Undumped, unlicensed, unknown 16-bit games (and some help needed!)

Undumped, unlicensed, unknown 16-bit games

Mods, I'm still new to Assembler, so if this belongs in another section I apologize in advance. Feel free to move it if it belongs elsewhere.

A while back with invaluable cracking help from D4S we managed to get The King of Fighters 2000 [SNES/SFC], Street Fighter EX + Alpha [SNES/SFC], and The King of Fighters '99 [GEN/MD] all dumped and cracked properly. KoF2k was undumped, SFEX+@ had been dumped before but wasn't supported by anything due to the copy protection, and KoF '99 was only supported by HazeMD and maybe Gens32. Now you can use them on any emulator or hardware. Also you can check this thread for Lord of the Rings [GEN/MD] and a bunch of low-rent MD hacks that all work properly (some of which I added today).

As a fan of shithouse productions and "Taiwanese trash" as one person so eloquently coined it, here's some more info and goodies...

Street Fighter III: Super Version - Super Nintendo/Super Famicom
Link Here
An obscure hack of Twin Eagle Group's Champion Edition hack (which was a hack of The World Warrior) you get the standard Rainbow Edition stuff; super fast/slow fireballs, mid-air moves, variable height Dragon Punches, etc. New to the mix is rapid fire jabs/shorts, a weird low-flying Psycho Crusher, 2P's palette reflects 1P's palette after the first hit, a hacked "III" title screen, and some other stuff. They removed the Capcom logo so for some reason you're unable to input the player-versus-same-character code. You'll have to use a patch code or modify the ROM to have it turned on. Distributed exclusively in South America.

Soul Edge VS Samurai Spirits aka Soul Blade VS Samurai Shodown - SNES/SFC
Big thanks to user Sonik for helping me save this from obscurity. Has anyone even seen this before? It's really just a port of the Mega Drive pirate of Samurai Spirits II with Cham Cham removed and Seung Nina added in from Soul Blade. Other than a new title screen and that one character swap everything is pretty much the same. Most of the music (that I noticed) is either redone stuff from the MD SSII or possibly other unlicensed games, nothing ripped straight from SNES Capcom games like other fighters. Wait, that isn't completely true, since every sound effect is ripped straight from SFII:TWW. Attached some cart and gameplay pics to the post.

Edit...
Lovingly cracked by D4S
Link here

Soul Edge VS Samurai Spirits aka Final Samurai V - Sega Genesis/Mega Drive
There's some box cart/scans of this floating around, as well as some gameplay shots. It's more of an actual crossover than the SNES version. All the sprites are from the SSII/SB pirates, backgrounds are a mix of straight rips from other games and slightly original stuff.

Edit...
Cracked by Mr. Eke himself
Patched ROM (Note; doesn't work on flashcarts, copiers)
Unpatched ROM


The Battle of Red Cliffs - GEN/MD
Unpatched BIN
Patched for all emulators, flash carts
Horrid beat 'em up that's an attempt to do a conversion of Capcom's Warriors of Fate aka Tenchi o Kurau 2: Sekiheki no Tatakai. The sprites, HUD, and art style make me think it was done by the same group behind Yang Warrior Family. The dump prior to this is only emulated under HazeMD & Gens32 and is in MDX format. This one is in regular BIN format and loads in pretty much anything, but goes into an infinite loop at the title screen unless you use the patched version. I had written about it here along with trying to dump Super Mario World 64.


Edit...
Links for the cartridges Bramsworth elaborated on below and was nice enough to let me borrow to dump.

Mighy Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition - GEN/MD
Patched BIN cracked by Eke

Tiny Toon Adventures 3 - GEN/MD
Patched BIN cracked by Andlabs

Digimon Adventure - SNES/SFC
Patched by D4S

Pokemon Gold Silver - SNES/SFC
Patched by D4S

 

I had no idea you were making this topic. But since you've already called for my introduction.... =p

I gave Azathoth some of my cartridges to dump, but none of them work due to the usual protection problems. If anyone can help that's experienced in this sort of thing, PM either of us. I'd prefer not to publically share the ROMs yet as I know how these things start spreading around once you let them out, and I'd rather that not happen when they're not fully working yet, so I'm only passing them on at the moment to anyone who can help crack them. These games include...

(Genesis)Tiny Toon Adventures 3 http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Tiny_Toon_Adventures_3 For some reason this ROM works in Picodrive, but no other emulators.

(Genesis)Power Rangers Fighting Edition : Port of the game from SNES. Freezes in battles on emulators.

(SNES)Digimon Adventure: http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Digimon_Adventure Possibly not a complete dump unfortunately...

(SNES)Hercules 2 : http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Hercules_2

(SNES) Pokemon Gold & Silver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5dc4YuzSlo

I'm messaging Eke in the meantime about the Genesis ones, but anyone else that can help please feel free to let me know!

 

Some infos about the Mega Drive ones:

Tenchi wo Kurau II - The Battle of Red Cliffs

This dump is in a strange .mdx format. Refer to this post to know about that format and copy-protection details for that game if you want to emulate it in an emulator.

To bypass the protection manually, get a proper dump in .bin format then apply the following patches (using hexeditor or action replay codes in an emulator, it's the same)

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers - The Fighting Edition

Copy-protection method is vey similar to the previous one (and similar to other unlicensed games). The game expects $55 to be read from $400000, $0f from $400002 and $18 from $400006.

To bypass the protection manually, again, apply the following patches:

Tiny Toons Adventures 3

The game writes $55 to $400000 then expects $55 to be read from $400002. Not sure if the value being read is related to the written value though.

