10-29-2023, 07:16 AM
Had a bit of extra time lately to get some rips done.
There's only one thing remotely Halloween (the closest is Super Cauldron however is still WIP) but we start off with an old friend, a system that I used to be known for...
Genesis
Super Spin
Still got it! A cancelled Zyrinx game (Sub-Terrania, Red Zone) but it's just a tech demo at this point mainly showing off the smooth rotation and the polygonal looking bridges. Supports both single player and split screen 2 player. Oh and two Jesper Kyd songs too, probably one of his first Mega Drive work. Raven actually isn't used in game so found something unused along with the complete debug font and some sprites that I'm not sure whether they are roadside objects or weapons... Judging by the HUD the game would have been a top down weapons based racing game with the ability to boost but only the racing is currently coded.
The HUD was ripped over a year ago, shows how significantly behind I am when it comes to the backlog...
Don't expect too much more... In the past, would have loved to do more Genesis rips however health and time means that... not possible now. Well especially since quite a lot of the unripped games are either sports, hard to rip or specialist genres. To think at one point there were plans for a Genesis Ripping Thread like the NES, SNES and Master System ones. It's mainly going to be title screens, maybe a few things here and there but nothing big.
Even in terms of title screens, the palettes have to be hacked because changing the black to pink only affects the first palette in BizHawk while sometimes... actually more often, a developer uses black with a black background on the other palette entries. Combat Cars and Ferias Frustradas do Pica-Pau (Woody Woodpecker) are two examples but there are plenty more. Come to think of it, some Amstrad CPC games also have the black background while the sprites use black in case people wonder why my rips have the background being either "pastel magenta" pink or pastel green.
Game Boy
Pro Mahjong Tsuwamono GB 2
Sometimes seeing a game on the site that's been in a recent update gives ideas to rip.
Usually I would say some obscure fact about the game except that I'm no good at all at mah-jong or any card based game (the only mah-jong related thing that I can somewhat play is mah-jong solitaire aka Shanghai but that's more of a matching game). Only thing really is that the publisher was connected to organised crime.
ATV Racing
Wanted to rip this ages ago but most GB emulators don't support the game due to using an unlicensed mapper (either doesn't detect the cart at all, tries to detect the cart and then crashes, detects the signature but crashes before the Rocket Games logo shows up or just plain crashes the emulator). I had to use hhugboy that pretty much is the GB emulator for unlicensed and bootlegged games and there's no palette viewer but... Did some research and long story short, it can be fixed to boot up in other emulators just like what I had to do for the John Madden Football prototype regarding GB headers. Then it turned out that it was black using a black background if I ripped it the usual way... sigh...
Unlike most bootlegs, these were sold in retail in the UK and some info here. Could be the Mandela effect or something but do recall HMV selling them for a short time. Had the Space Invasion game and didn't really like it.
Race Time
This one is compressed in the ROM but luckily the cars are loaded into the tile viewer.
Pocket Smash Out
Breakout clone only with anime/manga pictures and ear piercing music. The first one looks either fan art, hand drawn or a scan but the others are pretty much screen captures with varying results in terms of the conversion. Remember this was around 2000-2001 and wouldn't have been as easy as it is now for sourcing. I don't know what anime series or film they are from... Thought that there were from Ninja Scroll or Kenshin considering the era and the feudal appearance but don't look like it to me... When this came out, anime/manga was pretty niche outside of the likes of Pokémon and even something like Dragon Ball Z took off in the early 2000s especially in the UK (Ghost in the Shell and Akira were sort of well known). Nowadays, a completely different story...
Oh and this was sold in retail, sometimes bundled with Race Time. Very lucky that this was under the radar otherwise the anime producers would have sued Rocket Games ASAP.
The 9th picture (the redheaded samurai) kept palette glitching in game, one time there was a white square and another a glitch so it shows that this was an amateur developed game.
As for the other Rocket Games... Can't get very far in Karate Joe. Full Time is a hack of Sensible Soccer (the give away is that the title screen is still in the ROM) while Hang Time is a hack of Tip Off (again the title screen is still there and ironically plenty of "licensed by Nintendo" graphics), both of these were enhanced to color and changed the music. Also Full Time and Hang Time were "developed" by the same people as Race Time that does wonder whether Race Time comes from a different source. It's weird that one is compressed but Full Time and Hang Time aren't. Not doing Painter or Space Invasion.
