The 9-in-1 King001 multicart has the games The Lion King, Earthworm Jim 2, Super Aladdin, Boogerman, Somari, T.M.N.T. Tournament Fighters, Mortal Kombat 3, Captain Tsubasa 2 Arabic (as Boy Soccer Team 2) and Taito Basketball on it. Its menu is depicted in the attached screenshot. If someone has this multicart in its original physical form, could that person please play The Lion King until the first boss is defeated and tell me if the game freezes at that point?
Background: Of the emulators that I have tried, only FCEUX and Nestopia Plus even run this ROM image at all (in .UNF format). FCEUX freezes after the "The Pridelands" screen because it decodes the CPU address too restrictively. Nestopia Plus runs the game until the first boss is defeated, then freezes. I can get as far as Nestopia Plus by implementing the board in Nintendulator
as I described. After the first boss is defeated, the game basically hashes a section of PRG-ROM to check against hackers having modified the game (code executed in RAM at $0682). Since that checksum does not match the expected value in Nestopia Plus' and my emulation, the game freezes on purpose. While I cannot rule out that we both just still get the bankswitching slightly wrong (even though everything else works fine), I have a hunch that the game was modified for multicart inclusion without the expected checksum being adjusted, and the multicart manufacturer did not notice because one has to play the game a bit to notice it.
I have crossposted this topic from
nesdev, as CaH4e3, who originally dumped the cartridge, says that he no longer has it, and this message board is on-topic enough to assume that somebody else here might physically possess this multicart.
Attachments:
