Story time: some years ago, I downloaded a Mayhem in Monsterland dump.
Whoever uploaded it clearly had just done LOAD
"*",8,1 and called it a day because it wasn't even
remotely a good dump (nor even just a crack dump): a quick look at the
directory showed there was another game inside as well as a letter. The
letter is what I want to talk about.
Here are the relevant parts of it (to screen readers users: I've
transcribed the relevant part below)
Transcribing the part I want to talk about because the font is
awful:
deadbone/breeze design: Yo bevan! I hope that you've still got your
64 left so that you can read this! hehe… OK, many thank for your send…
Yes, you read right on the boot-text but I don't have a SNES, at least not
yet… I wrote it there because that I've got some friends that have got
wildcards and also because that Trasher will buy one soon. We're also
able to get the latest SNES games as Surfer (the leader of Active)
works as a game-reviewer for one of the absolute biggest newspapers in
Sweden.
Therefore he gets all the new games for SNES/Sega (and more systems)
directly from the importer to review them, and I don't think you have to
guess long to understand that he of course makes backup copies of it all
to himself!! He already supplied some Sega first-releases to Censor and
Auartex! I'm thinking of buying a 24M wildcard & SNES myself as you see
that I can get all the new games for it, but we'll see… I'm not such a big
arcade freak, and most console games are in that range, so… But it would
be cool anyway! I've heard rumors that backup systems for consoles will
get illegal here in Sweden in the beginning of 94 so I have to think fast
if I want one while it's legal to buy…
I saw some demo names on the list of your SNES stuff. I've never seen any
console demos so could you please send some over, but wait until I've
spent some HD disks over to you of course! I'll copy some SNES stuff for
you as fast I can… but as I've got quite limited spare time it could take
a while.
As you can see, Censor and Auartex (is that meant to be Avartex? going by
the letter's spelling…) would get dumps of Mega Drive and SNES games
directly from a game reviewer. Seeing as some Censor releases have been
found to be prototypes, I thought I may as well bring this up.
A bunch of the Mega Modem stuff is designed around some on-line service
that of course is long gone by now. But some of them actually feature some
form of off-line mode as unlikely as it sounds.
1200bps modem noises
Mega Anser
Mega Anser was a piece of home banking software. Of course, the service is
not available anymore, but what many people don't know is that it
still works without the modem (in part because it's one of the
few things that doesn't work without a standard controller, it needs
the Ten Key Pad).
If you try to use Mega Anser without a modem connected, it'll go into
"practice mode" (練習用). In practice mode, Mega Anser will
give you a few bank accounts with 1,000,000 yen each and you can do
everything you would normally do with a real bank. You can also set up the
password, change the modem settings, etc. Occasionally it'll even
pretend that there was a connection error.
Sansan
Sansan, SanSan, San San, whatever. サンサン
This game was used to connect to the Sansan service to let you play Go with
other people on-line. Of course, the service is gone now, so people assume
that it's unplayable anymore. What most people don't know is that
it has a local multiplayer mode! (or something that can be used
like one — no AI players, sorry).
Sansan will refuse to go anywhere without having initialized memory, so if
this is the first time you're playing it you need to do this:
Select the 4th option (メンテナンス — "maintenance")
Select the 2nd option (メモリークリア — "memory clear")
Select the 1st option (はい — "yes")
Once memory is working you can access local multiplayer as follows:
Select the 2nd option (棋譜の研究 — "practice matches")
Select the 4th option (電子碁盤 — "electronic Go")
Note that both players share the same controller (taking turns, of course).
I was reading a thread
about SNES gurus on the NesDev forum and seeing people discuss about
old timers got me thinking about how I've been around for much longer
than it seems and how I seem to remember some stuff a lot of people have
forgotten (granted, my memory is flaky so I also tend to screw up a lot).
Tripping into legacy cruft
You may be aware of the ROM padding article in
this site, there's a reason behind it.
Some time ago last year I was talking to Drag00n (the Second Dimension guy)
and he casually mentions that somebody reported some edge case bug with the
SWITCH instruction that seemed to show up or go away depending
on the surrounding code. Being the distraction machine I am, I end up
interrupting whatever he was doing in order to figure out what was going
on. Whatever.
Anyway, I convince him to load the ROM (expecting this to be a pain to
figure out), and he says that Fusion just showed a blank screen and that
the titlebar was garbled… and wait a minute, but the ROM header is right?
And it was ASCII, so not an encoding issue. The game can't set the
titlebar (Fusion takes it directly from the ROM header), so garbled text
means that Fusion for some reason didn't load the ROM properly.
And then it hit me: Fusion ignores the file extension and tries to
autodetect instead. If the ROM is not padded and the stars align just
right, Fusion will misdetect it for being in SMD format (Super Magic Drive
dump), which is split into blocks and interleaved and of course will result
in a completely wrong ROM. This isn't unique to Fusion, I recall some
flashcart loader having the same issue long ago. The easiest way to work
around this is, of course, padding the ROM to a reasonable size.
I bet some of you are confused now: new people to the scene probably
don't even know what SMD is, and older people will wonder why the heck
would anybody use SMD these days. Thing is, Fusion had been around for long
enough that SMD dumps were still relevant when it first came out, hence why
those files are supported. Newer emulators indeed don't bother with it
usually, but many people still use Fusion, so this issue still pops up
every so often.
I only spotted this quickly because I had met this issue many years ago,
otherwise it'd have been probably dismissed as something impossible to
debug and just give up because any change would make it go away.
