Alpha, Beta, Demo and RC Homecart discussions

[Big Bruno]

Sorry for the thread bump, I didn't see this thread when it was first posted and it's very fascinating reading about the Ninja Combat changes! I realize that not many people have the ability to dump the roms off cartridges but I do hope something can be arranged, because preservation of this stuff is very important.

I am kinda disappointed The Super Spy sounds like it's near final because I've been wondering about the version that could be seen in old screenshots and the 1991 Summer CES video that's on youtube. Note that the lifebar has 10 small blocks of health instead of 8 larger blocks, and the default high score is 50000 instead of 30000. I assume the version you have has neither of these.

Hey,

so i finally go around to taking a screen shot of the demo and low and behold it is the longer life bar with the 5000 hi score just did not notice. since this is a ver 3 assume they made an additional version or 2 after this. As a additional note I posted and alt soundtrack from my mutation nation beta. just do not think i can upload videos here So I threw it in the neo geo forever group.

 

[Neo Alec]

Thanks, Big Bruno!

I really want to hear that alternate soundtrack. Can someone please post it here?

Hopefully these get dumped some day.

 

[Big Bruno]

Ah geez,

I uploaded a Raw copy on my OniCade youtube. Mutation Nation Beta sound hopefully it does not get ripped up to badly. i let it sit on a couple of tunes.

Note: So again the roms were light erased, so this probably impacted some of the music and sound, also could have impacted how the mapping to the sounds occur, Just a guess as some of the music shudders (so maybe when a punch or something is executed it goes to the wrong sound sample, Guess) same with music events. Also should say i have not played through the original game in awhile but do not recall hearing some of this music or sound in the final.

Thanks, Big Bruno!

I really want to hear that alternate soundtrack. Can someone please post it here?

Hopefully these get dumped some day.

 

[BBH]

Hey,

so i finally go around to taking a screen shot of the demo and low and behold it is the longer life bar with the 5000 hi score just did not notice. since this is a ver 3 assume they made an additional version or 2 after this. As a additional note I posted and alt soundtrack from my mutation nation beta. just do not think i can upload videos here So I threw it in the neo geo forever group.
View attachment 57118

Oh wow! Should also be pointed out that the demo in attract mode never shows the gun-carrying enemies, either. I think there could be more changes in this prototype than you're aware of. I will always advocate for somehow getting these prototypes dumped because preservation of these early beta versions is super important. Thanks for the update!

 

[Neo Alec]

Ah geez,

I uploaded a Raw copy on my OniCade youtube. Mutation Nation Beta sound hopefully it does not get ripped up to badly. i let it sit on a couple of tunes.

Note: So again the roms were light erased, so this probably impacted some of the music and sound, also could have impacted how the mapping to the sounds occur, Just a guess as some of the music shudders (so maybe when a punch or something is executed it goes to the wrong sound sample, Guess) same with music events. Also should say i have not played through the original game in awhile but do not recall hearing some of this music or sound in the final.

Thanks for posting it, Bruno. Unfortunately, this definitely isn't alternate Mutation Nation music. This is Pop'n Bounce music. I think you might have a mixed and matched rom there, which might explain some of the graphic corruption. There's no way the data for NGH-237 existed when Mutation Nation was in beta.

How did you capture it? It must be on real hardware since you haven't dumped it?

 

[Big Bruno]

Thanks for posting it, Bruno. Unfortunately, this definitely isn't alternate Mutation Nation music. This is Pop'n Bounce music. I think you might have a mixed and matched rom there, which might explain some of the graphic corruption. There's no way the data for NGH-237 existed when Mutation Nation was in beta.

How did you capture it? It must be on real hardware since you haven't dumped it?

Hmm,

now that i listen to pop n bounce it does mostly match aside from the sound effects which seem from the mutation nation, i do not recall how the rom breakdown is (if the punches and such would be kept on the same rom or moved out) all i can say is if i replace the entire backboard with a full backboard of a release it plays fine. maybe there is more history to this cart. i would have to look at where i picked it up from think it was a yahoo japan auctions 15+ years ago. also odd it is a white label as opposed to a black label release. To answer question I played it on my home console plugged in and converted to hdmi then captured on my El gato. picture of the actual board is in this thread you can see it is a epg board and backboard roms were uncovered so assumed they were light erased. i suppose someone could have replaced the sound rom with the pop n bounce then do the flash erase afterwords not sure if this would align with the other sounds in game. Or someone rom savy could have inserted in pop n bounce music in the rom then flashed. I posted the checksum but with the flash not sure they would be relevant. At any case the boot up sound matches and does not match the orginal boot with would lead to a sound swap theory. Not sure why this would have been done (i do not own pop n bounce so did not recognize it). maybe i will dump the bad board at one point, go thru all the roms and see what is recoverable and what is not then fix the graphic and replace to see what it give me, but i doubt i will go through that much trouble

 

[Neo Alec]

Bruno, it sounds likely to me that for some reason you have a Mutation Nation PROG board, but the CHA board is Pop'n Bounce (and perhaps other things).

(PROG boards contain the main program, and sound samples.)
(CHA boards contain the graphics, plus sound program. Pop'n Bounce uses almost completely FM for the music with few samples, which explains why it seems to play the music intact for the most part.)

The fact that the CHA board in your photo has all of the stickers pealed off is suspicious, because the PROG board is clearly labeled 014 for Mutation Nation.


I'm still curious to see what kinds of differences you can find with the CHA board replaced with the final version of Mutation Nation. Since the PROG board contains the main game code, you're still likely to find differences from the final.

 

[Big Bruno]

Bruno, it sounds likely to me that for some reason you have a Mutation Nation PROG board, but the CHA board is Pop'n Bounce (and perhaps other things).

(PROG boards contain the main program, and sound samples.)
(CHA boards contain the graphics, plus sound program. Pop'n Bounce uses almost completely FM for the music with few samples, which explains why it seems to play the music intact for the most part.)

The fact that the CHA board in your photo has all of the stickers pealed off is suspicious, because the PROG board is clearly labeled 014 for Mutation Nation.


I'm still curious to see what kinds of differences you can find with the CHA board replaced with the final version of Mutation Nation. Since the PROG board contains the main game code, you're still likely to find differences from the final.

maybe, would be interesting if i got a popn bounce and replaced the cha board with the one from my mutation nation beta to see if it give me a working pop n bounce . so i did a basic play through using my working mutation nation aes back board did not notice any drastic changes and it seemed to play normal i may play with it a bit more but i hate cracking carts, i always seem to break a tab or 2 in the process.