Lurked for a bit, never posted before. Anyway, I picked up this Bound High ROM off some guy on craigslist a few months ago. Never got it to work quite right so I figured someone might be able to tell me why I’m retarded. And in the process, maybe get a copy for themselves, if they can get it working.

I attached it to my post and uploaded it to — as well. Give it a shot hope someone can figure this out.

I’ll agree with most of Krisse’s history of Bound High, except for a few wrongful assumptions about my past and a few clever omissions from his.

I did receive the code when he said I did. I did not start selling it then. The process to get the code was very difficult. Krisse lied to me all along the way in order to prevent me from getting the code. He even went as far as to get the creator of the game to promise not to share his own code with anyone else. Upon finding out the ware Krisse handled his code, the creator was very upset. Getting the compiled was just as difficult as obtaining it in the first place.

It was during that time that Krisse offered to sell me the four rare japanese roms that weren’t available at the time. I declined his offer. Once I got my hands on Bound High he gave them to me as a peace offering. I eventually used them in a trade and from there they were leaked. Krisse did ask me not to trade them but I can only feel so guilty for doing so see as how Krisse had offered me multiple items over the past few years which he had sworn he would not give out. Those same four games had been offered to be publicly dumped by private owners of the original copies, though Krisse would not allow it. He has done a great deal to control the scene for his benefit. He has deleted many posts over the years where people were offering to share Bound High or the other unreleased roms.

The deal I had for Faceball was very real. The word ‘was’ was chosen carefully because I am assuming at this point the deal will be off. As I stated to anyone who I gave Bound High to, the money was intended to help procure Faceball not only for myself, but for them as well. The asking price for the game was quite high. I never received enough funds to pay for even a quarter of the asking price. My deal with the Bound High crew is still valid, though I think it will be much harder to get the game for everyone now. I am out a few thousand dollars from bad trades or people who flat out lied to me. On top of that I have a rather large personal financial problem that has created a situation where I cannot afford to buy these games on my own. That is why I tried to gather a group to help fund the purchases. In making such a large deal out of this I think Krisse has shot everyone of us in the foot.

I would also like to mention that Krisse does not have the squeaky clean past he would like you to believe. Many people I spoke with over the past few years were offered various rom sales from him, including Bound High. He also tried to leverage himself as a needless middle man in many deals, including a deal involving DogP’s Faceball. Krisse also has created a few aliases, though I feel no need to name them seeing as most of their business was done privately. He has also used his abilities as the website administrator to read private messages in order to block trades. I have had multiple trades put together over the past few years but Krisse has stolen my sources and cut me out, even though he acted as if we were partners. He didn’t even know what many other members on here had in their collections because there was not enough trust to tell him.

If a few people are mad at me because more people now have a few games, I guess I can live with that. I think far more people have benefited from my actions then been hurt by them. I did not cross those I did business with, I have crossed the big collectors. I offered people a private trade that allowed them to play a game they would have never otherwise had the chance to play. I’m sure there will be a public release eventually but I know perfectly well that it wouldn’t have happened without this current upset.

I still hope we are able to discover more unreleased games. The value, whether financial or as trade, of Bound High has been hurt by this public outcry from Krisse. It is yet another attempt to stifle the trading scene. The community as a whole would greatly benefit from people working together instead of everyone sneaking around trying to have the biggest collection. Pride is not needed in a scene as small as ours. Neither is endless internet arguing and drama. I have only said my side of the story as a rebuttal. I do not intend to perpetuate anything.

Why can’t we all just get along? 🙂

Oh, wow. It’s funny and sad at the same time how you always come up with even bigger lies when your previous ones were exposed, jojobean. I don’t feel like I have to justify for anything here, so would you please just stop wasting everyone’s time with your absurd conspiracy theories? I hope you don’t believe this yourself.

People can believe what they want. You and me know whats true and what isn’t, Krisse. I’ve admitted to my actions but you have lied about yours.

I’m still very new to the scene, but I just wanted to chime in with my 2 cents.

I have been a long term video game enthusiast, and I love prototype carts. Prototypes are the dream that keep one going, just that hope that something else is out there and will hopefully surface one day. Heck, I’m always thrilled to get a prototype of a released game to have in my collection.

