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View topic - Super Boy II (SMS/KR), Alex Kidd in Miracle World [BIOS] (SMS/KR)

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Super Boy II (SMS/KR), Alex Kidd in Miracle World [BIOS] (SMS/KR)
Post Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 5:14 pm
More goodies from Korea!

Super Boy II for the Master System/Samsung Gam*Boy, an absolutly awful clone of Super Mario Bros., running in legacy SG-1000 video mode. The game seems roughly feature complete, however bad controls and lack of polishing put it on league for the worst game of its kind (us Sega Master System fans are not well used to bad unlicensed games, no doubt that other systems have worse to complete). A historic curiosity and perhaps toy for masochistic gamers all over the world.

Another curiosity, Korean version of Alex Kidd in Miracle World (알렉스 키드 in Miracle World), apparently not released as a stand alone cartridge, but featured in Samsung versions of the Sega Master System II (codenamed Samsung Gam*Boy II / 겜보이, or Samsung Aladin Boy II / 알라딘 보이). The game is basically the game as the original version, with text fully replaced in Korean. Note that it probably requires patching to play on most emulators, please read game page or comments for help on this matter.

Special thanks to RaccoonLad for kindly providing the cartridges for those. And there's a better game coming soon!
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Note about releases
Post Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 5:23 pm
- Alex Kidd in Miracle World [BIOS] patching
The game run as a BIOS, as thus, the first thing it does after displaying the SEGA logo is to check for the presence of a card/cartridge in the different slots and attempt to boot it. This behavior is not properly emulated in many emulators, or may requires specific configuration to instruct the emulator that it is a BIOS image.

One possible patch is to overwrite 3 bytes from 0x1FA13 with zero, to disable calling the card/cartridge detection routine and continue running the regular BIOS code featuring the game. If you use MEKA, you can download the latest meka.pat from development version and save it in your MEKA directory (overwrite existing meka.pat file), it'll patch the game automatically on loading.

- Super Boy II paging
The provided ROM image is 48 kb. The first and last 16 kb were duplicated, so the real ROM chip is only 32 kb. The mirroring is to allow all emulators to play the game without needing to add a specific mapper to implement the mirroring. Doing this is debatable, I'm ok to discuss this matter, particularly since some future SG-1000 16-kb releases with a special 40 kb-ish mapping would require a similar treatment.
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Post Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 5:41 pm
Just wondering... what do you mean by "For the sake of human species' survival, please avoid distributing patched ROM images."?
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Post Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 5:54 pm
Tom wrote
Just wondering... what do you mean by "For the sake of human species' survival, please avoid distributing patched ROM images."?

That was just an attempt to tell people to keep spreading the original ROM and not a patched one that someone could create from the given instructions.
I suppose I could rephrase this sentence. I'll let me english advisor (Maxim) suggest something more appropriate.
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Post Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 6:10 pm
If you distribute the patched ROM, I will come and find you and kill you. At least, I think that's what it means.
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Post Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 7:01 pm
On another note, I need to find soon some other place to put my mirror. While I still have like 350 megabytes of free space, and the ZIP files themselves are working fine, my hosting service is starting to add more and more crap to the html page (like the navigation bar), and I have no way to edit it.
The best thing I can do is to keep the ZIP files stored there and to move just the html index. The question is: where?

especially because that webspace isn't properly mine, I still have the FTP access from when I had to make the website for a volleyball team, and they can, like, find it someday
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Post Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 4:35 pm
It doesn't look like the bios do any verification of the game as it plays japanese games and the Mario clone without complaining.
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Post Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 4:47 pm
Korean machines were effectively Japanese, the same cart slot, so they had the same problem of wanting to not break compatibility with older carts. That, and they wouldn't want to break compatibility with pirate carts.
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Re: Note about releases
Post Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 5:10 pm
Bock wrote
- Super Boy II paging
The provided ROM image is 48 kb. The first and last 16 kb were duplicated, so the real ROM chip is only 32 kb. The mirroring is to allow all emulators to play the game without needing to add a specific mapper to implement the mirroring. Doing this is debatable, I'm ok to discuss this matter, particularly since some future SG-1000 16-kb releases with a special 40 kb-ish mapping would require a similar treatment.


