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.
