Looking at a giant pile of mystery EPROMs tonight that are all cryptically labeled and mismatched, with few clues as to anything, including their platforms. It's a really hard puzzle game basically. Image
So far it's mostly stuff like "...I think that's SNES?" but we did recently have OUR FIRST SIGN OF LIFE, FOLKS. Image
We also have what appears to be tiles for a janky, early version of Ufouria on the NES, one of my favorite games on the system! And it appears we're missing 1/2 of the game's program data, so it will never run. Image
This appears to be SNES data, our only clues are the initials "DK" and the year 1994. No, this isn't Donkey Kong Country. Any ideas? ImageImage
Looking at the data, @PixelatedWah suspects Super Drakkhan, a game I had no idea existed until this moment. They're seeing if we have a full game here or just some random pieces.
Unexpected! It's the final ROM, so nothing interesting here, but still neat to see. Image
It's the Japanese version of Spanky's Quest SNES! It's just the retail game, but with a four-byte watermark. ImageImage
Oh, here's a great find! A localization of Quintent/Ancient's Slap Stick, before it got rebranded here as Robotrek. Also has some debug cheats enabled. ImageImageImageImage
I don't think anyone's gonna be sore if I go ahead and share a file link, right? filebin.net/51uj44pqbotkpr…
lol they already deleted it, where do I throw this?
Okay, I doubt the internet archive is going to delete this, here you go folks archive.org/details/slap-s…
Okay, I did all the "easy" stuff, now I have a big pile of vaguely numbered chips (that I did my best to piece together) that ALL have to have pins rewired to dump. I don't have the parts for that yet, let's reconvene once I do. Image
Final tally:

- NES Tetris (final)
- Super Drakkhen English prototype
- Slap Stick English prototype
- QBillion
- Tarzan (GB, final)
- Half of Batman: Return of the Joker (NES, final)
- Spanky's Quest (JP, final)
- Part of an unknown SNES game

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More from @frankcifaldi

29 Apr
Before I mail out one of @GameHistoryOrg's blind box magazines (gamehistory.org/shop) I make sure it's been scanned online. If not, I put it in a "donate to scanning group" box. I'm finally sorting them today and it's, um, a lot. This is years of labor. Image
We're getting closer to my dream of having every video game magazine OCR searchable every day, I'm so excited that we're able to use this program to get more things online and make video game research easy for everyone!
I'm going to spell this all out in detail soon, but we're taking donations of your old unwanted video game magazines! Every donation either gets directly preserved (physically and/or digitally), or if that's already been done, we sell it and use the money to buy the mags needed!
Read 8 tweets
28 Apr
This is an amazing reminder that what we call "pixel artists" were often painting for messy analogue television canvases. In this case, it's absolutely clear that this game is meant to be played with a composite signal. Look at what it does to the checkerboard dithering!
Poking around on Smart Blur with Photoshop has some pretty compelling results Image
Read 5 tweets
23 Mar
Video game companies would sometimes (not always!) "watermark" copies of games sent out before release, so that if it leaked they knew the culprit. Here's a fun example in a build I just dumped of Boogerman on the SNES. Left is retail game, right is review copy. Image
Update: Motika has been apprehended and is in federal custody
Since y'all are into this, here's my favorite prototype watermark that I've seen, just straight up in your face telling you that they know it's yours so you better not copy it, GAME PLAYERS MAGAZINE. Image
Read 4 tweets
21 Mar
Our old Cuisinart burr coffee grinder has a hilarious design flaw that fills its own insides with super fine grain coffee over time. The switch stopped working so we couldn't turn it off, there was a solid coffee brick stopping it after like 13 years of near-daily use. Image
I should brew this and relive most of my adult life in one cup
It still works but after cleaning it's dumping like 75% of the yield inside of itself, our current theory is that it's been doing this for years now but we didn't know because the fresh coffee was bouncing off the Coffee Wall and into the hopper.
Read 5 tweets
20 Mar
It's time to show everyone that Koala Mario is the king of off-model Marios. Get in here and vote Lou OUT.
You're all voting for the wrong one
There are FOURTEEN MINUTES LEFT and it is REALLY CLOSE. Get in there and give Koala Mario the win he needs. Everyone voting for Lou doesn't know what "off-model" means.
Read 5 tweets
10 Mar
I'm really proud of this episode, because we mostly talked to Howard about his craft and his creative process, not about E.T. and the market crash. In fact, it took about 45 minutes until E.T. even came up!
I think Howard's a really interesting guy, and his output during his time at Atari demonstrates a really unique take on what game machines could be capable of at the time. He's a rebel and a pioneer, not just "the guy who made E.T."
Anyway, go buy his book! There are not nearly enough video game autobiographies out there, let's demonstrate to the publishing world that we want to see more of these! onceuponatari.com
Read 4 tweets

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