Amstrad
Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters
Gabrielle
Another early Ubisoft game. As the notes on the sheet say, this game suffers from colour clashing and can show garbage as a death animation but also suffers from broken sprites.
Darkman
Closest thing to a Halloween rip... I really can't get very far at this game at all and is the case of all the Darkman sprites are loaded in the graphics viewer.
Shufflepuck Cafe
A looooooong time ago, I was going to rip the Sharp X68000 version of this game but somehow never made a sheet or any progress. Forgot about it until discovering that there was an Amstrad version of this game.
Sadly this game suffers from compression meaning that the paddles, some parts of the portraits and the background cannot be ripped. Like Princess Bejin is only missing her hair but Skip Fenney only shows his face on the graphics viewer. I also tried CPCEC, another copy of the game and it's the same...
Renegade 3: The Final Chapter
Final Imagine published game, final game in the Renegade series (Kunio-kun lives though) and also one of my final beat 'em up rips... Ended in a whimper is all that I can say...
(It was planned to be one of my final rips in general but progress was a bit easier to finish than others in the backlog, mainly due to that all the enemies are stored in memory on a 6128 model.)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Surprised that I ripped this so quickly... Then again the game is more or less 3 rounds with the T-1000, two avoid the obstacles stages (that uses a frame buffer for some of the sprites) and two bonus mini games. As the saying goes, good graphics don't always make a good game. Mainly because there's not much game. Also have you noticed that the Terminator doesn't look like Arnie? I don't think Ocean was able to get the rights to his likeness for the Spectrum/Amstrad versions hence the T-800 that was in the other versions becomes the T-101.
Airborne Ranger
A classic on the C64, forgotten on the Amstrad. One of those where the player and the enemy use the same sprites. More common than you think.
Strider 2
Strider now with a transforming mech! From what I've read this started off being an original game on the Atari ST but the higher ups at US Gold wanted the game to be like Strider as it had placeholder graphics, programmer got frustrated, US Gold approved it as a Strider sequel and the programmer left Tiertex. Besides US Gold were known for arcade ports and licenses so the original game would have been altered to tie in with something anyway. At least the Amstrad version looks much better than the Strider port. Oh and there's a lost GX4000 version but probably would have been more or less the same.
As for the main character himself, it's not Hiryu or Hinjo (used in the Genesis game). The packaging mostly describes him as "the warrior" outside of one reference where he is just called Strider. Oh and thank goodness for level select cheats and the graphics loaded into memory.
Army Moves
One of the mysteries of life is why some difficult games are easy to rip while easier games are much difficult to rip? Another mystery is that the idea of playing as a jeep and a helicopter was later used in Silkworm but I highly doubt that Tecmo were even aware of Spanish developed games for them to get the idea.
Rick Dangerous
Ditto...
Rick Dangerous 2
Ditto... Not doing any more from this game... The icon is as far as I can go...
Ice Breaker
Imagine RoadBlasters as a top down game but in a bobsleigh and the Spanish level of difficulty.
WIP wise; there's some Spanish and French Amstrad games left to do, still no progress done on Burnin' Rubber, Operation Wolf and Thunderbolt. Westphaser has a bit more done. There's also some late commercial era Amstrad games that I'm saving for later. Getting closer to the sunset now...
Slowly getting Daley Thompson's Super Test ripped. I only have the penalties and tug of war left to do. The rest are ripped however they are incomplete (the cycling doesn't have the background due to not showing up on the graphics viewer, the diving is missing a sprite, the ski jump is missing the snow ball sprites). All I can say is thank goodness there's a level select cheat in this game unlike Hyper Sports.
Doomsday Blues is scrapped due to unable to get out of the cell door even when following a guide. Did however discover an Amstrad game that I can rip, one that was so influential that a YouTuber got his name from this game. Playing it you can say that it is like Shadow of the Beast if it was made on the CPC, at least the first level. About 3/4 done of the player as of writing.
