(Reminder: we are holding the yearly coding, music, hacking competition to celebrate SMS Power! 24th Anniversary on March 27!)

About ten years ago we released an odd Alex Kidd in Miracle World dump extracted from a Game Gear Taiwanese cartridge. After more years of research and collecting of bootleg titles I was able to uncover a lots more.

A company called "Hung Tao Hsin", also referred to as "HTH", released a quantity of Master System games in Taiwan in the form of Game Gear cartridges. For those not acquainted with the hardware, the Game Gear is hardware compatible with the Master System and therefore those games are "regular" Master System roms.



Plenty of bootlegs were released in Asia in the nineties, often in the form of compilation X-in-1 cartridges. The Hung Tao Hsin releases from Taiwan are notable as they were single title, with box and manual, frequently borrowing quality art from Japanese releases.

Unlike some other boxes series (such as the "nameless" ones with GGxxxx product numbers), the HTH releases (with HG xxx-xx product numbers) were generally scrubbed of references to Sega, sometimes replacing them with their own name:







As with Taiwanese Aaronix release, I'm not 100% ruling out the possibility that those games were actually legit licensed from Japan, but in tradition with Asian releases they sometimes use dubious naming and the name inside the program do not always match the one on the box. The worst offender in term of inconsistency is "Action Boy" which uses artwork from "Maze Hunter", has a manual mixing up info for "Maze Hunter" and "Bubble Bobble" and the game is actually "Seishun Scandal (My Hero)".
Below we will be listing games by including the english name on the box, the chinese or japanese name on the box, and the name of the actual title contained within.

Another thing HTH did with their release is that they commonly made the games easier by patching the number of lives initially available. The following games (may not be an exhaustive list) have been patched in this way: Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Aerial Assault, Black Belt, Doki Doki Penguin Land, Double Dragon, Final Bubble Bobble, Hokuto No Ken, Paperboy, Quartet, R-Type, Scramble Spirits, Shadow Dancer, Strider, Submarine Attack. See:



So those dumps are essentially Taiwanese hacks from the nineties.

So far we've gathered 25 dumps and releasing 24 new ones today:

HG 201-11: Aerial Assault / Kōng zhòng chūjí (空中出擊) = Aerial Assault
HG 101-10: Alex Kido / Tiānkōng mó chéng (天空魔城) = Alex Kidd in Miracle World (already released)
HG 101-02: Alocos / Shízì jiàn (十字剣) = Argos no Juujiken ("Rygar" in the west)
HG 101-07: Shàngwèi mìnglìng (上尉命令) = Secret Command (English name yet unconfirmed)
HG 101-19: Black Belt / Sa! Rèxuè gāoshǒu (サ！熱血高手) = Black Belt
HG 201-01: Bubble Dragon / Chāojí pào pào lóng (超級泡泡龍) = Final Bubble Bobble (Bubble Bobble)
HG 201-33: The Cyber Shinobi / Space no Ninja (スーペースの忍者) = The Cyber Shinobi
HG 201-02: Double Dragon / ???? = Double Dragon (missing chinese reading)
HG 201-46: Forgotten Worlds / Shìjièno mòrì (世界の末日) = Forgotten Worlds
HG 101-17: Great Basketball / 94-Nen Super Basketball (’９４年スパーバスケットボール) = Great Basketball
HG 201-04: Northen Ken / Běidǒuno quán (北斗の拳) = Hokuto No Ken
HG 401-21: Kung Fu Kid / Mójiè lièzhuàn (魔界列傳) = Makai Retsuden (Kung Fu Kid)
HG 201-05: Lord of Sword / Yuè fēngmó chuán (月風魔傳) = Lord of Sword (Lord of The Sword)
HG 256-06: Action Boy / Jué dǎ xiǎozin (㭈打小子) = Seishun Scandal (My Hero)
HG 101-23: Paper Boy / Yínsè xiānfēng (銀色先鋒) = Paperboy
HG 101-03: Astro Adventure / Yǔzhòu dà màoxiǎn (宇宙大冒險) = Doki Doki Penguin Land
HG 201-15: Prince of Persia / Alipapa Densetsu (アリパパ伝説) = Prince of Persia
HG 101-28: Quartet / Cí xióng shuāng xiá (䧳雄雙侠) = Quartet
HG 401-01: R-Type / Yìxíng (異形) = R-Type
HG 201-09: Scramble Spirits / Hǔ dǎn miào suàn (虎胆妙算) = Scramble Spirits
HG 401-06: Shadow Dancer / Yǐng wǔ zhě (影舞者) = Shadow Dancer - The Secret of Shinobi
HG 201-47: Shadow of the Beast / Guǐ yǐng shòuno wáng (鬼影獸の王) = Shadow of the Beast
HG 401-02: The Strider / Tūjī fēilóng (突撃飛龍) = Strider
HG 201-31: Submarine Attack / Hóngsè shí yuè dà fǎnjí (紅色十月大反擊) = Submarine Attack
HG 201-03: Thunder Blade / ???? = Thunder Blade (missing Chinese reading)

If you have access to more Taiwanese bootlegs please get in touch!

(PS: I typed the Chinese and Japanese titles myself and might have made mistake, we will have reviewed them soon)

As with every year, we are running a fun Sega 8-bit Coding, Music and Hacking competition. Deadline is March 27th, 2021.

Please read details:
https://www.smspower.org/forums/18310

Homebrew has been striving recently:

1997

First recorded homebrew SMS software of the emulation era.

2021

Bara Burū - winning SMS Power 2016 competition entry, designed and programmed by Kagesan, turned into a physical product by Ichigobankai (2minds), photo courtesy of @segacomics.

We look forward to your entries :)
Details: https://www.smspower.org/forums/18310

Today we release a rather unusual ROM dump from an unlicenced cheat device for the Game Gear which seems to be quite rare: X-Terminator for the Game Gear.



There seems to have been a range of X-Terminator devices for Nintendo (Super Famicom, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance), Sega (Game Gear, Saturn, Dreamcast) and Sony (PlayStation, PlayStation 2) consoles. Most included both the ability to both apply cheats and to search for cheats.

Similar to the other cartridge-based systems, the X-Terminator fits into the cartridge slot, and the game cartridge connects into the X-Terminator. It shows a menu on startup to let you enter cheats before starting the game, and the ability to return to this menu in order to search for cheats, resetting the game each time.

Thanks to the relative ease to dump and disassemble the ROM, and the efforts of Calindro, you can emulate this in Emulicious immediately: just look in the menus for Options › Emulation › Game Gear › X-Terminator.



You can also adapt Pro Action Replay codes which are much more well-known. For example, this PAR code for Sonic The Hedgehog: 00D24009 can be entered in the X-Terminator by reversing the order of the last three pairs of characters: 000940D2. Reversing the procedure turns an X-Terminator code back into a Pro Action Replay code.

Let us know if you find any cool cheats, and if any other emulators add support for this!

Today is the Sega Mark III's 35th anniversary. The console - essentially our Sega Master System - was released on October 20th, 1985.

To celebrate we're uncovering a couple of recently obtained prototypes:

Battle Wings (Bomber Raid) prototype for the Sega Master System.

The working title for Bomber Raid was Battle Wings. In fact, the retail version of Bomber Raid contains a hidden cheat to activate the old title screen. We uncovered a build of the game, sent to Sega of Europe for evaluation, which appears to predate the original Japanese/US release. Among other things, this version of the game lacks the Bomber Raid title screen, lacks the introduction animation and has amusing typos in the text. *EDIT* As found by Nineko, the final boss is also partly glitchy and incomplete in this version (see comments below).




Out Run 3-D Prototype for the Master System.

Announced in Japan, Out Run 3-D eventually only made it to Europe and Brazil. This early prototype with a "1988" date on the title screen (vs "1989" for final version) notably includes a rendition of Passing Breeze which is absent in the final version.

If you compare Out Run 3-D screenshots and Out Run screenshots you'll also notice the Start section in this prototype is closer to the one in Out Run, as presumably Out Run 3-D was programmed as a derivation of Out Run and slowly evolved into its final form.




Cyborg Hunter Prototype for the Master System.

We already released a prototype of its Japanese counterpart Chouon Senshi Borgman (超音戦士ボーグマン) in 2009, and now uncovered a prototype of English Cyborg Hunter. I haven't played enough of this build yet, but the first thing apparent is that this build uses an earlier/placeholder localization. Whereas the final version refers to the hero as "Paladin" and the enemy "Voltron", this prototype refers to them respectively as... "Ralph" and "Brad Biddle". While the latter name is common enough, I wonder if it could be the name of a Sega employee involved in the localization?




Happy birthday Sega Mark III !

Hello all,

In 2006 we managed to obtain a copy of the (unreleased) Dinobasher for the Master System and released it here..

Only 14 years later, we finally got hold and excavated a copy of Dinobasher - Starring Bignose the Caveman for the Game Gear! The cartridge was kindly lent to us by Stanislas Marmion. THANK YOU.




Yes, that's a hand-printed label, made by teams at CodeMasters :)

The Master System prototype box art describe the game with: Join Bignose in a zany, prehistoric race to catch his dinner! Club your way through hoards of dinosaurs across four huge islands, collecting bones and rocks and trade with the natives. Fly between the islands using your club as helicopter rotors and become the first flying man! Great cartoon graphics, brilliant music and, most importantly, excellent fun!

The game is 2 megabits (256 kilobytes) and uses proprietary CodeMasters mapper so it might not work on all emulators or setups.

We are proud to announce the release of version 2.00 of our long-in-production translation patch for Phantasy Star. This patch retranslates the original Japanese game to give a whole host of improvements:

• More faithful to the original Japanese script
• Expanded script
• Expanded menus and item names
• Sound test and sound chip selection
• Built-in cheats to make the game a little less tough/slow
• Two custom fonts, with upper and lowercase letters
• Expanded save slot names and three additional save slots
• Fully compatible with old saves, the original cartridge (with ROM replacement) and of course for play on real hardware



This update also includes lots of script changes, faster scene changes, bug fixes, and a great deal of improvements to the translation helper programs which should help future translations to more languages. Like the previous releases, this is all open source.

Download the patch here:

https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-EN

Happy birthday Alisa Landale!

As usual we are running Coding, Music and Hack competitions, all sixteen entries have been posted, you can browse them and vote for them!
https://www.smspower.org/forums/f9-Competitions

Music Competition features a new track by Polaria Poyon and one by TomyS.

Coding Competition features, e.g.



Hack Competition features many new hacks (mostly based on Alex Kidd in Miracle World engine, using KiddEd)


Voting ends in 13 days!
Enjoy!!!

Game page:
https://www.smspower.org/Games/GameDeCheckKoutsuuAnzen-SMS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 27, 2020
MIRACLE WORLD - Not-for-sale Traffic Safety Sega Master System game from 1987 resurfaces!

Game de Check! Koutsuu Anzen for the Sega Master System / Mark III
Original: ゲームでチェック！交通安全 [gēmu de chekku! kōtsū anzen]
Literally: “Let’s check with a game! Traffic Safety”

The SMS Power! community is happy to celebrate its 23rd anniversary today by unearthing and preserving yet another extremely rare game title for the Sega Master System! We are also releasing a complete Japanese to English translation patch for the game.

Active since 1997, people behind SMS Power! have been meticulously documenting and preserving Sega 8-bit history. About one thousand titles, including many obscure ones, are catalogued and have been digitally preserved. Hardware has been researched, documented, hacked, augmented. Games have been reverse engineered, secrets found, soundtracks extracted, long lost staff credits made public, countless prototypes have been found. Every year the site hosts a competition for people making games, demos or music on Sega 8-bit systems.

This release has been made possible with help from NPO Game Preservation Society (NPO法人ゲーム保存協会) in Japan.





What is it?

Game de Check! Koutsuu Anzen is an educational Sega Master System/Sega Mark III cartridge commissioned by The Tokio Marine and Fire Insurance Ltd and developed by Sega in 1987.

A lengthy research article by SukaSega (in Japanese) has a list of known appearances of this long lost game over the years, mostly from non-game publications. In January 1988, both the Hoken Mainichi Shimbun and Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspapers wrote about it.


(images from SukaSega)

Below machine-translated extracts from for the Hoken Mainichi Shimbun article:

Quote:


Quote:


Quote:


Quote:


Quote:


On January 21, 1988, a similar article in “Insurance” states:

Quote:


On August 30, 1988, another article in Zaigai (~Business World) gives a higher production number::

Quote:


The game briefly appeared in a Japanese TV show in 1988:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9xxphpOfPo

All those findings are courtesy of research done by SukaSega.

It’s not clear today what happened to those 200 or 300 cartridges. Were they actively rented by many schools and associations? We have no evidence of Sega fans saying that they were exposed to this game in 1988. The game seemingly wasn’t promoted to gamers, and the Master System was not particularly popular in Japan either. Likely many of those cartridges were unused, lost or destroyed.

Auctions



On December 29, 2009, a loose cartridge surfaced and was auctioned on Yahoo Auctions, with an initial price of 3 million yens (about US$33,000 at the time). No bids were placed on the auction, but it appears that the cartridge was eventually sold outside of the auction, to a private collector, for an unspecified amount of money. We were aware of the auction at the time but unable to reasonably bid such an amount, we opted out of it. The collector who purchased the cartridge at the start of 2010 did not intend to share its contents, but posted one screenshot of the title screen on their website.



In October 2019, another copy of the game resurfaced on Yahoo Auctions. This time, the game came with extra previously unseen contents: a briefcase, a Master System console and two large manuals. Initial price was 3.5 million yens. No bids were placed over a two month period and eventually the seller decided in mid December to turn it into a regular open auction, starting at 1 yen. We decided to bid, gathered funds and we won the auction for 521,000 yens (see purchase thanks/credits below). The NPO Game Preservation Society (NPO法人ゲーム保存協会) in Tokyo helped us with handling of the auction and transporting the briefcase to France. We also decided to have them dump the cartridge and fully scan manuals while in Japan, in order to avoid any risk that the game may be lost or damaged while transporting.

We got it !!!



We at SMS Power! have preserved and shared almost a thousand games over the years and we are happy to share this one as well.

See the Game de check! Koutsuu Anzen page for details.

Screenshots

More screenshots at https://www.smspower.org/Screenshots/GameDeCheckKoutsuuAnzen-SMS























Manuals

All scans at https://www.smspower.org/Scans/GameDeCheckKoutsuuAnzen-SMS

*EDIT* To clarify, the inside pages were all mediocre-quality copies. We scanned them the best we could and Game Preservation Society cleaned the scans a little.



Soundtrack

The game supports both PSG and FM audio (the FM chip was only available in Japan).
It is as yet unknown who composed this soundtrack.

Maxim extracted both PSG and FM and created standalone VGM packages with them. See the Game de check! Koutsuu Anzen page for VGM packages details.

Youtube playlist (PSG version):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLbT4EUcBngqAjCkUBgIw5dWGFDrN4-TQ1&v=ooMhDqLyXGs&feature=emb_title

Unofficial English Translation

Because of the significance and rarity of this game, we decided that we’d try creating a translation patch for non-Japanese reading audiences so they could enjoy it. Maxim (SMS Power!) reverse engineered the game code, extracted the script and created custom tooling to reinject code along with translated text, new fonts and translated graphics into the game. Damian Rogers (Sudden-Desu.net and member of NPO Game Preservation Society) helped translate the game script to English.

A full english version of the game is available today:
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/GameDeCheckKoutsuuAnzen-SMS-EN
Full source code and tooling for the translation will be made available on GitHub shortly after.







