Got another new GBA dump today (thanks Azathoth for the cart!) but don't get too excited, it's no Digimon Sapphire. It's something I saw in Turkey many, many years ago, read somewhere that it's "like a weird Space Invaders clone" and never found again. Until now! presenting:
Star Wars 3
A very simple GBA game. With nothing to do with Star Wars. It may well be a homebrew game that some pirates released on cart, but I don't recognise it - anyone? The ROM dumped as 32mb but I got it down to a gigantic 8kb - anyway give it a try:
download! Star Wars 3 (Unl).zip (4.13kb)
could it be? another new dump? :O yes! and, I believe, the first playable dumped GBA pirate original ever ever. so take that, internet!
it's a platformer, it's by Vast Fame, it's based on Digimon and it's awesome. it is of course:
Digimon Sapphire!
those of you who have seen my youtube channel may well be aware that I've had its counterpart (well I say "counterpart", it's not even the same genre) Digimon Rury/Ruby for a while and I've never been able to dump it, but I bought this one recently from Volumerates and amazingly it dumped and was playable the first damn time! So I'm guessing either this was a reprint without protection or Sapphire just isn't as well protected as Ruby was.
Anyway I like this game a lot. Like, I think it's genuinely good, not just "good for a pirate" or what have you. It's a Digimon based platformer with three selectable characters, all of which can turn into some big dude if you press the R button (can you tell I don't know Digimon) and there are bosses with engrish dialogue and all sorts. The sprites apparently are ripped from Digimon Battle Spirits but hey. And Vast Fame's music is awesome as usual, even if they are only using the GBC sound hardware for this one.
Now this rom does have certain ... issues, mainly that while the actual game data is only 4mb big, the ROM itself is 32mb. The rest of the ROM is filled with 4mb blocks of either the game repeated, all 00s or a pattern of bytes, I've been tinkering with it for a while and it seems to be laid out like this:
1. Game
2. some repeating pattern of bytes
3. Game (duplicate of 1)
4. Pattern again
5. Pattern
6. 00's
7. Pattern
8. 00's
blocks 2-4 and 6-8 don't matter but the pattern at 5 has to be present, I'm assuming for some failed copy protection routine, and it has to be in the right place (1000000h), so all you can do is trim off blocks 6-8 - the last 12mb - leaving it at 20mb which is kinda an odd size for a GBA game. So, fuck it, I'll just release the whole 32mb dump as is, at least it's playable. It compresses down to under 2mb anyway so size is only really a problem if you're playing it on a flashcart. And hey, maybe someone out there can figure out a solution to get it running in its correct size.
download! Digimon Sapphire (Unl) [p1].rar (1.93mb)
Update 7 Aug 2011 - This version of the game seems to be a bit different to the original, the credits are missing and on the real cart it crashes after every level (though not in emulators) so i'm going to label it as a [p1] (ie a modified pirate copy, since that apparently is what it is)
In other dumping related news cah4e3 has dumped a couple more of my Famicom carts namely Waixing's port of Zelda: Link to the Past and this 12 in 1. You might also want to check out the PGC Forums if you aren't already a member there, a whole bunch of new MD and SNES games have been posted recently. or if you aren't interested in that you should check it out anyway!
i own, like, loads of plug & play consoles, but not many of them are as interesting as the Samuri. why? because it's a damn Hummer Team plug & play console, that's why! So maybe you should check that out, if you're interested in either obscure plug & play consoles or Hummer Team.
and if you are interested in obscure plug & play consoles you might also want to check out my secondary youtube account where i've uploaded a few videos of games off them. I'll also probably upload a video of the games on the Samuri to either that or my main youtube account at some point.
I've just released a translation patch for the Game Boy Color game Harry Potter 3. so, if for some reason you ever wanted to play this thing with its small amount of text translated into English.. enjoy! if you notice any bugs or anything (except the palette issues mentioned in the readme, which were in the original) let me know.
i'm actually going to start using the official neofuji twitter account that i registered back in april or something. because i'm always totally on the cutting edge of a few years ago. yay! maybe in 2015 i'll actually display the twitter feed on the site somewhere too.
well in the last minute of the first day of 2011, i just remembered to post this. so yay happy new year etc etc. im sure at least *some* of the shit i've got planned will make its way out this year. woo!
from crazy santa
[INSERT VAGUE PROMISE OF FUTURE UPDATES TO COME]
just moved hosts, everything should be the same as before (hopefully a bit faster) but if anything's broken let me know.
i definitely still have some updates in the pipeline (honestly) but in the meantime i've also been uploading a bunch of shit to youtube of late, mostly undumped unlicensed gameboy games, so you should totally check that out. also if you're at all interested in pirate/unlicensed/taiwanese/chinese console games of any variety the Pirated Games Central Forums (which i designed the theme for, yay) and Bootleg Games Wiki are definitely worth a visit.
just a quick sort of survey... esque thing - if you're using IE6 to view this site, could you leave a comment on this post? looking at my stats it seems to be the most popular individual browser version used here, but I know this site is visited by a lot of spambots - the no. 1 referrer at the moment is a porn site, i guess either thats spam related or they mistakenly linked here and i'm getting a lot of disappointed visitors at the moment :D
so i'm just curious to know whether lots of my human visitors are genuinely still using IE6, or if its proliferation is just down to spambots faking their user agent. thanks!
btw genuine updates are most definitely nearly here this time. Probably.
you should totally all go out right now and buy the latest issue of Retro Gamer (the one with Rainbow Islands on the cover, which surely makes it worth buying anyway). theres this whole article about the Gamate by Damien McFerran, with assistance from yours truly :D
in related news I am definitely going to update the whole Gamate section soon. i swear!