C64
I was thinking of doing The Simpsons as a surprise and had already exported most of the sprites of Homer and Marge however someone had nicely ripped from that game. It would have been a struggle anyway... Did have plans to re-rip arcade Homer as a bookend but my declining skills, alas it wasn't meant to be.
Moto X Simulator
The return of the Dark Souls of racing. Seem to have a habit of ripping the same games on different platforms.
Also the game name on the C64 version is confusing. It says Moto X on the cover, Moto X Simulator on the loading screen/manual, Motocross on the title screen/tape and each place calls it a different name. Archive for X, Mobygames for X Simulator, Motocross for the Italian Ready64, scene groups and the audio SID file. Lemon64 also can't decide between Moto X Simulator or Motocross... Doesn't help that there was an earlier game called Motocross on the C64 by a different company. At least the original Spectrum and Amstrad versions just call it Motocross Simulator throughout the game but even then the packaging is just as confusing.
Knuckle Busters
Annoying beat 'em up that takes around 16-20 hits to kill an enemy that then respawns straight after and the maze level design without a map yet... has a great soundtrack with a 16 minute+ song. Seems to be inspired by the arcade game Knuckle Joe and the prototype version has the main character looking more closer rather than the American football player look of the final. It was one that I wanted to do with the older set up but the game didn't load, VICE is a lot more compatible in terms of emulation.
While the sprites were loaded onto a savestate, getting the palettes meant playing through the game... Original tape? Not very far, only Deke and the first enemy. A trainer version with 3 cheats? A bit further with the alt palettes of the first enemy and just the second one, stuck because of getting the keys. A "hacked" version by HackerSoft offering 25 cheats making the game sort of a debug mode? Got the last enemy and managed to "complete" the game.
Knuckle Buster (Prototype)
Thought might as well rip the prototype version with completely different graphics.
Subway Vigilante
More like Underground Renegade... Partially ripped during a power cut.
Dick Tracy
Infamously released unfinished. Disney was going to publish it but it got cancelled along with the Apple II version that's still missing when they realised that the movie wasn't doing as well as they hoped. As a guess, I'll say around 70% in terms of the art with touch ups needed but probably just over 60% complete overall (the levels are there but obviously missing content, no bosses in this game and apparently the game was meant to scroll). Since the Amiga version was "finished", Titus picked up the rights and converted the game to systems that were popular in Europe such as the Atari ST, Spectrum, Amstrad, even the GX4000 got a version. All Titus had done for the C64 version was to add a soundtrack, a splash screen and put it on tape* since it would have been disk only in the US but then again outside of a couple of games, the C64 version of their games were the lowest on the food chain for them. This was the same company that did a sprite hack of Crazy Cars 1 and released it as Crazy Cars 2 while the other systems got a different game.
* - Funnily enough there is a bug on the tape version where if you get a Game Over and by choosing either No on a continue or losing all your lives, it loads the rest of the tape. Eventually it loads what was done for the ending and tries to access the disk drive if one is connected.
Since it's unfinished, it means that there are unused sprites because the moves and the enemies weren't programmed. Unlike other rips that are out there of these sprites, it's not from a .jpg and are freshly ripped from a VICE snapshot using SpritePad. Oh and since it was originally developed in the US, the default is NTSC palette rather than the expected PAL palette.
Match Day
aka Daley's Thompson's Football at least on the C64. Also one buggy game (teleporting players, players who aren't suppose to be outside the goal area show up, players in between the goal posts, yellow ball that breaks up in half).
At least International Karate is out of the window as a snapshot only loads what is on screen... I think the only ways to rip this game are either really know the game inside out making a massive amount of snapshots or to make a C64 graphics tool that can view from tape/disk images (both C64 ripper and SpritePad only do savestates).
I'll say now that there's more C64 games on the way. Kung-Fu Master, both Rally Cross games, hopefully Out Run some point in November, hopefully Track & Field and the two Yie Ar Kung Fu games at least in terms of Oolong/Lee Young.
There's only one thing remotely Halloween (the closest is Super Cauldron however is still WIP) but we start off with an old friend, a system that I used to be known for...
