ppress Start Button" is SIC, and is currently based on a VT32 conversion, as I don't have the proper VT03 copy on hand.

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Here are restorations of some of the "Qi Sheng Long" variants of Nice Code games. These releases never had copyright notices originally; however, a few games in this library originally had two-player modes, which were removed in the currently dumped revisions. Additionally, two games had extended titles: "Indreak" was originally called "Indreak in the Conduit", and "The Worms" was originally called "The Training Camp of Worms". I'm not sure exactly why the titles were simplified, though data for the original logos still exist in the ROM.

In total, I have restored seven of the Qi Sheng Long games: including the aforementioned Indreak in the Conduit and The Training Camp of Worms, alongside Bear vs. Thief, Cool Baby, Doll, Fairy, and Monster Ball. "Bubbles Puzzle" also has a two player variant, though I was unable to restore that one. I used footage of the Japanese "FC Home 88" console as reference.

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In some Nice Code titles, the copyright byline is specially fit for one string to appear in that area. I found that two games, Bomberman 2002 and Jungly Guy, have their blanked-out areas fit to read "© Dongxin Soft" and "© Power Joy Ltd", respectively; the order the text appears in the CHR data also indicates this. Interestingly, all further variants of Bomberman 2002 have no logical space for a copyright notice whatsoever; as is the case for Tactful, another variant of Jungly Guy. Restorations of both games attached below.

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Here's a random selection of further restoratons (as I've had them sitting around for a while...). Included here are five general copyright restores, and two previously overlooked copyrights seen in the SuperArcade 110; alongside an assortment of fixes to Nice Code's Defender II/Star Gate hacks (e.g. Star and Atomic Blast), which have a myriad of strange issues.

Additionally, the attached directory includes a few unaltered SuperArcade 110 games without copyrights; this was part of a study to conclude that some games flat-out never had legal notation to begin with. These games were later reissued by Waixing with "SRO" copyright numbers attached, though the SuperArcade's revisions are the original releases. Further documentation is featured in the included .txt files.

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Here's a pretty bizarre one. One of the weirder anomalies in Nice Code's common game set surrounds two separate Whac-A-Mole games, "Toad in the Hole" and "Hit-Mouse"; while completely different in programming from each other, they use identical graphics in-game. Toad in the Hole has nine holes and is controlled via the d-pad and buttons; Hit-Mouse features four holes and solely uses the d-pad.

While the four-hole Hit-Mouse features a title screen, Toad in the Hole does not; with the exception of a Qi Sheng Long hack of the game, which confusingly, uses the Hit-Mouse name. However, I noticed that the PRG data between Toad in the Hole and the Qi Sheng Long Hit-Mouse were almost identical, only differing by a few bytes. Sure enough, Toad in the Hole has a zeroed-out title screen reading "Hit-Mousee"; a single byte at address 600A can be altered to re-enable it. The title screen ever-so-slightly differs from all other Hit-Mouse variants (no boulders, cacti, etc).

What I find interesting about this discovery is that it indicates that the nine-hole version came first; then had its title screen stripped after the creation of the four-hole version, presumably to label them as separate "games". Another curiosity is that an early revision of the four-hole version also has the "Hit-Mousee" typo; that copy (AFAIK) was leaked by maxzhou88 in the early 2000s. With all of that said, the one-byte-changed ROM of Toad in the Hole is attached below.

(Edit: as an even further note, the game's music is ripped from Tenchi wo Kurau II: Shokatsu Kōmei Den.)

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There are two Nice Code games - best known by their Power Joy Ltd. titles of "Gallagant" and "Pobble" - that were originally designed to read two gameplay variants off of the same ROM. I presume the games were designed so that a multicart could read both games off of one file; though I've honestly never seen a multicart actually do this, probably because the concept of enabling that code to save some 16k of data isn't that worthwhile.

While I was aware that Gallagant and Pobble variants could do this, I evidently overlooked something rather notable: Gallagant and Pobble are not the original releases of the games. Rather, the original versions are "Space War" and "Fly on Cloud", with their second gameplay variants being "Defensive" and "Hot Speed", respectively. I was able to verify the "second game" on all Fly on Cloud variants via PRG coding, and all Space War variants by their CHR data; and comparing the dozens of versions, it is apparent that they are the originals (as most others will have mismatched or glitchy leftover games).

There are only a few Fly on Cloud and Space War-derived variants that properly recode their second game. These include Garden War, which is attached to Resistant, and Motoboat, which is attached to Awful Rushing. Now here's where things get even stranger: a variant called "Dream Way", which I'm unsure of the origin of, is attached to a game called "Space Rider". As far as I know, Space Rider has never surfaced on any documented plug & plays; so attached is that game decoded from Dream Way's code.

More information on all of the junk mentioned above has been added to the Nice Code article on the wiki (which is currently undergoing a format change).

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So here's...well, everything. In connection with the last few weeks of edits made to the Nice Code Software wiki article, I've compiled every entry on the wiki's index table into matching ROM files. This includes featuring every single original copyright variation, many of which have been newly-restored. Any game that was unobtainable (for various reasons) has a blank "DUMMY" file in its place. There's far too much here to explain everything in-depth, so just ask if there are any questions surrounding specific titles or the ROM set as a whole; though the wiki should have the answers for most of it.