It's been a month since the last batch of releases, and I've come back with another little pearl this time - the recent streak of luck following NBA JAM, Street Hero and Korean rarities continues!



I've managed to acquire a prototype cart of Unreleased Game Gear game Crazy Faces. The game has been discussed before but no prototype had surfaced - until now! Crazy Faces was developed by The Kremlin in 1993 (same developers as SMS/GG versions of Desert Strike and Prince of Persia among others). It is an original variation on sliding puzzle games where you have to push around blocks to assemble a picture. The pictures here are based on Domark properties - and Sonic!

The prototype we managed to get hold of doesn't come with music but otherwise looks pretty solid and fun. It is unsure whether the game development ever reached completion or why it was canned.

Enjoy another treasure from SMS Power!

Voting is finished, we have checked for postal ballot fraud, cut off any hanging chads, fired all the corrupt officials we could find, and now we have results!

Coding Competition

We had several very strong entries this year, exciting looks at early versions of big projects, as well as a few entries more in the old-fashioned spirit of our competitions, where releasing anything is a huge achievement. So congratulations to everyone who managed to enter!

Results:

1. DARC by Zipper: 8.29
2. Lost Raider by vingazole and ichigobankai: 7.83
3. Tower of Sokoban by Killer Bean 2 and BG: 6.82
4. DataStorm by haroldoop: 5.15
5. Derpy's Mail by aypok: 4.94
6. Radical Rat SMS by TmEE: 4.90

We're looking forward to seeing the excpected further developments on most of these!

Music competition

This year we got a bunch of great entries, perhaps a little heavy on covers but when the quality is this high, there's nothing to complain about! Here are the results of the vote:

1. Sonic Chaos - FINAL GEAR ZONE by Chris_Kelly: 7.73
2. Little Red Riding Jumpsuit by tibone: 7.42
3. Collision Chaos - Sega CD (JP/EU) (SMS/GG rendition) by Chris_Kelly: 7.38
4. Smash TV - C64 (Insert Disk Theme) by Chris_Kelly: 7.00
5. Green Hills Zone OPLL by ValleyBell: 6.67
6. Final Battle with Endocrine by Chris_Kelly: 6.31
7. My The Last Dungeon by furanku: 6.14
8. Space Harrier: Main Theme by thehendrix: 5.15
9. SMStrk Real Time Demo by TmEE: 3.36

Prizes

We raised an amazing $500 competition fund this year, thanks to many generous contributions from our members. We'll be announcing prizes when we figure out what they will be :) Discussion will accompany this news post.

Bock speaking,

It's been 15 years when 'SMS Camp' was founded for the initial purpose of releasing dumps, and so much has been done since then. Dumps releases are still ongoing and we've pretty much covered 90+% of the worldwide Sega 8-bit library. But above all we've managed to sustain a healthy and knowledgeable community of hobbyists. We are small but as we mature our collective output is only getting better. The forums are full of creative ideas and discussions and the contents of our Wiki infrastructure is maturing at steady pace. I'm very proud to see this community and its projects evolve way beyond what I could have ever imagined. Thank you all.

And as ever a very special personal thanks goes to Maxim who is giving quantity of energy and talent into nurturing the site, its content and community on a daily basis. Working on SMS Power! and various Sega 8-bit related projects along the years required a lots of love and sacrifice from myself and I can only guess it did as well for Maxim. Thanks for being part of this journey :)

Now on the entries that were submitted to this year competitions.!!
Please visit our dedicated Coding & Music Competition 2012 forum to get access to entries and vote for them on the forums (after you've made sure to check all entries for a given category!).

We've got some fabulous fabulous things this year, huge thanks to everybody who put in the effort to work on your game and music tracks.

Coding Competition 2012 - Entries

DARC by Zipper
DataStorm by haroldoop
Derpy's Mail by aypok
Lost Raider by vingazole and ichigobankai
Radical Rat SMS by TmEE
Tower of Sokoban by Killer Bean 2 and BG

Music Competition 2012 - Entries

Collision Chaos - Sega CD (JP/EU) (SMS/GG rendition) by Chris_Kelly
Final Battle with Endocrine by Chris_Kelly
Green Hills Zone OPLL by ValleyBell
Little Red Riding Jumpsuit by tibone
Smash TV - C64 (Insert Disk Theme) by Chris_Kelly
SMStrk Real Time Demo by TmEE
Sonic Chaos - FINAL GEAR ZONE by Chris_Kelly
Space Harrier - Main Theme by thehendrix
My The Last Dungeon by furanku

Heading myself into checking all the entries now, I'm very excited :)

Anniversary tomorrow! Keep submitting your last minute competition entries :)

Seven new dumps today!





King's Valley / Jīnzìtǎ (金字塔) for the SG-1000 released in Taiwan by Aaronix. This game requires a special adapter released by DahJee that extend the SG-1000 memory to 8 KB (read more about the DahJee adapter for SG-1000). Else it would work on a normal Asian Master System. King's Valley is pretty much in the vein of pre-scrolling item collecting arcade game, Think Lode Runner meet Pac-Man in Egyptian tomb adventure theme. A very game by Konami.






More Konami, extremely rare and sought after Nemesis / Gradius (그라디우스) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System. Did you even know it existed? Port of the Konami's revolutionary scrolling shooting game, based on the great MSX1 port. This is a good testament as to what SG-1000 type hardware could have achieved at the time if it had more dedicated developers. Note how the game title screen shows international title "Nemesis" but the box and Korean transcription use the "Gradius" name. And guess what we've got in reserve for tomo..*cough* later on.



The Cyber Shinobi [Proto] for Master System. This is an early build of the infamous Shinobi milking sequel. This version has different interface, no audio and supposedly less level.



Sky Jaguar (스카이쟈가) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System, Korean released port of the Konami shooting game.



Poker Face Paul's Poker for Game Gear. This is the correctly sized US dump (previously available dump was overdumped with AFAIK unrelated garbage in the second half).



Pacar (パッカー) [40k map] for the SG-1000, mapper variant of the odd Pacar.



And finally we've got a short Strider rolling Demo for the Master System, taken from a newly found prototype cartridge.

Competition and anniversary time approaching!

Been busy here sorting dumps and we've got no less than 7 today including a handful of rarities. Short descriptions today, here's the list of what we have!






Magical Kid Wiz / Mófǎ shī (魔法師) for the SG-1000 released in Taiwan on a beautiful green cartridge. Developed in 1986 by Sony for the MSX, this is among the MSX games that Aaronix ported to the SG-1000 for the Taiwanese market.



Gun.Smoke (건스모크) for the Master System, released in Korea by Prosoft. This is a conversion of the MSX original by Capcom. Find the secret Wanted posters to make the boss appear and progress in the game!



Ys non-interactive rolling Demo for the Master System. This is coming from a US type cartridge yet the text is in Japanese. It was likely created to promote the game at shows events.



C_So! (시소) ported from MSX for the Master System and released in Korea. Not to be mistaken with the legit SG-1000 version of the same game.



Safari Race (サファリレース) for the SG-1000. This is the proper genuine, yet unreleased dump of Safari Race. Previously available dump is a hack (supposedly from Finland) labelled 1988 similarly to the N-Sub 1988 dump.



Super Monaco GP [Proto 1] for the Master System, a new prototype of Super Monaco GP. This is a later build than the previously released prototype which shall now be referred to as [Proto 0] :)



Columns [v1] (JP) for Game Gear, alternate later build of Columns in Japan. If you're curious, some of the jewels shapes and flash block shapes have been changed between all three versions of the games. You can see it on the screenshots.

Charming little rarity ahead.






Janggun-ui Adeul (장군의 아들) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System !