Genesis
Super Spin
Cars
HUD
Still got it! A cancelled Zyrinx game (Sub-Terrania, Red Zone) but it's just a tech demo at this point mainly showing off the smooth rotation and the polygonal looking bridges. Supports both single player and split screen 2 player. Oh and two Jesper Kyd songs too, probably one of his first Mega Drive work. Raven actually isn't used in game so found something unused along with the complete debug font and some sprites that I'm not sure whether they are roadside objects or weapons... Judging by the HUD the game would have been a top down weapons based racing game with the ability to boost but only the racing is currently coded.
The HUD was ripped over a year ago, shows how significantly behind I am when it comes to the backlog...
Don't expect too much more... In the past, would have loved to do more Genesis rips however health and time means that... not possible now. Well especially since quite a lot of the unripped games are either sports, hard to rip or specialist genres. To think at one point there were plans for a Genesis Ripping Thread like the NES, SNES and Master System ones. It's mainly going to be title screens, maybe a few things here and there but nothing big.
Even in terms of title screens, the palettes have to be hacked because changing the black to pink only affects the first palette in BizHawk while sometimes... actually more often, a developer uses black with a black background on the other palette entries. Combat Cars and Ferias Frustradas do Pica-Pau (Woody Woodpecker) are two examples but there are plenty more. Come to think of it, some Amstrad CPC games also have the black background while the sprites use black in case people wonder why my rips have the background being either "pastel magenta" pink or pastel green.
Game Boy
Pro Mahjong Tsuwamono GB 2
Portraits
Sometimes seeing a game on the site that's been in a recent update gives ideas to rip.
Usually I would say some obscure fact about the game except that I'm no good at all at mah-jong or any card based game (the only mah-jong related thing that I can somewhat play is mah-jong solitaire aka Shanghai but that's more of a matching game). Only thing really is that the publisher was connected to organised crime.
ATV Racing
ATV
Wanted to rip this ages ago but most GB emulators don't support the game due to using an unlicensed mapper (either doesn't detect the cart at all, tries to detect the cart and then crashes, detects the signature but crashes before the Rocket Games logo shows up or just plain crashes the emulator). I had to use hhugboy that pretty much is the GB emulator for unlicensed and bootlegged games and there's no palette viewer but... Did some research and long story short, it can be fixed to boot up in other emulators just like what I had to do for the John Madden Football prototype regarding GB headers. Then it turned out that it was black using a black background if I ripped it the usual way... sigh...
Unlike most bootlegs, these were sold in retail in the UK and some info here. Could be the Mandela effect or something but do recall HMV selling them for a short time. Had the Space Invasion game and didn't really like it.
Race Time
Battle Racer
Blue Bug
Brazilica
Burning Rubber
Desert Turbo
Flame Thrower
Jade Racer
Magenta
Purple Fury
Scorpion
This one is compressed in the ROM but luckily the cars are loaded into the tile viewer.
Pocket Smash Out
Backgrounds
Paddle, Ball & Powerup
Breakout clone only with anime/manga pictures and ear piercing music. The first one looks either fan art, hand drawn or a scan but the others are pretty much screen captures with varying results in terms of the conversion. Remember this was around 2000-2001 and wouldn't have been as easy as it is now for sourcing. I don't know what anime series or film they are from... Thought that there were from Ninja Scroll or Kenshin considering the era and the feudal appearance but don't look like it to me... When this came out, anime/manga was pretty niche outside of the likes of Pokémon and even something like Dragon Ball Z took off in the early 2000s especially in the UK (Ghost in the Shell and Akira were sort of well known). Nowadays, a completely different story...
Oh and this was sold in retail, sometimes bundled with Race Time. Very lucky that this was under the radar otherwise the anime producers would have sued Rocket Games ASAP.
The 9th picture (the redheaded samurai) kept palette glitching in game, one time there was a white square and another a glitch so it shows that this was an amateur developed game.
As for the other Rocket Games... Can't get very far in Karate Joe. Full Time is a hack of Sensible Soccer (the give away is that the title screen is still in the ROM) while Hang Time is a hack of Tip Off (again the title screen is still there and ironically plenty of "licensed by Nintendo" graphics), both of these were enhanced to color and changed the music. Also Full Time and Hang Time were "developed" by the same people as Race Time that does wonder whether Race Time comes from a different source. It's weird that one is compressed but Full Time and Hang Time aren't. Not doing Painter or Space Invasion.
