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!
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