Hmm. Recently ran into a Game Boy prototype cartridge I was given a few years back.. decided to drop the EPROM into a chip reader and see what I got, if anything. Turned out to be a copy of the game Palamedes which boots and seems to run fine... (after a LOT of cleaning corrosion off; it wouldn't boot in its cartridge) but the dump I got doesn't actually match either version (EU, JP) of the ROM I picked up from the 'net to compare. #gameboy #prototype #videogame
The dump (well, once I got a good one.. first few tries didn't work out) boots in an emulator perfectly fine, and shares a large section (I assume graphic/sound resources) at the end of the ROM with both regional variants, but a large section near the beginning is different (used WinMerge just to get a quick look, really) from either the JP or EU versions. Not quite sure what to make of that.
A friend put me into contact with someone he knew that could read Japanese, hoping we could make some sense of what remains scratched into the erase window cover sticker. They thought it looked like the name of the game (which makes sense) on the first line, and then _maybe_ roughly "Neo" on the second line. I'm wishing more of the sticker survived, but... it's more than I expected!
I'd be glad to send the binary to someone who knows more than I do about sorting out what, if anything is materially different - all I did here was run it through a compare program to see if it matched up with what I was able to get online... If it's actually an unusual revision I'd like to have it archived somewhere. #prototype #videogame #gameboy