The drama comes in when an unreleased game surfaces, obviously. The person with the original game I think should dump it for the owner’s personal archives no matter what, just to insure that if something were to happen to said game that it wouldn’t be lost forever. The choice to share the game is a nice gesture, but it does literally “devalue” the demand for the original cart/source.

In the Atari 2600 scene, people usually sell preorders for a limited release on physical carts, to make up for the initial investment put into buying said prototype. Once the pre-order is sold out, enthusiasts can have their physical re-release cart, the owner can rest easy knowing that he/she got his original cart essentially for free, and the less than enthusiast public will inevitably have their freebie ROM image.

Unfortunately for the VB scene, VB Flashcarts / Socketed Eprom carts aren’t exactly cheap to buy, or super easy to make. Until someone manufactures a batch of clone PCBs from the Nintendo Dev carts (along with the inconvenient task of getting VB connector pinouts as well), it will be tough to come up with a wise way for people to release these unreleased games.

There are only 3 ways to handle unreleased prototypes

1. Keep it for yourself (and dump it exclusively for your own archive recommended)
2. Re-release it on physical carts and make your expensive financial investment back.
3. Dump it, release it, and make your Multi-thousand dollar investment worth considerably less. There will always be a demand for said original cart, but I doubt in the thousands anymore.

I wasn’t aware that the Bound High ROM image didn’t come from a cart dump, but one thing for certain is that the second the ROM was given to somebody that started selling the ROM to the public on eBay/Craigslist, the cat got out of the bag.

jojobean wrote:
He also tried to leverage himself as a needless middle man in many deals, including a deal involving DogP’s Faceball.

I just want to clarify that it’s not my Faceball, but as I told you (and “Sam Gupta”, who died in an earthquake in Mumbai – R.I.P. :rolleyes ) in the emails, that I could work a deal for it, in trade for the Zero Racers source code you claimed to have. Too bad it was obviously just Bound High source code, with some files renamed.

I guess I was kinda a needless middle man as well (except I would have likely been the one trying to compile it), but the owner trusts me, and without my knowledge/judgement, may have been scammed into buying/trading for your “repackaged” source code.

DogP

Don’t get me wrong, DogP, I don’t have anything against anything you’ve done. You’re an honest guy.

I really didn’t mean to start an crazy dROMa (see what I did there?) – I don’t really care to expose sellers and all that. I just wanted to give some people a shot at trying it out without having to buy it and see if they could get it working better than I. Yeah, it was dumb of me to buy it off someone on craigslist, but I can say I definitely didn’t pay 3k for it.

I better understand why KR155E doesn’t want a buggy copy out. But to me, I guess something for free and widely available (buggy or not) is much better than the same product being sold for absurd amounts by people who don’t have the rights to it to begin with.

props for the dROMa thing.

So… I guess the work continues on the original source code then – and if a completely working version is ever done it will be sold very expensive to the nearest friends of the code-wizard or will it be released publicly?

There might even be a fully working version out there but removing certain elements from it and releasing it small to test the waters so to speak ended up in this mess – so that won’t happen again… ?

If there’s nothing wrong with Hideyuki Nakanishi’s original source code (and if this source code has been forwarded to our gifted programmers unedited) then it should now be possible to use the original compiler to compile a working Bound High!-ISX-file and convert it with the new converters to a fully working game, right?

Like I said, there still is an unknown bug. The converted ROM seems to run perfectly, but plasma stages and boss stages are broken. RunnerPack and LameBoy are working on it, but it is currently unknown what causes the bug.

The ROM will be released once this is solved.

I just had a closer look at both ROMs, the complete but buggy gccVB version and the broken VUCC version:
(Played on Reality Boy)

Final boss stage
– Normally you would play the boss level (screenshot 1), and if you beat the boss, you see the credit
– In the broken version the boss stage looks like mixture between the final stage and a bonus stage. The boss it mssing and you have a countdown like on a bonus stage. (screenshot 2)
– Oddly, floor plates randomly vanish, just like they would in the correct boss stage, since the final boss sometimes “eats” floor plates when moving over them.
– After finishing that level, you’re taken to level one of Pocket & Cushion mode (screenshot 3).
– After finishing that level, you’re taken back to the title screen.
– Icons of items hidden under the floor plates are garbled (happened to me only once)

Plasma Stages
– Those are level 6 of each world. Goal is to bounce together the pairs of (+) and (-) balls. There’s a counter. (screenshot 4)
– In the broken version, items seem to be placed under the floor and fall down and die once the level started, leaving you with an empty level. Since the counter is missing, Plasma Stages are unsolveable. It also says “boss stage”.(screenshot 5)
– BUT Level 7 says “Plasma Stage” in the broken version and there’s (garbled) (+) and (-) balls. (screenshot 6)

Normal (not final) boss stages
– Normally, there should be a “Boss Stage” and then a “Bonus Stage”, which are effectively the 11th and 12th level of each world. (screenshot 7 & 8)
– In the broken version it says “Level 11” instead of “Boss Stage”. Stage is empty and instantly cleared. (screenshot 9)
– The next stage, which should be “Bonus Stage”, then says “Boss Stage” and is another empty stage. It can’t be finished. (screenshot 9)

This looks like levels are shifted somehow as well as corresponding graphics.

Attachments:

1. 

   boss-level-correct.bmp
   

2. 

   boss-level-broken-1.bmp
   

3. 

   boss-level-broken-2.bmp
   

4. 

   w1l06.bmp
   

5. 

   broken-plasma.bmp
   

6. 

   broken-level-7.bmp
   

7. 

   w1l11.bmp
   

8. 

   w1l12.bmp
   

9. 

   broken-boss-1.bmp
   

10. 

    broken-boss-2.bmp
    

In the interview Hideyuki mentions a bug that he eventually solved, perhaps the source code is an earlier version where this bug is still present?

Any chance we can ask Hideyuki Nakanishi for help?

It’s been done. He hasn’t offered any advice.

KR155E wrote:
This looks like levels are shifted somehow as well as corresponding graphics.

Could also be that the values that determine the level get overwritten while loading the stage.
So it loads the map for stage X, values are overwritten, loads events from a different stage.
Depending on the game’s framework, it can be possible. I know of more than a few games whose release versions contain buffer overflow bugs that weren’t caught in testing, the most prominent being the Mew bug in Pokémon Red/Blue, that took some years to be figured out, but eventually surfaced.

cYa,

Tauwasser

whats the mew bug?

Offtopic:
Mew glitch.

Basically, the article simplifies some things. It assumes that you beat all other trainers except the one they state.
If you read up on it, basically, the routine that walks trainers to your position, doesn’t take into account that trainers can be off-screen, therefore first having to correct the trainers facing, then disabling the menu. The user can then use the menu to escape the fight.
The fight also disables some events on the map itself. For some reason, the developers chose to set a counter to an invalid state (not expecting to ever enter the map while it was invalid). They rectified this in Gold/Silver.

Therefore, when entering the map, code is executed that is not supposed to be executed, eventually leading to execution of the portion of RAM that holds which trainer has been fought with. That’s where the battle command and Mew come from. The stats are determined as the wiki describes.

/Offtopic

So yeah, basically, the impossible can happen. Don’t ask me who found this, but it must have been someone crazy trying every possible combination of trainer fights or being really lucky 😀

cYa,

Tauwasser

Ok so i took my time to read all this drama and just dont get it
People are working to fix the bound high game to release a 100% perfect copy but why wont they release the clitched copy to us so other people have harder time to get scammed by people?

I for example would really want to play the bound high clitched copy because it seems the game is 60%+ working

I think its lame if people want to pay over $1000 for a unreleased game or protoype
Release all the games clitched or not including sourcecode and maybe for once we can see some full 100% working 16/32 bit vb homebrew games

Like when someone released the 4 rare vb games, I did not care if some strange person lost thousands of dollors because I think when the vb has so few games (including homebrew) people should release anything they have so atleast more people want to play the vb, join this community and make more homebrew games

Just to add to the drama here is a e-mail jojobean send me some time ago

I made a fake thread on this site just to really see if someone really had the rare games because tired of waiting for so many year so he send me…

“heres the deal. right now i have bound high and space pinball. i know someone personally who has faceball but they said they would only trade it for something they dont have. they dont have mario and neither do i. if you were willing to trade i could offer bound high and space pinball now and share a copy of faceball with you as soon as the trade goes through.

also, and this is top secret. i know someone with the zero racers source code but i’m having a hard time getting them to cough it up.

think about it.”