GBA Digimon RPG from Vast Fame

[Awesome Panda]

Looking through the hex, I can see that the ROM header is "Digi World" so maybe this is based off another pirate called Digimon World or something? (given that it's an RPG, I very much doubt that it's based off the Playstation game)

I also found some error messages which I guess appear when you crash the game or something. One of them, which is seperated from the rest, says "Unknown Signal." No idea what that one's about. Another one says "This code can only be run on a Thumb compatible processor" which I don't understand either. Some of them also appear at least twice in the ROM.

[codeman38]

Cheetahmen

Oct 31 2010, 01:05:53 PM

I also found some error messages which I guess appear when you crash the game or something. One of them, which is seperated from the rest, says "Unknown Signal." No idea what that one's about. Another one says "This code can only be run on a Thumb compatible processor" which I don't understand either. Some of them also appear at least twice in the ROM.[/quote]Pretty simple, really: The Thumb is the processor architecture that the GBA runs on. It's closely related to the ARM architecture used in the iPhone and iPod, actually (hence the punny name).

There's no actual dialogue text, not even encoded in a non-ASCII character set-- I did a relative search for "igimon" (so that capitalization wouldn't count), and it's nowhere to be found.

Incidentally, this dump has the exact same issue that the attempted dump of Rockman Crystal had: it's the same bank of ROM repeated 4 times. I guess VFame must do some sort of bank-switching trick that throws off copiers or something.

[Awesome Panda]

codeman38

Oct 31 2010, 04:11:58 PM

Cheetahmen

Oct 31 2010, 01:05:53 PM

I also found some error messages which I guess appear when you crash the game or something. One of them, which is seperated from the rest, says "Unknown Signal." No idea what that one's about. Another one says "This code can only be run on a Thumb compatible processor" which I don't understand either. Some of them also appear at least twice in the ROM.[/quote]Pretty simple, really: The Thumb is the processor architecture that the GBA runs on. It's closely related to the ARM architecture used in the iPhone and iPod, actually (hence the punny name).[/quote]Well I'm not exactly the most knowledgable person when it comes to GBA hardware. (or any hardware, myself) I figured it might be like that but I wasn't entirely sure.

Also, I don't know much about dumping either but is the whole game in that ROM or just part of it? If only some of it's there, then the text could be stored in a part of the game that wasn't dumped. Given that's an RPG on the GBA, I'd assume that the game would be larger than 2MB.

[codeman38]

Cheetahmen

Oct 31 2010, 04:39:29 PM

Also, I don't know much about dumping either but is the whole game in that ROM or just part of it? If only some of it's there, then the text could be stored in a part of the game that wasn't dumped. Given that's an RPG on the GBA, I'd assume that the game would be larger than 2MB.[/quote]Yeah-- it's definitely a bad dump. It's the same 512K repeated 4 times, which is clearly not right.

[Awesome Panda]

Mind you, that raises the question: Why do pirates even bother copy protecting their games in the first place? Then again, it's probably because us lot (among others) end up finding hidden stuff they can't be arsed to remove.

[taizou]

Cheetahmen

Oct 31 2010, 05:59:29 PM

Mind you, that raises the question: Why do pirates even bother copy protecting their games in the first place? Then again, it's probably because us lot (among others) end up finding hidden stuff they can't be arsed to remove. [/quote]Well they have more incentive to protect their games than licensed developers. Theyre releasing stuff exclusively into markets where nearly everything is pirated already, and they can't exactly take legal action to stop some other pirates flooding the market with a million copies of their game that they get 0 money from. I think us digging through their roms for leftover crap is pretty low on their list of priorities