To bypass the protection manually, again, apply the following patches (there does not seem to be any checksum routine):

Soul Edge VS Samurai Spirits

The game actually uses two kinds of protection.

The first one uses a set of 3 special registers:

- first register is mapped at $600001 and is written with DATA value
- second register is mapped at $600003 and is written with MODE value
- third register is mapped at $600005 and returns RESULT value where RESULT is a bitshifted version of previously written DATA value. The bitshift operation depends on the MODE lowest 2-bits (0-3). Here is some pseudo-C code that mimics the hardware behaviour:

The second one uses ROM bank-switching hardware by writing bytes value to any address inside $700000-$7FFFFF memory area. ROM access to $000000-$1FFFFF is affected by the written value so that address = address OR (value << 15).

Those two protections are also used by the following games:
- Top Fighter
- Lion King III
- Super Donkey Kong 99
- Mulan
- Pocket Monsters II
- Pokemon Stadium

To bypass the protections manually, again, apply the following patches (there does not seem to be any checksum routine):

PS: I prefer ROM patches as it's more important in my opinion to preserve original ROM data and I would rather emulate cartridge protection than distributing patched ROMs in the wild. If you are going to distribute patched ROM, at least make sure they are properly named (with [f1] for example) since there is already too much confusion with available dumps (a lot of [!] unlicensed dumps were actually patched by the dumper to work on emulator or copiers). Also seems that a lot of ROM were dumped from bootlegs/repros that currently used already patched ROMs to disable the protection...

 

Kudos for hunting down these games and putting your time and money into it, just to release them so we all can play.

By the way, how works the copy protection on a cartridge game?
The cart have any special hardware that the game looks for?

 

Eke, thanks for your help. I'll add links to the patched versions soon for anyone that doesn't want to fool with patching it themselves.

 

Hrm... I would have thought these games were already dumped on Chinese emu forums. Though, perhaps I'm way out of touch since I haven't really been in the scene for ages.

 

Original post edited to add links to patched version of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition and The Battle of Red Cliffs. Link to the Tiny Toon Adventures 3 fixed file in this thread.

Thanks again Bramsworth for sharing your carts, especially Tiny Toon Adventures 3. I know you went through a lot of trouble to get that one.

 

A while back while checking who has linked to my site I noticed quite a few Chinese links. After following them they all took my to a Chinese wares site that had loads of chinese original MD games and translations from japanese games with new title screens. I could never get any of the games to work though because they were in the MDX format. I may still have them on a Hard Drive somewhere or if not I could check my tacking history to find the links again.

Yakumo

 

I've done a good search of the Chinese internet and beyond and am pretty confident these are the first dumps ever of these games. Everything you find on the Chinese internet usually is Chinese translations of JP games, or old dumps of games that have been out there forever now.

I'm looking forward to the SNES games being cracked next

 

Exactly, cartridge hardware is mapped in normaly unused area.
Some games also try to overwrite ROM to prevent usage from a copier (where ROM could be writable, unlike real cartridges).

On an interesting note, copy-protection hardware is very similar among unlicensed games, which makes me think there was some kind of generic chip that was distributed in this area to use with unlicensed carts. The most simple is a set of read-only registers that return constant values (the possible values are always the same in most games), more complicate is a set of registers than can be written and return a computed value (generally bitshifted from the written values) when read. Most complicate one is banking hardware that remap chunk of ROM data when a specific value is written to a specific address.

 

Edited first post, both Soul Edge VS Samurai Spirits games are now cracked. Link for SNES version is up, posting link for MD version soon

 

Original post updated with links to Mega Drive version of Soul Edge VS Samurai Spirits

Next up; A Bug's Life and Aladdin 2000 for SNES

 

Great stuff, I've just downloaded a bunch and am really looking forward to checking these out.

One note: there's a Megaupload link for TTA3. That should probably be pulled. It'd be great if it could be redirected to a different download.

EDIT: Is the version at narod.ru the raw or fixed version? I could try to figure it out but I don't 100% trust the resources at my disposal (Model 2 Genesis, Mac-only emulators, etc.).

EDIT #2: Whoops, overlooked Eke's post above. I checked with a hex editor and it's the fixed version.

 

Just an FYI, some of these games (namely the crappy pokemon silver bootleg) I have on my 280-in-1 GBA cartridge. I also have a lot of NES romhacks and legit games on that cartridge too. I don't know if the games were ported to GBA or if the GBA is just running the SNES rom in emulation.

 

Being that prior to now this game was undumped and uncracked (plus SNES emulation on GBA is rubbish) I doubt it was that particular game. Very good possibility it's a Famicom ROM running in a hacked version of PocketNES.

TT3 link removed for now, will be fixed soon.

Goldenband, you turn up in the damnedest places.

 

Still no link for fixed TT3, if anybody interested I'll upload it to Mediafire.

And thanks for all this work.

 

FYI: Aladdin 2000 and A Bug's Life for SNES have been cracked and can be downloaded at http://www.dforce3000.de.

 

Hey I got a DBZ Final Bout Cart, I tried to dump it but it is not even recognized by the Super UFO. I don't think this pirate has been dumped.

Im also on the hunt for the rom of Hercules 2 and Mortal kombat 5. I think these 3 have to been dumped to complete all the Unlicensed/pirate carts?

Although, I saw once in Monterrey a Mario 64 for the SNES cart lol.

 

I have Hercules 2, Azathoth dumped it from my cart and gave it to d4s but he couldn't figure out the protection. I've hesitated releasing it since it's a nonfunctional dump that might not even be correct? I have no idea. If anyone thinks they can figure that one out let me know.

I bet Mario 64 on SNES was just SMW. Not uncommon for pirates to use bullshit labels.