This is a similar problem to what happens with Coleco carts - the cart slot was designed with multiple chip-enable signals because at the time, the idea of having a whole 48KB+ on one chip was unimaginable, or maybe just really expensive. Then they'd decide to make a 16KB game by having 8KB in the range 0-8KB and another 8KB in the range 16-24KB. In the "gap" you might get zeroes or you might get that first 8KB repeated due to hardware mirroring. Then they'd make sure to mix and match whether they accessed the data at the "real" address or via a mirror, so emulators expecting a contiguous ROM image will need to have the data repeated in the ROM itself (as seen here).

[Side question: I seem to remember Dega crashing horribly when you gave it a 48KB image, since it doesn't initialise the third 16KB paging setting and expects a game to do that before accessing it. Then again, maybe it doesn't support legacy video modes so it doesn't matter anyway?]

So anyway, yes, a "mapper" file format is needed, and it'd be great if it could be "universal" to some extent, even if nobody ever uses it. Obviously it will break compatibility with old emulators so it ought not to be used except where needed. The somewhat-failed UNIF format seems rather unsuitable but could be a good starting point (a chunked binary format seems like a good idea). The most important part is the file extension, or course, I suggest ".sgx" because everyone knows "X" is a the most cool letter.

Anyone who mentions XML will be mercilessly ridiculed until they die of shame.
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Post Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 7:29 pm
Alright, a ROM release!

GO! NEXT STAGE
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Post Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 11:15 pm
That Mario clone looks impressive, too bad it uses the SG-1000 mode (it could use more colors). How close to the original are its levels?
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This is OT, sorry
Post Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 12:39 am
Tom wrote
On another note, I need to find soon some other place to put my mirror. While I still have like 350 megabytes of free space, and the ZIP files themselves are working fine, my hosting service is starting to add more and more crap to the html page (like the navigation bar), and I have no way to edit it.
The best thing I can do is to keep the ZIP files stored there and to move just the html index. The question is: where?

especially because that webspace isn't properly mine, I still have the FTP access from when I had to make the website for a volleyball team, and they can, like, find it someday


Errm Tom I sent you a PM, I may be able to help you
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Post Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 12:55 pm
I updated the dev wiki page on BIOSes with the Korean Alex Kidd one. It's interesting in that it takes a slightly different approach to cartridge detection from other BIOSes, apparently based on the fact that the data lines will be held high when disconnected (seemingly not the case with Japanese machines based on their BIOSes). It's also of note that it checks on all slots despite being on a 1-slot (?) machine - possibly aiming for flexibility to enable re-use with a multi-slot console.
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Post Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 4:57 pm
PrOfUnD Darkness wrote
That Mario clone looks impressive, too bad it uses the SG-1000 mode (it could use more colors). How close to the original are its levels?

Zemina did a lot of (unofficial) ports on the MSX(1) so I guess they used that knowledge when developing this port.
Offtopic: is there a version for the MSX?
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Post Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 6:19 pm
yes, there is Super Boy, Super Boy II and Super Boy III for MSX
 
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 11:14 pm
It's basically an SG-1000 game. Rename the file to Super Boy II (KR).sg and it work perfectly in Fusion.
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Post Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 12:00 am
I don't know about that, I tried playing Super boy II in my SG-1000 and it didn't work.
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Post Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 12:54 am
mattmess wrote
yes, there is Super Boy, Super Boy II and Super Boy III for MSX


There's also what should have been called Super Boy IV, but it has been released under 2 different names by Clover, another Korean company : Super Bio Man 4 and Super Bros.World 1.
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Post Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 7:11 am
Raccoon Lad wrote
I don't know about that, I tried playing Super boy II in my SG-1000 and it didn't work.

As a first guess I'd say it's because it uses more then 2KB of RAM, or at least uses a range of addresses bigger than 2KB.
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