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[madman]

I received a batch of FDS disks today and after testing the first 5 or so, it appears there's some rarer stuff in here. There's a couple games so far that only work with my Famicom Doctor plugged in, one of which appears to be an HK original...a really crappy car racing game. There's also a Super Mario Brothers hack, complete with pirated picture insert. Is there any interest for people in me dumping GD trained games, or hacked games? I'm going to go through the rest, I got about 50 games total so if anything else interesting pops up, I'll report back in.

[rbudrick]

I'm interested in seeing them, sure. A lot of games will only load with a copier because they are hacked famicom games trained to work on an FDS via a copier. It's really the only thing these so-called "copiers" are good for. They don't copy FC games at all, but they can copy fds disks with the right software. Then again, certain software can copy an fds disk without a copier, so, really the only main advantage of a famicom copier is to play pirated games. The lone exception of this I can think of is the program Copy Master by Bung, which has a few other features, like helping you tune your drive speed, but that's about it.

But yeah, the images aren't really sought after by anyone, but they are an interesting sidenote to videogame history, just as pirate cartridges are. It's just that no one's ever really dumped these pirate disks before because 1) you need a copier to play them, and 2) most folks didn't want to flood the internet with images people can't get to load (too uninformed to know they need a copier), and with pirated images.

Many times the games have messed up graphics since they are trained to work as a different mapper than they were intended. Other times they are slower than the originals. Sometimes they work just fine.

I'd like to see pics of them too, if anything stands out, especially that Mario one. I wonder if it's the same as Tonkachi Mario.

Most of this I learned through Kyuusaku, who also told me that some odd pirate disks actually used an extra 2000 bytes over the regular 65500 on a FDS disk. He couldn't think of any instances where this space was actually used, as it's usually zeroed out, so you can just cut off those 2000 bytes most of the time to make a valid .fds image. There's no evidence FDSLoadr will even dump (or load, or rewrite) those types of images correctly, but I've been waiting to find out. I've heard a MGD1 will do it correctly, though.

I'm interested in seeing what you find out, though, Madman.

-Rob

[madman]

I got through them all, there's 2 different SMB hacks, one of which the first enemy you encounter is a turtle kind of locked into a rectangle made of bricks. I have 2 copies of that. Another hack, levels look the same but there's the underwater squid guys flying in the air and flying turtles in places they normally aren't. There's finally a 3rd mario bros related hack, it has the original Mario Bros title screen, but the game itself is totally weird. I'll take some pics.

There's also a Super Pig porn game called Gal's Dungeon (I think), a few HK originals, I think I've seen one of them on a multicart before and one is that crappy racing game simply titled "Car" on the FDS disk. And a good amount of GD "trained" famicom titles. No Famicom licensing screen appears before these, instead you get a "WAIT" message that I assume is generated by the GD.

I also loaded the copier utility and I don't believe it's the Bung utility, but it does have the drive speed adjustment utility. I'll take some pics of that as well and post up some links for everyone.

[madman]

OK, so the mario bros game I guess is just the original mario bros hacked to run on FDS, it just had some weird cut scene that I don't remember being in the US version.

Here's the copier utility, when I ran the speed test, I get Speed = 1. I don't know if that's good or bad


Here's the title screen of the Super Pig game:


Here's the first enemy you encounter in one of the SMB hacks, sorry for the color but it's the best my camera could do:


Here's some of the disks. It's the hacked SMB, a GD "trained" copy of Zippy Racer and 2 other games I can't remember, but the one disk says "Turbo Dick" and that's just funny.
[/img]

[ChimyFolkButter]

It looks like a copymaster hack.

[ChimyFolkButter]

Madman,

If I send you a disk, can you copy that utility for me? That's of course if you have the proper writeable FDS. Let me know.

Thanks,

-CFB

[madman]

I've got a write mod'ed FDS but haven't tested it yet. Once I get all my FDS stuff straightened out I'll contact you.

[ChimyFolkButter]

Thanks Madman. I have a write modded FDS too. Let me know if you want me to test or copy something for you.