Enjoy!!!

Credits

The game was purchased thanks to generous donations from:
- Carnivol
- Jair
- Wiggy2k
- Hubz
- RetroRumper (http://www.gamingalexandria.com http://preservegames.org)
- Kusfo
- SavagePencil
- Badsector
Which accounted for about 30% of the total auction price.
The rest was paid by Omar C (Bock) / SMS Power!

*EDIT* The original post accidentally omitted Wiggy2k from that list, apologies to Wiggy2k!

NPO Game Preservation Society (NPO法人ゲーム保存協会)
Auction handling, dumping, scanning & cleaning, transport, translation

Maxim (SMS Power!)
English translation patch, reverse engineering, hacking, soundtrack extraction

Damian Rogers / RyogaMasaki (NPO Game Preservation Society)
Japanese>English text translation

marklincadet
Translation logo graphics

Calindro, Paul Jansen
Additional hacking and translation help

Cyrus C
Photos

Omar C / Bock (SMS Power!)
Purchase, coordination, additional hacking, screenshots

After our release of a Missile Defense 3-D Prototype last year, we stumbled on more good stuff...

The February 1987 issue of "Computer Entertainer" a trade publication made available to retailers and purchasers in the US introduced the 3-D Glasses:



"Games in 3D
Another new peripheral, the 3D Imager with glasses, was shown in a darkened room with WALLBALL-3D (a racquetball game) and 3D GUNNER (a space shooting game for the use with the Light Phaser). The futuristic, goggle-like glasses come with an interface unit with plugs into the Master System Power Base. (A $65 package, 3D Imager with Glasses and WALLBALL-3D, was announced at CES. Two weeks later, however, WALLBALL-3D was scraped due to lukewarm response from show-goers. As of presstime, the 3D Imager witrh Glasses as to be sold by itself for $50, with 3D games set to retail at $40 each.). The 3D glasses employ liquid crystal technology which can make either lens instantly opaque. Using special game software which alternately displays slightly different pictures for the left and the right eyes, the glasses block out one eye at a time in synchrony with the software. The picture on the TV screen appears to vibrate when viewed without the glasses (an easy way to make yourself quite dizzy), but snaps into an illusion of 3D reality when the glasses allow each each to see only its special image. Viewed in a completely darkened room, the way Sega showed the glasses and games, the effect is quite good and suffers only the barest minimum of flicker."

This has been discussed in https://www.smspower.org/forums/15531 and other places however we generally discussed WALLBALL-3D mostly, and assumed 3D GUNNER was an early name for Missile Defense 3-D... we were wrong!



Introducing 3D Gunner for the Master System, an unreleased early prototype we managed to acquired recently.

The game is a 32 kilobyte ROM so as you can imagine it is a very simple piece of software and predate the more full fledged Missile Defense 3-D. Althought we couldn't get confirmation of it, we can imagine this was maybe programmed by Mark Cerny who also programmed Shooting Gallery and Missile Defense 3-D (and worked on things such as Marble Madness and the PS4 console).

The games requires both 3-D Glasses and Light Phaser and may be usable in all setups. What more, there was a bug in recent Meka build which prevented 32 KB from accessing 3-D Glasses registers...

For an ideal experience, you can use MEKA 2019-12-13 which is released today. Otherwise if you use an older version of MEKA you will need to this line in your meka.nam file:

Please note that MEKA 2019-12-13 will give you a largely more confortable Light Phaser emulation experience for the game.

It may or not work in other emulators, and of course should work on a real system should you be equipped with a Light Phaser, a pair of 3-D Glasses and a CRT screen :)

Enjoy!





Bonus midly related beautiful scan of early 3-D Glasses prototypes:

Hello all,

To celebrate SmsPower 22nd anniversary we are happy to release 6 recently found prototypes and introduce a bunch of cool coding/music/hacks homebrew submitted by the community.

Chapter 1: The Dumps releases!





