@Ankos: That’s very interesting! I wonder if anything of substance was changed between these revisions.
I’d never seen that art page before, what a delight! I’m a sucker for oldschool animesque, it’s a pity that not all images were archived. The GBA girl looks a lot like a moe gijinka version of the console to my eyes; while I know that this trend already existed in Japan in the early 2000s, I wonder if it had gained enough traction to spill over to other places in East Asia by the time this drawing was made.
@elfor: I’ve just taken a look at both these games, but sadly, I only have a less-than-basic understanding of Assembly, to put it mildly. Without Low End’s notes, there’s no way in hell I’d have been able to figure out School Fighter’s copy protection. That being said, Binary Monster seems to have a similar implementation and I might be able to work it out in a night or two using the other game as a very rough guide – I’ll probably work on it when I have the time if nobody beats me to it. The way Binary Monster 2 works, however, looks completely alien to me and I can’t even figure what the debugger is trying to say.