6MB ROM limit in Fusion
A much less known thing is that Fusion supports ROMs up to 6MB in size…
from what I recall when talking with Steve Snake at least. He mentioned
that for some reason emulators were supporting 6MB, but he had forgotten
why. This was in the context of me using the Sega
mapper to make a Sonic 3D hack larger than 4MB (since the ROM barely
had any space left).
The only released game using the mapper was Super Street Fighter II, and
that one is 5MB (and indeed, that's the maximum Regen supports).
What's going on?
I'm going to take a wild guess here, but I think the issue may have
been Sonic & Knuckles. See, the lock-on
mechanism wasn't properly documented until recently, and while
it's emulated nowadays, back then the common way to do lock-on was to
literally append the locked-on ROM to Sonic & Knuckles. If you tried to
do this with the largest games, the resulting file would be 6MB. Some
emulators statically allocate the memory upfront and may blindly load the
entire file as-is, so by making the limit 6MB they could ensure the merged
ROMs worked (even if 2MB went ignored).
Other stuff
Part of the reason why I made this site is because there's some
obscure stuff I know (like how the Mega Anser accessories work) that I
don't want to get lost. Which is probably also why so far articles
have been leaning towards the obscure stuff instead of the more basic
things like sprites or scrolling (I really need to get more serious about
that…).
Another example of stuff mostly forgotten is a few test ROMs from
SOA's hardware R&D department (in large part because they
aren't in no-intro…). A couple of them are for testing the Activator
(and turns out there
was an Activator command that had gone undocumented until not long
ago), there's also a ROM for testing a "head mounted
display" which presumably is the only trace left of the Sega VR (I can
confirm there's something there, I need to finish looking
into it), eventually I'll try to document both of those in this site.
Game Toshokan has support for yet another peripheral in the modem port,
albeit it's dummied out in the released version (as Game Toshokan
shows an error message if there isn't a modem there, otherwise the
code seems intact). Also buried in the Sega documentation is a mention of a
"RAM disk", although sadly the only thing we have left from it is
its peripheral ID (14 aka %1110).
There's probably more stuff to talk about, I'll try to get around
it when I get time. A lot of stuff only comes back again after something
unrelated happens to bring back the topic. You never know what may show up
next!
It's the 30th anniversary of the Mega Drive! Hurray! Sadly, I
didn't really make anything interesting for this occasion (sorry), so
instead have a dancing iwis (click/tap/whatever for an animated version):
Then we know how it goes. It's released in North America in 1989 and
Europe and Brazil in 1990, and Sonic comes out in 1991 and proves that
it's possible to dethrone Nintendo from it's practical monopoly
in the US (leading to such a rivalry that even today is remembered as
the console war). Eventually support for the console faded out by
the end of the decade.
The present
Fast forward to 2018, homebrew is having a momentum never seen before,
almost as if a revival was imminent. Baby steps, everybody is making
mistakes e.g. getting things done in time and not screwing up with
manufacturing cartridges, but hopefully we're gonna get there. And now
the Mega Sg has been announced (a FPGA-based clone that aims to be as
accurate a possible), and Sega themselves are planning to release the Mega
Drive Mini (a small console that play a bunch of the most popular games).
As for Plutiedev? Well, the idea is for this site both to help with
homebrew and preserve information on Mega Drive development. Here's a
list of ideas I have (albeit doing all this will take time!):
More pages explaining the basics, like drawing sprites on screen or the like. Seriously, this site is still pretty lacking on that.
Also more advanced stuff, like saving games using EEPROM.
More pages on peripherals. There's a lot to do yet: the multitap, the mouse, also uncommon stuff like the keyboards, printer (adapter?) and Miracle Piano.
More hardware references, the kind that goes into heavy detail.
More pages documenting file formats used in homebrew.
Make a page gathering info on manufacturing cartridges: things to do and to avoid, maybe pointers to places that we have learned provide good materials.
Make circuit schematics, both for cartridges and peripherals.
Resources for use in homebrew like FM instruments or maybe fonts.
…oof, that's a lot.
Message from Iwis
pwease make wots of homebwew, i want to pway aww the games >w<
>w<
(translation: "Please make lots of homebrew, I want to play all
the games!")
Published on 2018-aug-19, last updated 2018-aug-24
Decided to open this in order to keep track of homebrew news. Don't
expect there to be a new blog entry whenever some new article goes up or
the like. In particular, what prompted me to start this is that this month
turned out to be packed and I didn't want this to get lost to
time.
In the span of about a week we had three releases:
Two of those (Little Medusa and Tanglewood) are commercial cartridge
releases. Tanglewood is probably the most well known one (thanks to its
Kickstarter back then), and it also launched on the 29th anniversary of the
US launch of the console (which for the record, was actually a coincidence,
I'm not making this up).
Also this week came in the news of the release of Hardcore, a game from
back in the day by DICE to be published by Psygnosis that was cancelled at
last minute. The announced release is for PS4 and Vita, but hopefully
somebody can manage to get it released on a Mega Drive cartridge?
Xeno Crisis should be coming in a few months, so 2018 is shaping nicely.
More long term, Tänzer and Kung Fu UFO are on the way too. There's
also Crypt of Dracula, probably a bunch more that I forgot. And I have the
scoop that a brand new platformer may be coming too. Nice to see how the
console is getting attention again about three decades after its launch.
*iwis boops you*
2018-08-23 edit: Ahaha, I had completely forgotten that
Star J came out on August 1st (going by Star
J's sale announcement tweet, anyway — note: tweet in Spanish).
What's going on with this month.