Amstrad
Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters
Jake
Duke
Gabrielle
Gabrielle
Another early Ubisoft game. As the notes on the sheet say, this game suffers from colour clashing and can show garbage as a death animation but also suffers from broken sprites.
Darkman
Darkman
Closest thing to a Halloween rip... I really can't get very far at this game at all and is the case of all the Darkman sprites are loaded in the graphics viewer.
Shufflepuck Cafe
Puck
Intro & Menu
A looooooong time ago, I was going to rip the Sharp X68000 version of this game but somehow never made a sheet or any progress. Forgot about it until discovering that there was an Amstrad version of this game.
Sadly this game suffers from compression meaning that the paddles, some parts of the portraits and the background cannot be ripped. Like Princess Bejin is only missing her hair but Skip Fenney only shows his face on the graphics viewer. I also tried CPCEC, another copy of the game and it's the same...
Renegade 3: The Final Chapter
Renegade
Prehistoric Zone Enemies
Egyptian Zone Enemies
Medieval Zone Enemies
Future Zone Enemies
Final Imagine published game, final game in the Renegade series (Kunio-kun lives though) and also one of my final beat 'em up rips... Ended in a whimper is all that I can say...
(It was planned to be one of my final rips in general but progress was a bit easier to finish than others in the backlog, mainly due to that all the enemies are stored in memory on a 6128 model.)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
T-101
T-1000
Surprised that I ripped this so quickly... Then again the game is more or less 3 rounds with the T-1000, two avoid the obstacles stages (that uses a frame buffer for some of the sprites) and two bonus mini games. As the saying goes, good graphics don't always make a good game. Mainly because there's not much game. Also have you noticed that the Terminator doesn't look like Arnie? I don't think Ocean was able to get the rights to his likeness for the Spectrum/Amstrad versions hence the T-800 that was in the other versions becomes the T-101.
Airborne Ranger
Player & Enemy
Plane
A classic on the C64, forgotten on the Amstrad. One of those where the player and the enemy use the same sprites. More common than you think.
Strider 2
Strider
Bosses
Strider now with a transforming mech! From what I've read this started off being an original game on the Atari ST but the higher ups at US Gold wanted the game to be like Strider as it had placeholder graphics, programmer got frustrated, US Gold approved it as a Strider sequel and the programmer left Tiertex. Besides US Gold were known for arcade ports and licenses so the original game would have been altered to tie in with something anyway. At least the Amstrad version looks much better than the Strider port. Oh and there's a lost GX4000 version but probably would have been more or less the same.
As for the main character himself, it's not Hiryu or Hinjo (used in the Genesis game). The packaging mostly describes him as "the warrior" outside of one reference where he is just called Strider. Oh and thank goodness for level select cheats and the graphics loaded into memory.
Army Moves
Derdhal
Enemies
Explosions
One of the mysteries of life is why some difficult games are easy to rip while easier games are much difficult to rip? Another mystery is that the idea of playing as a jeep and a helicopter was later used in Silkworm but I highly doubt that Tecmo were even aware of Spanish developed games for them to get the idea.
Rick Dangerous
Rick Dangerous
Enemies
Items
Ditto...
Rick Dangerous 2
Rick Dangerous
Ditto... Not doing any more from this game... The icon is as far as I can go...
Ice Breaker
Bobsleigh
Enemies
Explosion
Imagine RoadBlasters as a top down game but in a bobsleigh and the Spanish level of difficulty.
WIP wise; there's some Spanish and French Amstrad games left to do, still no progress done on Burnin' Rubber, Operation Wolf and Thunderbolt. Westphaser has a bit more done. There's also some late commercial era Amstrad games that I'm saving for later. Getting closer to the sunset now...
Slowly getting Daley Thompson's Super Test ripped. I only have the penalties and tug of war left to do. The rest are ripped however they are incomplete (the cycling doesn't have the background due to not showing up on the graphics viewer, the diving is missing a sprite, the ski jump is missing the snow ball sprites). All I can say is thank goodness there's a level select cheat in this game unlike Hyper Sports.
Doomsday Blues is scrapped due to unable to get out of the cell door even when following a guide. Did however discover an Amstrad game that I can rip, one that was so influential that a YouTuber got his name from this game. Playing it you can say that it is like Shadow of the Beast if it was made on the CPC, at least the first level. About 3/4 done of the player as of writing.