(1) We have a dump from the elusive "Red" Hang On card for the Master System. The exact whereabout of this card is unknown but this appears to be an very early European release. As with some of the early Italian/German releases, this version of the game contains a early prototype build of the Western version of Hang On, while it was being ported from the Japanese version.

This version of the game appears to have one minor glitch that won't affect most players. It doesn't fully clear the RAM and while western Master System BIOSes are clearing most of the RAM, Japanese Master System doesn't. This creates a few glitches when running on a Japanese Master System, some can be visible when letting the game play through its demo. If you have more information you may post on this forum thread.



(2) We have an Early March 1995 build of Empire Syndicate (Chicago Syndicate) for the Game Gear at a time in development when it carried the title "Empire Syndicate" (unknown until now). A long while ago Hidden Palace released an impressive stash of prototypes source from old Sega of America backups, which included a whooping 24 builds of Chicago Syndicate made during May and July 1995 during its QA sessions, all sporting the final title. Our build today is dated March 1995 and has the earlier title.

The original file ("EMPS2003.ROM") for this includes in its 3 first bytes a Z80 call to code held in RAM, which presumably with the development system they used was carrying a little bit of debugging/testing related code (probably code to download code from the development computer to the storage used by the console?). Those 3 bytes makes the game incompatible with real machines and emulators, so we are releasing a patched version as well.



(3) We have a Prototype version of Andre Agassi Tennis for the Game Gear, which appears to be a close to final build.





(4) We have a A prototype of Alex Kidd: High-Tech World for the Master System. Housed on an elegant 171-5587 test board with both Western and Japanese style connector, the build doesn't exhibit obvious differences early in the game but it needs to be studied and compared in more details. Anyone? This good old classic adventure/action game is a rebranded version of the Japanese original Anmitsu Hime and is a pretty fun game to play too!

*EDIT* Supper said: "High-Tech World fascinates me for being such a bizarre localization, so I took a look at the prototype. The difference is in the Phantasy Star-compressed graphic at 0x15265, which is for the "Sega is No. 1" room. In the prototype, it hasn't been translated and is still using the graphics from Anmitsu Hime: "







(5) and (6) Finally we have two Codemasters prototypes here!

A Prototype of Micro Machines for the Game Gear. According to the Codemasters header this build is dated 1993-10-22 (compare to final build being 1993-11-24... ready in time for Christmas).

A Prototype of CJ Elephant Fugitive for the Game Gear. According to the Codemasters header this build is dated 1993-10-22 (compare to final being 1993-12-20.. this one missed Christmas as cartridge production and distribution time would probably have added a month on top of the final build date!).

The photo above also shows a blue sample cartridge for Cosmic Spacehead, which was confirmed as being the same dump as the final version (CRC 6caa625b).


Chapter 2: The Competitions Entries!

The community delivered again this year! Check out the forum for details on all the entries!







[Coding competition 2019] Gotris by Kusfo, ManuTrigger, Davidian

[Coding competition 2019] Platform Explorer by SteveProXNA

[Coding competition 2019] SC3D Demo By Geranium by SKuRGe911

[Music competition 2019] Town - Wonder Boy in Monster Land by gregglesaurus

[Music competition 2019] Castillo de Arena by Iced

[Music competition 2019] Mockstar (Cover) by tibone

[Music competition 2019] Meganiemi 88 by TomyS

[Music competition 2019] The Coastal Town of Baraboro by Immo

[Music competition 2019] Midnight Resistance - Flood of Power by otobo






[Hacks competition 2019] Bubble Dragon in Paradise Island by Kilkakon

[Hacks competition 2019] Sonic in Miracle World by law81

[Hacks competition 2019] Azled in Fantasy World by ian, Calindro, Nicole Marie T

[Hacks competition 2019] Great Ice Hockey Pad Version by BcnAbel76

[Hacks competition 2019] Mario Kidd in Retro World by Jano

[Hacks competition 2019] Ze Legende of Oliv by Yeti Bomar

[Hacks competition 2019] Mr Robot by Revo, tibone, Calindro

Please cast your votes!

ENJOY!!!