Merry holidays seasons to those who celebrate or enjoy cozy geeky activities :)

Following our extensive coverage of Taiwanese releases in 2010-2011, partly due to help from Wenli who I visited in Taiwan, I've never stopped researching those games (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7). By now and from searching practically every day and contacting locals I have assembled a 160+ piece collection and still stumbling on new pieces. Those are recently acquired games that were not part of Wenli's collection:






Adventure Island / Màoxiǎn dǎo (冒險島) for the Sega/Aaronix SG-1000 which is MSX1 based and requires the DahJee 2 KB RAM Extension Adapter (or the Jumbo branded equivalent).



Zanac / Yínhé zhēng bà (銀河争覇) for the Sega/Aaronix SG-1000, also MSX1 based and requireing the DahJee 2 KB RAM Extension Adapter.




The Goonies / Qī bǎo qí móu (七寶奇謀) for the Sega/Aaronix SG-1000, also MSX1 based and requiring the 2 KB RAM Extension Adapter. Unlike the two above, this yellow series cartridges has an Aaronix bootup logo. A very charming game by Konami (I enjoy those exploratory screen by screen platformers from the mid 80's).

We have more!



Korean dump of Star Force (스타포스) for the SG-1000. I've dumped two distinct variations of the cartridge and both yield the same dump.

And finally some abnormally "late" release for Game Gear variants:



The US dump for Pete Sampras Tennis for the Game Gear.



And the Japanese V1 dump for (Ayrton Senna's) Super Monaco GP II (アイルトン・セナスーパーモナコＧＰＩＩ) . Somehow only V0 had been released, though an old Japanese blog has a CRC32 for V1. Ben Sittler dumped this first, and made me realize that my own Meisaku copy might have been a swap so I purchased another and realized the Meisaku version matched this new dump. Though it is also certainly possible that some Meisaku releases used the V0 cartridge.

This game notoriously had a main menu that looks flickering and odd on most emulators: it keeps alternating between two images at 60 FPS, relying on Game Gear screen persistence to create a nicer image.

Enjoy!

As is traditional, every year for the anniversary of the release of Phantasy Star (on 20th December 1987) we release an update to the retranslation. This year we have some minor updates to the game for everyone:

- Now you can access the options menu at any time
- You can now use a Mega Drive control pad, and all of the buttons work
- The number of battles in the overworld sections can now be reduced

Plus some script changes from our surprisingly enthusiastic Catalan-speaking SMS friends. As ever, we are happy to find new contributors to help maintain and update translations as well as target new languages.

Links:
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-CA
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-DE
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-EN
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-ES
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-FR
https://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-PT-BR

Hello!

It's a been a while since we released Sega 8-bit dumps, as our last release were new Sega AI findings. Today I worked toward catching up on old/unsorted prototypes dumps, and I'm happy to say we've got a whopping 7 new prototypes dumps available.



Maze Hunter 3-D prototype for the Master System



James Bond 007: The Duel prototype for the Game Gear



Jeopardy! prototype for the Game Gear



Tesserae prototype for the Game Gear



Madoh Monogatari III (魔導物語ＩＩＩ － 究極女王様) prototype for the Game Gear



Strider Returns (Journey from Darkness) prototype for the Game Gear



R.C. Grand Prix prototype for the Game Gear

Boards/cartridges photos attached.
Enjoy!

A followup to our Sega AI Computer: first dumps, system roms, scans, recordings & more post.

We have discovered new software:



Eigo no Uta (えいごのうた) Card 1 and 2. Part of English Wonder School series, comes on two cards + two cassettes... but we only could find the cards so far. They are dumped and were added to MAME recently (will in upcoming release) but with the missing cassettes the software is not properly emulated.

It's likely that this has another subtitle, just like Eigo De Game and Eigo De Ohanashi have longer titles, but those are only written on the game packaging and we haven't found it yet.



We have also discovered that Pinpon Numbers, Pinpon Music Rhythm and Pinpon Music Melody were released on White MyCards, likely in 1989 (but it might have been end of 1988). I don't own packaging, manual or overlay so cannot confirm exact date as written on manual yet.

Pinpon Numbers use the same ROM data, but the two others have updated versions on the MyCard.

The main https://www.smspower.org/SegaAI page has been updated with all downloads.

Last month was our 27th anniversary (!!!). We were unfortunately both busy to update the news but our yearly Competitions went on and very strongly:

* Main competition thread

19 coding/game entries!
* Alter Ego (SMS)
* Bomb Jack Remake (SMS)
* Crazy Pinball (SMS)
* Cut Man (SG)
* Dithering Demo (SMS)
* FullSex (US) - The Game (SMS)
* Find The Wordy Gems (SMS)
* Goblin Kart Rescue (SMS)
* Mai Nurse (SMS) and (GG)
* Land On My Base (SMS)
* Raposa Do Sol (SMS)
* River Strike (SMS)
* SMS VGM Player 2.0 (SMS)
* SN76489 TestRom (SMS) and (SG, GG)
* Spaghetti Numbers (SMS)
* Stygian Quest (SMS)
* Sushi Nights (SMS) and (GG)
* The Sword Of Stone (GG)
* YM-2413 TestRom (SMS)
(see results)

6 music entries!
* Battle Squadron (SMS VGM)
* Delight (SMS VGM)
* Doki Doki Heartstopper (SMS SMS+FM VGM)
* First Strike On 8 bits (SMS VGM)
* Last Escape (SMS VGM)
* supermodel. (SMS VGM)
(see results)

5 hacks entries!
* Barn 51 (AKMW hack)
* Gaylex Kidd in Rainbow World (AKMW hack)
* Mônica e a Sereia do Rio (Wonder Boy hack)
* Oh-No! More Lemmings (Lemmings hack)
* Scourge The Hedgehog (Sonic The Hedgehog hack)
(see results)

In addition, although we missed the typical March 27th date for rom releases, we have four new roms to share.



A new prototype for Blade Eagle 3-D for the Master System, dubbed "Proto 1". In 2005 we released a another prototype of Blade Eagle, now dubbed "Proto 0" for being an early prototype. The new prototype is closer to the final release.



Taiwanese version of Orguss for the SG-1000! Since my trip in Taiwan in 2010 when Wenli helped me uncover a whole world of Aaronix releases, I kept finding new ones but at a relatively slow pace. However we've been missing the Taiwanese-modified version of Orguss with a Chinese title screen. I kept looking for a regular Aaronix release, but only found alternate versions (one with a generic label showing 8 games artwork, holding a normal rom), never a regular Aaronix version. Some time ago I stumbled on a batch of Doki Doki Penguin Land cartridges... guess what, they contained the missing Orguss. It's possible that every Aaronix copy of Orguss was released with the wrong label?



In 2021 I started focusing more seriously on dumping Hung Tao Hsin (HTH) Game Gear releases, which are slightly modified SMS roms. So far we released 29 of them.

We now have HTH releases of Kenseiden / Jiàn shèng chuán (劍聖傳) / Jiàn shèng chuánshuō (劍聖傳説) for the Game Gear (running in SMS mode). There is a standalone HTH release and one as part of a 2 in 1 compilation with Ghouls'n Ghosts.

And Ghouls'n Ghosts / Jiàn shèng chuánshuō (劍聖傳説) for the Game Gear (running in SMS mode) So far I have only stumbled on the version from the 2-in-1 cartridge.

Enjoy!

Around late 1986, Sega released the “Sega AI Computer”. This is one of Sega’s least well known and rarest systems. Not much was known about this system apart from a small amount of information in Japanese and American flyers and press articles. The information we have is still piecemeal and may be partly inaccurate.

Today we are making public, for the first time: all system roms extracted from the Sega AI Computer, data dumps from 26 my-cards and 14 tapes, many scans and photographs, and in collaboration with MAME developers, an early working MAME driver allowing this computer to be emulated.

This is technically a 16-bit CPU computer but with many 8-bit era parts. It's quite an orphan computer in Sega history, and although outside of SMS Power normal scope, we decided to work on preserving it.







Please read details and find all downloads at:
https://www.smspower.org/SegaAI

Enjoy!

Santa claus somehow got sidetracked in the woods and arrived late this year, but we have three new prototypes with a focus on games that were renamed.





We have a Prototype of Fantasy Zone: The Maze for the Master System. Sega's interesting effort at creating a Pac-Man style arcade game using Fantasy Zone is actually a fun game on its own, perhaps shadowed by the comparison with mainline Fantasy Zone titles (in Japan the game was called "Opa Opa", but US/Europe were less scrupulous in using the Fantasy Zone brand to market it).





A Prototype of Wonder Boy for the Game Gear. Late prototypes in the USA where sometimes distributed in regular cartridge forms, with small-form EPROM chips. The game was eventually renamed to "Revenge of Drancon" for the US market but this cartridge proudly says "Wonder Boy" on label and title screen.






Mentioned in 1994 magazines as Global Golf, CodeMasters 3D golf effort carrying a 8 KB ram chip was eventually released as "Ernie Els Golf". It turns out that in their usual fashion of inundating medias with sample cartridges, CodeMasters created a fully packaged sample set which we spotted in 2012 (thread). Here's the dump for Prototype Global Golf for the Game Gear !

Please note that CodeMasters own checksum (which appears when holding both 1+2 buttons during boot) is faulty on this version for some reason but the game itself runs correctly.

Enjoy the last few days of 2023 :)

Following on our March 2023 and August 2023 releases of newly emulated Korean multicarts, here are some more!

The work has been conducted mostly by Ben Sittler and Bock.
We have many more things lined up, but it's been tremendously challenging to try to make sense of bootleg multicart releases in term of e.g. naming convention, mapper reverse engineering, emulation.

Today we have 6 new releases, totaling 349 games(**)
(**) Marketing stunt, there are lots of duplicates!

Most of those games are using new mappers/circuit board.
Emulators which have put effort at supporting those include:
- MEKA 2023-08-26 (with an update today)
- Emulicious.
- CEGA.
If you have an emulator author, please consider supporting multicarts releases! We hope that other emulators will follow suit. None of those release will work on traditional flash-carts, but individual games may be extracted.

(1)



128 Hap (128합) for the Master System / Samsung Gam*Boy.

This is quite a feat to finally release it, as it is actually the first dump that Ben worked on and very eagerly documented in this topic and this other topic. In a way, the gateway leading Ben to work on more Korean multi-cart :)

The reason this wasn't released before is we had an issue with naming it...



Our copy of the cartridge is damaged and we don't have a proper label for it! For a while we hoped we would stumble on physical or in-rom data giving this a specific name. I scoured thousands of photos in my archives scrapped from auctions and misc pages, and found evidence of 128-in-1 multicart for SMS but upon further research we could tell it was a different cart with different contents. So eventually we went for what's displayed in the main menu "128 Hap".

(2)





11 Hap Gam-Boy (11합 겜보이) for the Master System / Samsung Gam*Boy
https://www.smspower.org/Games/11HapGamBoy-SMS

I first discovered this cartridge while traveling in Hokkaido to visit my friend Masato in 2011. It was an intense dumping session where I tried to grab as much data as possible, but for many games we didn't get to fully emulate the mapper until later. This is now done.

Ben also spotted an equivalent Megadrive cartridge (running in SMS mode) called "11 Hap Super Gam-Boy (11합 슈퍼겜보이)". We weren't able to dump this one yet but based on visible contents it seems very likely that the binary contents is identical.

(3) (4)







Super Game World 30 Hap (Super Game World 30합) / Super World 30 Hap (Super World 30합) for the Master System / Samsung Gam*Boy .

Two alternate versions of essentially a same compilation. We found two labels and contents is very slightly different. What appears to be the later version has a label saying "Super World 30 Hap" (instead of "Super Game World 30 Hap"), which is inconsistent with all other releases in this series. Contents differences analyzed by Ben:

Two variants exists, with a 8552 bytes difference. "There are clearly several differences, and at least some of them indicate it's likely two separate iterations. There are some addresses moved in the MSX BIOS replacement+menu region though not many, and also some stray assembler source remains in "Super Game World 30 Hap" that was overwritten in "Super World 30 Hap". Also, there is a whole different version of the MSX Bomberman game (폭탄인간 / pogtan in'gan, i.e. "bomb man") in "Super World 30 Hap". From the Bomberman title screen in "Super Game World 30 Hap" only button 2 works to start the game, whereas in "Super World 30 Hap" only button 1 works to start the game. Given button 1 on the Gam*Boy controller is also marked "Start", I suspect "Super World 30 Hap" is the later one."

We labelled the dumps respectively "Super Game World 30 Hap [v0] (KR).sms" and "Super Game World 30 Hap [v1] (KR).sms" to be consistent with our ROM images naming conventions.

(5)





Super Multi Game - Super 75 in 1 for the Master System / Samsung Gam*Boy.

(This is part of the same "Super Multi Game" series for which we released the more ambitious Super Multi Game - Super 125 in 1 back in March, along with a nice scan of the cover that could obtain.)

(6)





Super Game World75 Hap (Super Game World 75합) for the Master System / Samsung Gam*Boy.

From the same unnamed team who brought us Super Game World 30 Hap and Super Game World 260 Hap, this series is recognizable by their creative use of graphics and music in multicart menus.

Enjoy!

We are happy to be hitting a frontier of niche releases here, making very tangible progress on Korean multicarts. Many of those cartridges have taken decades to be dumped and emulated properly. We will have more soon.

If you can help us acquire any Korean title, please reach out!.

Following on our March 2023 releases of Korean multicarts, here's a new bunch.

The work has been conducted mostly by Ben Sittler with support from me Bock.
We have many more things lined up, but it's been tremendously challenging to try to make sense of bootleg multicart releases in term of e.g. naming convention. As Ben has been exploring Game Gear releases (more on that in the future) it has been become clear we still haven't found the right way to label some of them, as they are lots of naming conflicts, or difficult to label releases. We're doing our best and it's pretty exciting to be covering those rarely charted territories of retro-game preservation!

Today we have 8 new releases, totaling 489 games(**)
(**) Marketing stunt, there are lots of duplicates!

Most of those games are using new mappers/circuit board.
Emulators which have put effort at supporting those include:
- MEKA 2023-08-26 (with an update today)
- Emulicious.
- CEGA.
If you have an emulator author, please consider supporting multicarts releases! We hope that other emulators will follow suit. None of those release will work on traditional flash-carts, but individual games may be extracted.

(1)
Let's start humble but stylish:






Our first release is 2 Hap in 1 (Moai-ui bomul, David-2) / 2合 IN 1 (모아이의 보물, 다비드-2) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System released by Hwasung Computer Co. Ltd, featuring Moai no Hibou and David-II.
Also see Ben's forum post about dumping this and photos.

(2)





Next up we have Zemina 4-in-1 (Q-Bert, Sports 3, Gulkave, Pooyan) / 큐버트 스포츠３겔케이브 퓨얀 for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System. This doesn't actually have an explicit name, the label only provides the 4 game names, but in the vein of trying to make senses of bootleg releases we are prefixing our game page and filenames with "Zemina 4-in-1".
Also see Ben's forum post about dumping this and photos.

(3)






More Zemina branded multicart!
Zemina's Best 88 for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System, packed with early SMS titles and MSX1 ported titles.
About see Ben's github post about dumping this and photos.

(4) (5)
If you split the "Best 88" ROM dump in two in turns out that each half can act as an independent multicart! They were programmed to do so, so the code in the first-half scans for available contents and display a different menu depending on the presence of the second half of that.

First half is Zemina's Best 39 for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System.
and second half is Zemina's Best 25 for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System.

Here's the thing..
We have evidence that Best 25 exists as a standalone cartridge:


But we haven't found an original yet. We however don't yet have evidence that Best 39 exists as a standalone cartridge. Time will tell, but we are mentioning that clearly on the game page: for has it has been extracted as the standalone first-half of Best 88.

(6)





We have A Korean release of Tank Battalion for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System. Note that while the Korean adaptation was adapted for the Master System (which has the extra RAM the SG-1000 doesn't have), the Taiwanese adaptation which we released for the SG-1000 a while ago relies on the Taiwan-only DahJee RAM expansion adapter as Taiwanese market was running on SG-1000 II back then vs Korean market was always on Master System only.

(7) (8)
We're not done!







We have Super Game 150 (슈퍼게임150) and Super Game 180 (슈퍼게임180) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Sega Master System.
Unusually note that Super Game 150 is 2 whooping megabytes while Super Game 180 is "only" 1 megabyte: the earlier actually carries more unique games.
See forum threads about dumping Super Game 150 and more details..

Unlike several others multi-game cartridges, other We don't yet have menu indexes for Super Game 150 and Super Game 180. Your help would be appreciated there!

Reminder that you can find a handy list of our releases at https://www.smspower.org/Dumps/Releases.

Enjoy!