All of the Virtual Boy cart dumps that you will find in this thread from me were created using the Retrode (see pics 1 and 2), which normally can be used to dump SNES and Genesis carts, but with Richard Hutchinson’s Retrode Virtual Boy Cart Dumper Adapter (see pics 3 and 4), the Retrode can even be used to dump Virtual Boy carts! It could not be any more user-friendly. All I had to do to get each dump was insert Richard’s Retrode Virtual Boy Cart Dumper Adapter into the Genesis cart slot of the Retrode (see pic 5) and then insert a Virtual Boy cart into the adapter and plug the Retrode’s USB cable into my laptop computer (see pic 6). The Retrode automatically did all the rest from there.
The main thing I wanted to do with this was compare the machine code of each of my prototype/EPROM cartridges with their commercially released versions or versions that have already otherwise been made available previously and see if there are any interesting differences. I’ve already found out some things from converting the data into hex and comparing them with each other to find any possible differences using the hex editor plugin for Notepad++. Nevertheless, I’ve never worked with hex before, so all I can basically do is see if there are differences or not, but I wouldn’t be able to tell what exactly those differences represent. Perhaps others with more knowledge of this could shed some light on things. I’ve also run into some difficulties with certain dumps. I’m not sure if or how these difficulties can be resolved. I guess I’ll explain those when I get to posting about them.
DogP wrote:
I’m not sure why you’d be having problems dumping certain carts with the Retrode, but a much easier (and more certain) way to dump the EPROM carts would be to pull the EPROMs and use an EPROM reader on the chips directly. I’d be glad to let you borrow a USB EPROM reader if you’d like to try that.
Sure. I’m curious enough to try it out.
I’m guessing you know that the first, and only certainly genuine Space Pinball prototype cart wasn’t a standard EPROM cart, right?
Yes, I was aware of that. Since this cart in my collection was very likely obtained from the Nintendo Power office, I supposed that the Space Pinball program was flashed to this standard EPROM cart after the design of the Virtual Boy had changed and sent to the Nintendo Power office so that they could run the game on their Video Boy or Virtual Boy systems, all long prior to the release of Galactic Pinball.
That’s certainly interesting about the molding difference in the cart, but I’m not sure that I’d say that it’s likely that the cart would have been used to test sample code early on (before more carts were made with the lettering), and then never used again (and actually have labels printed for the chips, in a similar style to a newer cart). Like KR155E said, there was at least one other version floating around before-hand as well. Maybe someone could verify that it’s not the same as that, and look at the ROM for other clues (I’ll try to look into it if I get a chance).
Assuming that the Nintendo Power story is true, I was simply under the assumption that the Sample Soft for VUE Programming was flashed to this cart and sent to Nintendo Power so that they could view it and/or post pics of it in one of their articles about the Virtual Boy, but it seems that they never decided to use it in one of their early articles. I imagine that the Nintendo Power office received a lot of demos and samples from various places for possible use in their magazines, which were never actually used in articles that were published.
I definitely do hope that you will examine the code and see if it looks familiar to previously known code. From what I have examined so far, the code from my EPROM cart looks so vastly different from the code that has been made available on this site that it looks like two completely different coders created the programs separately and independently of each other.
One certain way that would prove a fake would be to look at the date codes on the EPROMs used. If they’re 96+, they’re fake…
I made a new photo of the Sample Soft for VUE Programming cart, which shows all of the info on the EPROM chip. I’m not sure which is the date code on this chip, though. I’ve attached it to this post for examination by others.
I don’t know what to make of the first three. Maybe they’re real, maybe they’re not. The Jack Bros. definitely looks less genuine than the Panic Bomber, but that could also be that the Panic Bomber label adds an “authentic” feel. Slap a plain sticker on the Panic Bomber carts, and I’d probably say that they all look equally uncertain. If they all came from the same place, and they are genuine, I’d say they would have had to be from a play testing environment. I don’t see any other reason that Jack Bros (Atlus) would have been related to Panic Bomber (Hudson).
Well, assuming that the story about these carts coming from an ex-employee of Nintendo of Japan is true, wouldn’t it make sense that these would have been the carts that Atlus and Hudson sent to Nintendo of Japan, in order to get Nintendo’s approval to commercially release the games?
