During a search for undumped/unemulated MD games, I stumbled about this unlicensed shooter which was apparently part of Gamtec series and is considered to be quite "rare" by the people who own a copy. From the link below, it seems the game was dumped but the dump never released publicly because it "did not work on emulators or flashcards" (well, like most of those unlicensed original games which have on-board copy protection... until someone cracks them) http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?21924-Thunderbolt-II http://s4.zetaboards.com/PGC_Forums/topic/9875962/1/ Out of curiosity, I contacted one of these fellows to see if they still had the "non-working" dump so I could had a crack on it. Hopefully, it appeared that the dump was complete and that the copy-protection used by the game is identical to the one in many other unlicensed games from this area (16 Tiles Mahjong II, Smart Mouse, etc) so it literally took 10 minutes to crack it. Basically, the game expects hard-coded value to be returned when reading address $400000 and $400006, which are normally not mapped on traditional cartridges (or flashcarts) but maps to extra cartridge hardware in these games. So much for the talk, here is a link to the patched ROM, which should work on any emulators (tested on Fusion) or flashcarts (tested on Mega Drive Model 2 with Everdrive MD) http://filetrip.net/dl?sKzJoiYp7x and here is a link to the original ROM, courtesy of the original dumper (thanks to him !), which will obviously only work in emulators that emulates the cartridge copy-protection hardware (only Genesis Plus GX atm) http://filetrip.net/dl?Y5Ihgh2aEH for the record, here are the patches used to make the cracked ROM from the original one:
Oh wow, thanks so much. I've been looking for an orginal of this but now at least I can sample the ROM.
awesome cheers! edit: tested this using gens and it freezes during gameplay, it's not the emulator as this still functions the game just stops with them music still going. will try on different emulator edit: yeah works great with Kega fusion, wonder why gens doesnt like it. i'll try gens/gs on the big rig and see if there's a difference
RetroCopy is the best Genesis timming-accurate emulator. The Mednafen core is also good. Kefa Fusion is quite outdated.
Brilliant tanks a million, just missed out on a well priced original, now I get to try before I buy!!!!!!! Cheers
indeed it is 3 years ish i think since last update, but it works, i will have to try RetroCopy and Mednafen as i've tried neither before also Gens-GS had the same issue as Gens so must be something up with that.
For those of you wondering why it crashes on a real Genesis: It's because of the sprites. While my model 3 doesn't crash when testing with a flashcart (Everdrive MD) I did notice slow down when there are a lot of enemies on the screen. It's also extremely hard even on easy mode. I completely lost it all several times on level 3...
I just had a look and it indeed hangs on Gens. The (technical) reason is that Gens does not properly emulate HV counter address mirroring which this games relies on (although it seems more like a programmer mistake to access those mirrored address). You have to keep in mind that Gens (and all his forks) is still based on the good old core from 2006 and so is quite outdated. Saying Fusion (or even Regen on that matter) is outdated just because it hasn't been updated for a while is quite misleading however, it's still more compatible than Retrocopy or Mednafen and accurate enough to run 99% of Mega Drive games just fine, including this one. I am not sure what you mean by that but I tested it with Everdrive MD + Mega Drive 2 and it worked fine, I was able to complete the first level without issues. Also, saying it crashes "because of the sprites" does not make much sense (if any). Slowdown is caused by software having too much things to handle, it happens in quite a lot of shooting games and shouldn't have anything to do with crashing
You should see my proto of FZ Axis, it's impossible even to get past Level 1 without cheats, it's completely mental!!! Thank you for sharing this!
I played it on K-Gen Fusion and yes it slowed down a little but I got to stage 4 and was even using the keyboard! Yep, ZXC keys and the arrow keys (left handed too). So I wouldn't say it was hard at all. I can vouch for that. The proto of FZ Axis is totaly nuts! It's not possible to complete the first stage boss without using an energy code via an Action replay.
tried it with RetroCopy, i don't really like RetroCopy now i've tried it, but the game works. much prefer Gens GS and Kega though. Edit: Also works fine on Regen, still have not tried Dgen yet but will do eventually. and yeah there is some slowdown but really that's kind of too be expected
No ... is not. Is just more user friendly and have better performance on low-end machines (coz obvious reasons). Just this.
This is really cool. It's always great to find new ultra-difficult shmups on the Mega Drive. Good work bypassing the copy protection too, sounds so simple I can't believe it hasn't been done yet, haha