Based on 1990' Korean gangster action movie Janggun-ui Adeul (translate as: General's Son), Daou Infosys created this ambitious production around 1992. The game is a side scrolling beat-em-up with relatively elaborate production value for Korean releases of the time. Much like other games from Daou the actual controls sometimes left to be desired, but it is otherwise a rather competent release! It also happens to be among the rare and prized Korean releases (the game set me back a small to acquire :).






Street Hero for the Game Gear !

Daou Infosys then was working out the possibility of releasing Janggun-ui Adeul in Western countries. The game got localized and was slatted for a in the US under the name Street Hero, to be published by Innovation Tech. The game got as far as being reviewed by some magazines at the time but then never released. Well guess what, not only we've got a prototype for it, we've actually got two prototypes!



Following on we've got Korean Comic Bakery / Ppang Gongjang (빵공장) for the Master System, unlicensed MSX1 adaptation of the Konami classic involving croissants and raccoon. Note of some bits were translated to Korean (screenshot on the right).



Last and least, Zoop for the Game Gear in its proper retail version. As it happened, the dump we released back six millions years ago was a prototype provided to us by one of the developer. The actual differences are extremely minor and only affect the ROM header, but here's the correct retail version for completeness.



Laster and leaster, a Korean dump of Choplifter for the SG-1000.

Enjoy!
As a reminder and if there's any confusion to clear up with our releases, we have a dumps release listing at http://www.smspower.org/Dumps/Releases.

It started snowing here!

As promised I am on fire with new releases, we've got eight Korean dumps today, seven of them being totally new games on the Master System. This is Christmas all over again. Many are conversions from rare MSX1 games, sometimes original developed in Korea.

Please also note again that many of those games may not work in some emulators. Latest MEKA wip builds (from here or MESS should run them, else please bug your favourite emulator authors for better compatibility with odd Korean releases.



Alibaba and 40 Thieves / Ali Baba (아리바바) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System, an odd variation on Pac-Man where you have to catch thieves and money back, avoiding the more armed thieves.



Block Hole / Sagak-ui Bimil (사각의 비밀) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System, unlicensed adaptation by Zemina of Konami's Quarth / Block Hole. An original puzzle game masquerading as a shooting game. Manoeuvring a ship able to shoot small blocks you able to complete the shape of blocks coming toward you. The game also supports two players.



E.I. - Exa Innova for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System, one of the early obscure shooter by none other but Compile, creators of the Aleste / Power Strike series. Lots of enemies, nice background and moving patterns with the Compile flavour, the game is simple but very playable.



King & Balloon / Wang-gwa Pungseon (왕과풍선) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System. My odd favourite of today. Early Namco MSX1 game, King & Balloon is an evolution of the Space Invaders and Galaga recipes in which you control knights protecting your king from being kidnapped by evil.. coloured balloons. The game is technically very low specced but it plays like a charm!



Pooyan (퓨얀) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System, Konami's classic adaptation of a pig and wolves story with a cute setting reminiscent of earlier Game & Watch (so much that a LCD game has been made out of it). The game is rather difficult and unforgiving and build up on our newly cherished "balloon=evil" thematic.



Puznic / Puzzle Game (퍼즐게임) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System, an unlicensed adaptation of Taito's arcade puzzle by the prolific programmers at Zemina. Actually a very good puzzle game relying on the mechanic of assembling blocks of the same shape accounting for gravity and blocks holding each other so success depends on the order of each of our move.



Xyzolog / XY Rogo (XY로고) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System. Taito again! A charming looking dodging game in the vein of Marble Madness, sharp visuals and an uncommon last-resort suicide mechanic.
*EDIT* In our initial update we called this game "Xyxolog" which was a mistake. Thanks to cactushead for pointing this out.



Finally we've got Great Golf [Japan] for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System in its Korean version. The naming confusion here is that there's two different games bearing the name Great Golf, one being only released in Japan. This specific Korean cartridge is based on the Japanese version of Great Golf, hence the odd naming.