[goldenband]

I've been curious for a while about the Game Boy title X (Ekkusu / エックス), which was never released in the US. Nosing about on one of the ROM sites, I found an English-language prototype under the title "Lunar Chase". It's 16 KB smaller than the X ROM I have (240 vs. 256 KB), and doesn't seem to work properly in the emulators I've tried -- after the game starts up, the sequence that ends with the Captain telling me "Here is your first mission" just loops endlessly.

Opening the proto up with a hex editor, it looks like there's a ton of English text in there, including the text that's apparently supposed to follow the Captain's comments (at 0x17BD1):

"Welcome to Lunar Chase ! I am your Captain. Here is your first mission. This is a power crystal. Collect this crystal and return to the base. This is the base. This is an enemy tank. Chase it closely. Tanks are very fast ! GOOD LUCK!!!"

Is my emulator working incorrectly, or is all this stuff inaccessible through normal gameplay? I read something along the way that Lunar Chase was essentially a tech demo, but the amount of text in the ROM suggests that it was much further along than that -- see 0x12C7F through 0x13789, for instance.

Anyway, if anyone knows more about the proto, or can verify whether it does the same thing on real hardware (or a better emulator), I'm all ears. I've been hoping for a translation of this one for some time, and the fact that this exists would seem a huge boon -- assuming, that is, that there's some parallel structuring between the two ROM versions and text contents.

[Evan]

The prototype originates from a bunch of documents and binaries that were given to SNES emulator developers, along with Star Fox 2. Initially, everyone thought it was a SNES prototype, and that it didn't work because it was an early Super FX demo (two Super FX demos were included in the pack). Later, it because apparent it was a Game Boy prototype. The Lunar Chase prototype is probably just a tech demo.

[goldenband]

Thanks for your reply, Evan. The idea of it being "just a tech demo" doesn't make sense to me, though, because there's tons of unused text in the ROM -- mission instructions, item descriptions, shop text, etc. -- and it's only 16K smaller than the final binary. It looks like they were a good ways into the game.

Does the loop I described happen in all emulators, and/or on real hardware? If it does, then it really can't be a tech demo, because the tech never gets demo-ed!

To me, it looks like it's either a damaged ROM, a bad dump, or a case where the devs have branched around tons of code for some reason. But that's all assuming that my emulator (KiGB 2.0.4, since I'm on a Mac) isn't completely messing it up.

[ICEknight]

Interesting, so that's the first-person "Lunar Chase" that was displayed at the 1991 CES.

[etabeta]

is the checksum of this English proto 0xcd555712? if so, the problem is in the emulator: MESS emulates it with no issues

[goldenband]

[etabeta]

my checksum was simply generated by crc32 in UNIX. Anyway, the MD5 matches the file I was using, so maybe you want to give MESS a try, since it works natively on Mac and Linux

(just find the bios and run "./mess gameboy -cart /path_to_the_file/x.gb" where "/path_to_the_file/" can be either absolute or relative as you like. on a mac you might also want to use the "-video opengl" option)

[goldenband]

Thanks for checking the MD5 and confirming we've got the same ROM. I have an old version of MacSDLMESS that I tried before my last post, but it crashes on the ROM with a strange error ("Must specify sensical buffer/length").

I'll mess around (pun not intended!) and see what I can get working. Thanks again!

EDIT: Aha, a newer version seems to be working. Good deal, I'll check it out.

[Evan]

[goldenband]