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.
So far it's mostly stuff like "...I think that's SNES?" but we did recently have OUR FIRST SIGN OF LIFE, FOLKS.
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.
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?
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.
It's the Japanese version of Spanky's Quest SNES! It's just the retail game, but with a four-byte watermark.
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.
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 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.
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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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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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