C64
I was thinking of doing The Simpsons as a surprise and had already exported most of the sprites of Homer and Marge however someone had nicely ripped from that game. It would have been a struggle anyway... Did have plans to re-rip arcade Homer as a bookend but my declining skills, alas it wasn't meant to be.
Moto X Simulator
Rider
The return of the Dark Souls of racing. Seem to have a habit of ripping the same games on different platforms.
Also the game name on the C64 version is confusing. It says Moto X on the cover, Moto X Simulator on the loading screen/manual, Motocross on the title screen/tape and each place calls it a different name. Archive for X, Mobygames for X Simulator, Motocross for the Italian Ready64, scene groups and the audio SID file. Lemon64 also can't decide between Moto X Simulator or Motocross... Doesn't help that there was an earlier game called Motocross on the C64 by a different company. At least the original Spectrum and Amstrad versions just call it Motocross Simulator throughout the game but even then the packaging is just as confusing.
Knuckle Busters
Deke
Enemies
Annoying beat 'em up that takes around 16-20 hits to kill an enemy that then respawns straight after and the maze level design without a map yet... has a great soundtrack with a 16 minute+ song. Seems to be inspired by the arcade game Knuckle Joe and the prototype version has the main character looking more closer rather than the American football player look of the final. It was one that I wanted to do with the older set up but the game didn't load, VICE is a lot more compatible in terms of emulation.
While the sprites were loaded onto a savestate, getting the palettes meant playing through the game... Original tape? Not very far, only Deke and the first enemy. A trainer version with 3 cheats? A bit further with the alt palettes of the first enemy and just the second one, stuck because of getting the keys. A "hacked" version by HackerSoft offering 25 cheats making the game sort of a debug mode? Got the last enemy and managed to "complete" the game.
Knuckle Buster (Prototype)
Player
Enemy
Thought might as well rip the prototype version with completely different graphics.
Subway Vigilante
Subway Vigilante
Enemies
More like Underground Renegade... Partially ripped during a power cut.
Dick Tracy
Dick Tracy
Infamously released unfinished. Disney was going to publish it but it got cancelled along with the Apple II version that's still missing when they realised that the movie wasn't doing as well as they hoped. As a guess, I'll say around 70% in terms of the art with touch ups needed but probably just over 60% complete overall (the levels are there but obviously missing content, no bosses in this game and apparently the game was meant to scroll). Since the Amiga version was "finished", Titus picked up the rights and converted the game to systems that were popular in Europe such as the Atari ST, Spectrum, Amstrad, even the GX4000 got a version. All Titus had done for the C64 version was to add a soundtrack, a splash screen and put it on tape* since it would have been disk only in the US but then again outside of a couple of games, the C64 version of their games were the lowest on the food chain for them. This was the same company that did a sprite hack of Crazy Cars 1 and released it as Crazy Cars 2 while the other systems got a different game.
* - Funnily enough there is a bug on the tape version where if you get a Game Over and by choosing either No on a continue or losing all your lives, it loads the rest of the tape. Eventually it loads what was done for the ending and tries to access the disk drive if one is connected.
Since it's unfinished, it means that there are unused sprites because the moves and the enemies weren't programmed. Unlike other rips that are out there of these sprites, it's not from a .jpg and are freshly ripped from a VICE snapshot using SpritePad. Oh and since it was originally developed in the US, the default is NTSC palette rather than the expected PAL palette.
Match Day
Players
aka Daley's Thompson's Football at least on the C64. Also one buggy game (teleporting players, players who aren't suppose to be outside the goal area show up, players in between the goal posts, yellow ball that breaks up in half).
At least International Karate is out of the window as a snapshot only loads what is on screen... I think the only ways to rip this game are either really know the game inside out making a massive amount of snapshots or to make a C64 graphics tool that can view from tape/disk images (both C64 ripper and SpritePad only do savestates).
I'll say now that there's more C64 games on the way. Kung-Fu Master, both Rally Cross games, hopefully Out Run some point in November, hopefully Track & Field and the two Yie Ar Kung Fu games at least in terms of Oolong/Lee Young.