-CFB

[madman]

I found another disk that has yet another SMB hack, you start out as a small mario that can throw fireballs and swim. I got hit once by an enemy and turned into big mario.

[madman]

OK, so the write moded FDS I have has a bum belt. From what I understand a writeable FDS needs the 7201 chip and some mod to the other board in the FDS. Mine has both of these, I'm going to swap the disk controller board with the 7201 into a drive with a working belt until I can order a replacement. At any rate, is there a page somewhere that describes the write mod? It looks like there's a jumper and a cut trace on the other board. I thought I remember seeing a page like that somewhere around here, but a search didn't bring it up.

[rbudrick]

It's REALLY funny you found that hack of Copy Master, because I just dumped that exact same program a week or two ago (and no one had ever heard of it), so I can send the file to anyone that wants it. Beware, though, you need a Game Doctor or something to get it to load. I also dumped Copy Master, if anyone wants it. Also dumped within the last couple weeks:

Tonkachi Mario

Tonkachi Editor

Disk Keeper (last block is bad, but image loads)

Disk Hacker 1.3

Disk Fax Prize Card Golf: USA Course (last block wouldn't dump...contains the user data...corrected by Chris Covell by substituting the user data from one of the other Golf Games. Works perfectly now, so it is assumed to be a good dump).

Disk Fax Prize Card Golf: Japan Course

I also made some blank 64k and 128k images, whch you'll need to get proper clean dumps.

That mario hack pic looks like another fds image that I think Skrybe sent me. That pic is identical to the first screen of level 1-1 on the one I got. The image he sent me has Mario renamed to Mituy, though.

I have a write-modded FDS too, but I can't tune the damn head right....just can't get it in the right spot. Argh.

As for the Gal's Dungeon (something) part II game, I'm not sure if it's dumped yet, so I'll ask around.

As for the instructions for the write mod, you may have been looking at my translation of the Famicom Kaizou Manual volume 3 article I translated. It was on SimplyNes's site for a while but the link t it is down yet again. It's a 50 something MB file, so I've been hoping someone else will start to host it.

-Rob

[madman]

Yea, Copy Master requires a Game Doctor to even load up. I took apart a couple of the FDS systems I got, almost all their belts are completely different. The 7201 drive has a very loose belt, I put a belt in from a working drive, but for whatever reason when the drive spun it just pulled the belt off the big white wheel. I had the same effect when I put it back in its original drive, but I found out that I had swapped the metal triangle parts between drives. So apparently there's some kind of differences between the two and they only work in their original drives in this particular case.

That said--I have one FDS that loads everything perfectly, I'll probably take it apart and put the 7201 board in there and the modded power board and not screw with the belts or anything. I have another FDS that will load most things, I was able to improve its performance by changing the drive speed to a 7 on the Copy Master utility. I don't know jack about how to calibrate the head, though. Any docs on that? My other FDS loads about half of the games, I haven't even taken it apart yet to try to tune it.

On the disks I couldn't get to load before is an original Super Mario 2, and a hacked Super Mario 2. I'm not sure what the hack differences are, but the title screen has a bunch of blinking *s on it.

[ChimyFolkButter]

Rob,

Are you able to write disks with the FDSLoader? I can't get mine to write disks but it can load images. If you can write disks, can I send you some disks to write the copy programs like Disk Hacker to my disks?

If you can't write disks, can you send me the images? I can PM you with my email address.

I am writing an article for Famicom World that will go over these copy programs so I would love to include disk hacker and others in my article.


Thanks,

-Al

[Skrybe]

Hey there, Rob pointed me to this thread.

Wow, madman, you've got a copy of Gal's Dungeon? That's not too easy to come by. Rob's right about that one not being backed up yet, I've been looking for a reasonably priced copy for a while now so I could get it backed up. I'd love to get an image of that and release it publicly, with your permission, of course. Those HK originals sound like they could be interesting too.

[rbudrick]

I can backup whatver you need and get them back to you. Just lemme know. I'd really like to back up that Gals Dungeon II!

-Rob