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: