[Tootai]

So here's the prototype rom i've been meaning to release:

http://personal.inet.fi/koti/wigwam/Double Dragon 2 - The Revenge (J) (Prototype).nes

I don't know if there's anything different about it than the title screen so dig around and let me know!

[B00daW]

Here is a binary and ASCII comparison of the two dumps.

I guess the binary comparison serves no point to most people other than to act as a marker for quantitative difference. (Please disregard the header information.)

In the ASCII comparison, you can tell that they had already started localizing the game for America before the game was ready to be released in Japan. Also, the SAMPLE information is present in both. So we can also determine that a lot of those byte for byte changes are sample related and were planned to be edited out later.

We can determine there are subtle script changes, and we know for a fact that there are no graphical differences.

I would doubt that there are even many bug fixes done between the two versions. The game is playable smoothly all the way through.

(As for gameplay, a little technique is to jump a lot and do the rising knee as much as possible. Also learn to time your jumps and know how far they are. Those are the only techniques needed throughout the game except for the ninja twins and the final boss. For the ninja twins, use your jumping spinning kick. For the final boss use a combination of both and work on more critical timing.)

I've beaten both games, but I *hate* that NEStopia doesn't allow for dual emulator instances and haven't made a game by game comparison like old times.

--

To those wishing to do what I did in the future, Windows has a command called 'fc'.

Binary compare:

fc /b file1.nes file2.nes >compbin.txt

ASCII compare:

fc /l file1.nes file2.nes >compasc.txt

[LocalH]

To be honest, FC sucks. You should get Hex Workshop and use it's resynchronizing compare, it's pretty good at matching up blocks of data that are not at the same location in the ROM but are otherwise identical, and can tell you where data was inserted or removed.

[B00daW]

[Johnny Undaunted]

[B00daW]

[Skrybe]

Mirrored. I've noticed the Stage 2 helicopter doesn't shoot at you in the prototype, at least not while I was playing on Easy. In the final, it shoots at you at all difficulties.

Thanks again for dumping this, Tootai!

[B00daW]

[Tootai]

Thanks for letting me know about the helicopter. Some guy on No-intro mentioned something about cheat codes being included but he hasn't elaborated further on that yet. Anyone find those yet?