Commando UM6578 
Friday, February 7, 2020, 14:26 - Dumps, 2020
Posted by MLX
UMC is well-known having produced highly-compatible cloned versions of the NES CPU and PPU chips that were built into almost all Famiclone consoles from 1988 to the early 2000s. In 1997 or so, they stepped up their game and introduced the first NES-on-a-Chip (NOAC) with additional features: the UM6578, with 10 KiB of CPU memory (compared to the NES' 2 KiB), 10 KiB of PPU memory (compared to the NES' 2 KiB), and four bits per pixel graphics (compared to the NES' two bits per pixel). The UM6578 so far has been unemulated and its games undumped, unlike its much more famous successor NOACs, VT02 and VT03, from V.R. Technologies. That is about to change!

Handy Boy 11-in-1

Emulator users have played Jungletac's games before on VT03- and VT09-based plug-and-play consoles, such as the "VG Pocket" series. Many of these games always had some strange quality about them: the lack of proper title screens, odd color choices, very repetitive stock music, and gameplay that seemed to resemble well-known Famicom games but was sufficiently different in timing and machine code to pass as "derivative but original". And most puzzling, these games used the VT03's four bits-per-pixel graphics mode, yet still restricted themselves to the normal 52 colors of the original NES palette.

And now we know why all that is so: Jungletac originally made most of these games for the UM6578! Back in 2001, they were basically elaborate hacks of popular Famicom games, most with the original music and gameplay mostly intact, but with (sometimes) highly enhanced graphics and even additional gameplay features. When the UM6578 NOAC went out of production sometime in 2002-2003, Jungletac ported these "Jungletac original versions" to the VT03. Apparently fearing legal problems, they not only reimplemented the game logic from scratch so as to no longer use any copyright-infringing code, but also removed most title screens and replaced all soundtracks, retaining only the new graphics from their original 2001 versions. With the UM6578 being emulated, we now get to see these titles in their original 2001 versions, eleven of which can be found on this "Handy Boy" console from that same year.


The first game, Big Racing, is either a very advanced hack of Road Fighter with R.C. Pro-Am elements mixed-in, or an entirely original game. Race on a curved track that scrolls both horizontally and vertically and follow your progress on the map of the race track at the bottom of the screen. The game's reprogrammed VT03/VT09 version, to be found on the "Classic Max Lite 120-in-1", greatly simplifies this gameplay and just shows a track without any curves whatsoever, always going straight-ahead, even as the map of the race track still misleadingly shows the original track layouts!


Ultra Doggy and Space Castle are two games that (as far as we know) are not graphics hacks of Famicom games. Ultra Doggy is obviously inspired by Frogger and has you control a small dog who must collect two keys from the street before being able to reach the exit. Space Castle is a slightly more difficult Space Invaders clone.


The remaining games are graphics hacks of popular Famicom games of increasing graphical quality: Jump Car based on Bump 'n Jump a.k.a. "Buggy Popper", Racing Pioneer" and GP Race based on Road Fighter, Race One based on F-1 Race (with the Astro Boy theme song at the title screen), Omega Zone based on Galaga, Jewel Master based on Magic Jewelry from Huang Xinwei (itself a clone of Sega's Columns), Block Shock based on Arkanoid, and Balloon Boy 2 based on Balloon Fight.

Here's hoping that over time, all Jungletac games become available in their original versions! Our archive also includes extracted versions of each game. Three of them have alternate versions, with different title screens and different levels, that are enabled by initializing a memory location with a non-zero value. It's not known whether these can be activated from the Handy Boy's menu, but thanks to us providing them in extracted form, you no longer need to!

Bandai Gamepad

In 1997, Bandai released a Famiclone-based plug-and-play gamepad with ten board games on it. In addition to playing each game individually, it also features a Story Mode that lets you play a selection of six games in succession, grades and (presumably) presents you with a different ending depending on your performance. Story Mode saves your progress in a 256-byte EEPROM. This gamepad was quite rare even in Japan; one reason for this rarity could be that in 1997, Nintendo's Famicom patents had not yet expired, with the resulting legal problems preventing a wider distribution.


City Patrolman

The UM6578 was not just used in plug-and-play consoles, but also in cartridge-based Famiclones that play both Famicom games and 6578-enhanced games, such as Daidaixing's (or Timetop, for us Westerners). City Patrolman, one of these cartridge-based 6578-enhanced games, is a clone of Konami's lightgun-based arcade game Lethal Enforcers, of which we previously saw the Famicom port (renamed to Lethal Weapon). It's surprisingly fun to play, with the very grungy-sounding PCM samples and the music that is basically a medley of various film and television themes (including Airwolf) only adding to the hilarity.

Other 6578-enhanced Timetop games that have not yet been dumped include Baseball, Ping Pong and Tennis. If you're curious on how those cartridge look: here's a scan of City Patrolman. Fight back, boys!

At the time of this writing, only NintendulatorNRS emulates the UM6578 hardware. Its latest version (binary and source) can be downloaded from its dedicated page in the blog sidebar, if you want to have a blast trying those games.

➡Download the ROMs⬅

Credits to NewRisingSun for the emulation, krzysiobal for dumping City Patrolman, Frank Cifaldi for buying and Sean Riddle for dumping the Bandai Gamepad and the Handy Boy.

Waddy update: dumped 
Saturday, February 1, 2020, 08:23 - Dumps, 2020
Posted by MLX
Snow is lacking, at least here, unfortunately. As you can't go skiing nor build the yearly snowman, here's some ROMs to pass some time.

1500-in-1

A strange version of Golden Game 100-in-1 with some really odd graphical hacks of NROM games.

400-in-1

If you follow taizou on his twitter or pay attention to what's happening at the BGW headquarters, you may have heard of an obscure Inventor game called Waddy Boy that has had been planned to show up on a bunch of Plug and Play and multicart but was always replaced with something else (maybe for a good reason?). It turns out that it does exist and it did show up on some obscure and not so recent 400-in-1 compilation. The last update you may have seen was this one, "waddy update: located". As you'd guessed from the title of the blogpost, we've got a final update regarding it.
The 400-in-1 is Waixing's largest multicart to date (64 MiB), with a few other previously-undumped hacks besides Waddy Boy. Waddy Boy was made based on Spartan X's mapper 4 hack, which splits the screen at the wrong scanline, so we present a kind-of 'back-hack' back to Spartan X's original mapper 65.

The following extracts are included in the archive.


千禧年熱血大進擊 8 in 1 (SC-112)

This is just JY-112 with a more boring menu and operating on a more common mapper. Next.

1998 全新超強 黃金組合卡 7 in 1 (WF-001)

One not too bad multicart seemingly from J.Y. You can pick either DBZ2 or DBZ3, depending if you want to play the proper version or have a weird trip with some other NES games' backgrounds.

HEROS 新熱血總動員 8 in 1 (JY-207)

Having already a ton of Kunio 4-in-1 compilation and one 8-in-1, you would obviously guess that, if J.Y. was starting a new series, it was a requirement to have a Kunio compilation in it, right?

Hot-Blood 8-in-1 Funny Time (PA-01)

Some Kunio compilation from the 2000s. They were everywhere and they likely overflooded the market with those games.

1995 SUPER HIK 4 in 1 新系列獅子王组合卡 (JY-047)
We released the 1997 version some months back, but the 1995 version has the better other Donkey Kong game.

Download the ROMs

The latest version of NintendulatorNRS and the associated source can be downloaded on its dedicated page in the blog sidebar.

Special thanks to NewRisingSun, taizou and Yahweasel.

All I Want for Christmas is… Huang Xinwei 
Monday, December 23, 2019, 14:37 - Dumps, 2019
Posted by MLX
Or All Kinds Of Huang Xinwei for Christmas because that's fairly close to All kinds of Everything one wants at that time of the year, right?!
Fine… let's just say that our presents for this year are rather blocky: rectangular parallelepipeds, bare rectangles in the cosmos… and this very thing:        (Eeeeek!)

3D Block (1989) & Block Force

You have seen these games before, but if you have only seen them that way, then you haven't seen them at all! The original versions of these games have an unusual protection mechanism: part of the game logic resides in a PIC16C54 microcontroller that is protected against dumping. Normally, this type of protection is only seen on arcade games, such as Bubble Bobble. Thanks to the valiant efforts of CAPS0ff, we got the microcontroller ROMs, so the games can now be played properly in their original versions. Notice the cheesy raster effect at 3D Block's title screen!
What about all those ROMs in GoodNES 3.23b of these two games?
• "3D Block (Hwang Shinwei) [!].nes" and "Square Force (Unl) [!].nes" are good dumps of the original versions, but without the microcontroller ROMs included, without which these games cannot function. Use ours instead!
• "3D Block (RCM Group) [p1].nes" is a hack for the Bung Game Master that originally came on floppy disk that also included a fusemap for the Game Master's FPGA, and so does not work on emulators, either.
• "3D Block (RCM Group) [!].nes" is the re-release of 3D Block by RCM Group that no longer requires a microcontroller (and lacks the raster effect at the title screen).
• "3D Block (RCM Group) [f1].nes" modifies the previous ROM file to be playable on licensed PAL consoles.
• "Block Force (Hwang Shinwei).nes" is a multicart extract of RCM's Tetris Series Super 9-in-1 multicart that no longer requires the PIC, but also drops a part of the credits and the contact information on the options screen.

영어, 피라미드 (English, Pyramid)

You'd think we would have covered every companies that licensed games from Sachen? Of course not! There is one, very obscure business named Kuk Je Academy (국제 아카데미) from South Korea that licensed three educational games from them. Two of which were adapted for the local audience. Today we have their first title; a translated South Korean re-release of Sachen's Middle School English (動動腦 II). If you perform well at learning some basic english, you get to play some Pyramid!
This version additonally has a credits screen that the original did not have, if you wait at the title screen long enough. As for some trivia: the original Sachen version of this game was the first sighting of Pyramid --- that game's single-cartridge release (SA-009) came later!

方塊外傳 5合1 - Tetris Family 5-in-1

You have seen this menu before as well, because this is another variation of "Tetris Family 6-in-1" with just five games. Since this is very confusing, some explanation is called for:
RCM must originally have designed a 6-in-1 multicart with just 256 KiB of PRG data. The fifth game was to be Sachen's "Pyramid", with the Sachen logo replaced by an awkward-looking RCM logo. Apparently, RCM either became afraid of, or actually was subject to, a lawsuit from Sachen, so they hastily replaced the menu code to make "Pyramid" inaccessible. Instead of replacing the menu part of the 256 KiB of PRG data, they added a second 8 KiB PRG chip to the cartridge that sort-of replaced, or patched, the menu data at run-time. As a result, RCM's Tetris Family 6-in-1 exists in three versions:
* 6 games, fifth game is "Pyramid", sixth game is "Block Force". This is what you would get when just using the 256 KiB of PRG data without any replacement menu. No such cartridge has been seen in the wild so far.
* 5 games, fifth game is "Block Force", sixth game is inaccessible: This is what our fresh "Tetris Family 5-in-1" dump represents.
* 6 games, fifth game replaced with "Magic Jewelry": This is what the previous "Tetris Family 6-in-1 (GS-2004)" dump represented.

Tetris Family - 玩家 19-in-1 智瑟實典 (No 1683)

A multicart from the early 2000s that seems to want to relive the "glory" of the old RCM multicarts, but falls short due to missing copyrights and the addition of unrelated games.

1995 Super HiK 5-in-1 - 新系列米奇老鼠組合卡 (JY-048)

Another J.Y. multicart that we missed the last time. Its mapper is crazy, but the game selection is unremarkable.

BMX Simulator (B-S2)

Realtec 60-pin stand-alone release of Codemasters' NES port of one of their more well-known Commodore 64 games. Camerica only released it as part of their Quattro Sports 4-in-1 multicart and so did BIC. Realtec did save the day however.

美女拳 - Honey Peach

Yes, that game again. After studying the circuit board more closely, we found that all dumps of the game got the CHR bank order wrong. Here is the correctly-ordered ROM! Both NintendulatorNRS and recent (Dec 22, 2019) dev builds of Mesen emulate mapper 243 with the correct bank order. All other games that sometimes are set to mapper 243, such as Poker III: 5-in-1, really should use mapper 150 (SA-015 PCB)!
The game has a bug that occurs on real hardware as well, which causes one of the girls to display with glitched graphics. An improvement hack on Romhacking.net corrected that bug for the previous misordered ROM file, so we also included the bug-fixed version for the correctly-ordered ROM file as "[correct girl #4 CHR bank]".

➡Download the ROMs⬅

The latest version of NintendulatorNRS and the associated source can be downloaded on its dedicated page in the blog sidebar.

Special thanks to Aprk-Zero, CAPS0ff and NewRisingSun.

Waixing Dessert 
Saturday, November 16, 2019, 08:11 - Dumps, 2019
Posted by MLX
Here's the last large delivery for a while. We need some rest. You'll get bored if we keep going with this volume of releases!

1996 英語 CAI 3合1

This is the earliest Waixing game to be dumped, featuring an unseen logo variant. Apart from that, it is a rather unexciting collection of learning games. Cartridge provided by taizou.

西天取经 - Journey to the West

This game has been included in GoodNES 3.23b for years, but only as a hacked version, likely from being some kind of multicart extract, that would fail to run on an actual BNROM circuit board due to bus conflicts. Our fresh redump comes from an original cartridge provided by taizou.

Super 19-in-1 (VIP19)

A very late J.Y. multicart with an odd Donkey Kong titled Joe & Mac hack. The separate ROM of that piece of art is of course included in the archive.

FIFA International Soccer '96 (JY-060)

J-League Winning Goal hack by J.Y. Company. It's not the first FIFA game by J.Y. in fact, there's a 1995 print as well that lacks any ID.

FIFA International Soccer '97 (EL-001)

The same except that it happens in 1997 and this time, in the separate "EL" line of J.Y. that saw got about four different cartridges in it. Was "EL" chosen after this odd "Electonnic Suki" alias?

推倒胡麻將 (JY043) - Tuidaohu Mahjong

This is a J.Y. release of Kaiser's hack of the original Nintendo Mahjong game. The Kaiser version has been in GoodNES for some time as "Tui Do Woo Ma Jeung (Ch) [!].nes". It is not part of the original J.Y. line but rather the "late" one. It shows up in a line of cartridges with JY id that features many of the original J.Y. games as well as other unrelated & licensed games. So it may come from somebody claiming to be J.Y. instead of J.Y. themselves. The mapper differs from how most emulators emulate mapper 171 used for the Kaiser version; depending on which address bits are queried, both versions could run under the same mapper however. Therefore, until the original Kaiser board is analysed, we tentatively shall assign JY043 to mapper 171 as well.

西天取经 9-in-1

An updated reprint of the EW-010 multicart. "Updated" to change the menu colors and game order, correct a spelling error, remove the TXC logo from "Journey to the West", and correct the sound problems in 1943 that AlexSRMD described. Cartridge provided by taizou.

All of the following cartridges are soft or hard reset based. We figured a way to dump them with the proper hardware so why not add them to the menu?

瑪莉家族大集合 5-in-1
This multicart, by Ge De, features Somari as well as the most popular Mario hacks from this period. Games are switched on every power cycle, so press Shift-F4 to cycle through them.

1993 Heroes Series 4-in-1 (JY-001 rev0)

1994 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列激龜快打組合卡 (JY-001 rev1)

1994 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列兔寶寶組合卡 (JY-002)

1994 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列侏羅記公園組合卡 (JY-003)

1996 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列熱血專輯組合卡 (JY-004)

1995 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列熱血專輯組合卡 (JY-008)

1995 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列機器戰警组合卡 (JY-022)

1997 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列米奇老鼠Ⅲ组合卡 (JY-024 rev1)

1995 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列魂斗羅二代組合卡 (JY-038)

1995 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列真人快打组合金卡 (JY-039)
This reset-based multicart from Jingtai is special for being their only cartridge to contain the improved version of Mortal Kombat II with the game options scrolling upward on the title screen. Some background:
The source code snippets that can be found in the MKII part of this dump tell us that Hummer Team developed the game to run both on MMC3 clones as well as Jingtai's mapper 91; an assembler switch ("IF _mmc3") would produce the game for one or the other. Because mapper 91 can do scanline interrupts only every eighth scanline, the scrolling effect on the title screen was disabled in that variant, even as the sound effect indicates that it should have been there. Jingtai always put the mapper 91 version on all of their other stand-alone and multi-cartridges, likely because using that unusual mapper made it harder for other companies to pirate it. Kasheng did so anyway, putting out some rather glitchy MMC3 hacks that are notable not only for lacking the scrolling effect on the title screen (since the version they used as a basis did not have it), but with some visible shaking. When Jingtai later decided to put this game on the reset-based JY-039 multicart, they must have asked Hummer to send over the MMC3 version because among their reset-based circuit board designs, they only had MMC3 and MMC1. Our unscrupulous friends at Realtec later must have extracted this "good MMC3" version from JY-039 and put it on their own stand-alone cartridge with the "M-O9" cartridge code that Sanchez had dumped nine years ago as "Mortal Kombat II (Rev. B)(Unl) [!]". The mystery behind this improved MK2 version has finally been solved!

1995 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列蝙蝠俠Ⅲ组合强卡 (JY-040)

1995 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列洛克人Ⅲ组合卡 (JY-043)

1997 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列獅子王組合卡 (JY-047)

1996 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列超級飛狼組合卡 (JY-051)

1996 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列NBA藍球組合卡 (JY-057)

1996 Super HiK 4-in-1 - 新系列怪獸大決戰 (JY-058)

The latest version of NintendulatorNRS and its source can be downloaded from its dedicated page, accessed via the top left menu.

➡Download the ROMs⬅

Credits to NewRisingSun and taizou.

Tasty Multicarts 
Saturday, November 9, 2019, 13:05 - Dumps, 2019
Posted by MLX
Here's your weekly delivery of dumps, savor it, please.

GameStar Fun Educator 32-in-1

Yet another GameStar compilation of their educational stuff. They had some really high throughput of those in the early 2000s.

Super Cool Boy 4-in-1 (CB-4011)

At first we only thought ABAB was involved in the CB-4030+ cartridges but it seems in fact they're behind the a good chunk of the 40xx line, if not all of it. Here's one of these cartridge that doesn't have any of the Hummer Technology game but credits ABAB.

Super Cool Boy 4-in-1 (CB-4034)

This ABAB Soft cartridge had been dumped for years (it was the first one publicly available, in fact) but it was hacked to run on some other mapper, boo! Here's the original ROM. Stomp a crow and become a Panda Adventure master because yes, it's possible.

7-in-1 1993 Chess Series (JY-015)

An early J.Y. cart, at the time they were frequently doing themed multicart. JY-013 was a Mario 4-in-1, JY-014 is about Soccer. It was just logical that JY-015 would be about Chess (to balance out the Soccer, you know…). It features TXC's Chinese Chess with copyrights untouched. It's got a nice menu, by the way.

1995 Super HiK 8-in-1 (JY-050)

We previously released the 1997 instance. The earlier prints uses a completely different menu and PCB so here it is. Next.

1996 Soccer 6-in-1 (JY-082)

Yet another Ball selection from J.Y. about Soccer specifically. This one is kind of an alternate to JY-014 (Soccer 6-in-1, also) as the game proposed are somewhat different, it features, for example, Fifa 96 the J-League hack.

1996 Photo-gun 9-in-1 (JY-084)

Simple Zapper selection from J.Y. with the standard set of Zapper games. SC-130 is an updated version of JY-084 with some more advanced games.

Super 8-in-1 Gold Card Series (JY-085)

A collection of not so special games.

Super 8-in-1 Gold Card Series (JY-086)

Just so slightly better than before, with some games not so often sighted on multicarts like Kid Kool and Rockman 1.

1997 Super Game 8-in-1 (JY-111)

A small selection of licensed games that manages to offer more than just the typical NROM games.

1997 球類大進擊 8-in-1 (JY-112)

J.Y.'s attempt at a Kunio 8-in-1, may be the first to offer more than four. JY-207 is their second attempt. We'll get to that one at some later point maybe.

Super HiK 8-in-1 (SC-131)

The last J.Y. multicart of the original series, released approximately at the beginning of 2000, such an adventure for them. This cartridge notably retains the key elements of standard J.Y. menu and brags about its capacity. It doesn't use their proprietary ASIC, abandoned after SC-130 that was released in 1999 or so.

1996 Super HiK Gold Card 3-in-1 - 新系列强卡組合卡 (NT-707)
餓狼傳說超強 3-in-1 (EW-3004)

Three-in-one with Garō Densetsu Special, Super Mario Bros. 3 and a Cony Fighter. This exact same cartridge was also released by Ka Sheng as 1996 Super HiK Gold Card 3-in-1 (NT-707). Which came first? Nobody knows.

Gamguer 6-in-1 (PK-208)

A Korean multicart from the 2000s! It's mostly like the JY-2xx cartridges featuring Sonic, the Somari hack and REX' King of Fighters.

No. 44 Super 4-in-1

I hope the rest of the cartridges in this series have a better selection.

➡Download the ROMs⬅

The latest build and source of NintendulatorNRS can be obtained on its dedicated page, on the left pane.

Credits to Consolethinks and NewRisingSun.


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