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.

We're back with a long, long awaited dump.



4 PAK All Action for the Master System, published in small quantities in Australia by HES in 1995. This 8 megabit multi-game cartridges contains 4 original Korean games developed for the Master System by Open. Some of them were previously known, but the versions in 4 PAK All Action were localized for an English-speaking audience and bear different names.

Let's have a look at our four games..



Adventure Kid ! A clear unlicensed clone of later Adventure Island games (iterations of Wonder Boy) using a legacy SG-1000 video mode (not smooth scrolling alas, but the game plays relatively well).



Power Block ! Previously known as Suho Jeonsa (수호전사), this is its English localisation.



Twin Mouse ! An original platformer.



Cave Dude ! Previously known as Toto World 3 (토토 월드３), also an English localization of the game.

We hope you'll be having fun trying those odd Korean-developed games released in Australia. Please note that the 4 PAK All Action cartridge relies on unusual mapper hardware and is only supported by a few emulators so far (MEKA and MESS). Go on and talk to your favorite emulator author to get it supported in other emulators!

We will be holding our annual coding and music competitions again this year, in time for our upcoming 15th anniversary on 27th March. Every year people complain that they ran out of time or didn't realise it was happening, so maybe you should start working on your entry now?

2012 is shaping well in term of upcoming awesomeness:
For the past year homebrew hacker Nick / Honestbob has been working on a custom design for a SC-3000 Survivors Multicart Project. It is shaping extraordinarily and is in particular a lots of efforts are put into creating high-quality software to manage the multicart.

Using custom hacked BASIC software the multicart is able to load tape software directly into memory and Nick has come up with a selection of games that he converted into this system. The whole thing is versatile, comes up with a bunch of homebrew and tapes games, and of course you can upgrade it to add your own SG-1000 ROM images.





Have a look at work in progress videos and Nick's descriptive website and blog about the making of this cartridge.
Moreover Nick is looking for pre-orders to commit into manufacturing a limited amount of those cartridges. It may not last and may not be manufactured again, so if you are any interesting in SG-1000/SC-3000 gaming this is a unique opportunity.

http://sc3000-multicart.com

http://sc3000-multicart.com/buy.htm (pre-order now before it is too late!)

Also check out the SMS Power! thread about it:

http://www.smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13351

Thanks for Nick for his work :)

Happy new year all !
Heading into 2012 already - can you believe this website will be 15 years old in March? Did the internet even exist 15 years ago? I was like seventy centimeters tall and drinking milk from small plastic bottles, trying to stick screwdrivers into cartridges. Not that anything has changed really...

I've set myself with the target of releasing as many remaining dumps as possible by our anniversary date in March so please do keep on harassing me on a regular basis.

Today we've got a delicately confusing set of releases, with four different same games! Taito's Bubble Bobble as it seems was very popular in Korea (so popular even some deluxe food product adverts are referring to it) and along with the rising trend of local game developments a bunch of clones appeared in this era. So what we have here are 4 clones of Bubble Bobble made in Korea. The naming is rather inconsistent (title screens do not often match cartridge labels, etc.) but here is what our experts came up with:



New Boggle Boggle 2 (뉴 보글 보글 2) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System
Developed by MBiTM (ROM data mentions 88-01-14) and published by Zemina in 1989, this seems to be the first game in our chronology of Master System clones. It happens to be also the roughest implementation of the game.



Super Bubble Bobble (슈퍼 바블 바블) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System
Also developed by MBiTM (ROM data mentions 89-01-14, making it a suspicious pattern) this version looks like a better iteration of the previous game.



Power Boggle Boggle (파워 보글 보글) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System
Presumably developed by Screen Software and published by YM Soft / Hana Engineering (which might be the same company), released in 1990.

And finally



Bobble Bobble for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System developed by Clover.
Developed by Clover and released in 1990. Note the name is "Bobble Bobble" unlike the original game.

How far can your curiosity push you to dig into all those clones of the same game? Their quality is rather uneven and of course do not match the official version developed by Taito for the Master System.

As I heard recently the official 'Final Bubble Bobble' / 'Bubble Bobble' for Master System was developed by the arcade teams at Taito as a semi-sequel to the original game, hence the subtitle "Final Bubble Bobble". Most other home console titles at the times were developed by dedicated porting teams.

We've got another rather obscure release here, in the form of Korean Zemina's attempt to convert cult early arcade game Xevious to SG-1000/MSX1 type hardware. Humbly titled, Xevious / The Micro Xevious (마이크로 제비우스) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System is indeed a rather feeble port considering the gap of the years between the 1982 original running on then cutting edge arcade board, and this late 1990 conversion. An original background music has been added in addition to the arcade version theme renditon.

Next we've got a lot of alternates..



Desert Strike for the Game Gear, European dump (existing dump was US version),
Hook for the Game Gear, European dump (existing dump was US version),
Junction for the Game Gear, US version (existing dump was Japanese version),
Riddick Bowe Boxing for the Game Gear, US dump (existing dump was Japanese version).



Challenge Derby for the Othello Multivision / SG-1000, alternate 40k mapped ROM of the [A] version (ordering between [A] and [B] is yet unknown).



Soukoban / Changgo Jigi (창고지기) / I.Q. (아이-큐) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System, two alternate dumps of the classic puzzle game of which we've released the Taiwanese dump recently.

Those are among the very last alternate releases I have in stock so it is good to have them out of the way so we can unroll a red carpet of new releases leading to our March anniversary.

We've got 6 very rare prototypes today!





First we've got here a lovely early Master System prototype and its associated Prototype v1.0 Sega Master System BIOS. The final retail version bear a v1.3 version number and include an instruction screen and the secret snail maze game, which this prototype version haven't. A few more information about this unit on the dedicated forum thread.

A few games came with this console and as it happens all of them were prototype builds. Here's four new dumps.






Choplifter [Proto] for the Master System.
Hang On / Safari Hunt [Proto] for the Master System.
TransBot [Proto] for the Master System.
World Grand Prix [Proto] for the Master System.
(NB- The Ghost House card pictured is also a prototype build but we've already released this dump a few years back.)

*EDIT* Paul has done an analysis and writeup about the TransBot prototype.

Last but not least,





A unique test cartridge from 1984. SG1000 M2 Check Program / Test Cartridge (テスト カートリッジ) for the SG-1000. The story behind this is totally unknown. Huge thanks to Masato for providing us with this little rarity :)

Have a great month of December leading to Christmas!