Use the PAR code 00AB4C:6002 (for REV00) or 00AC80:6002 (for REV01), go to the Sound Test, set the sound to Transylvania and start playing for a nice surprise. For the curious, the game's story screen clears the RAM till $FFFD00 when it loads, which is why this effect normally doesn't occur. The PAR codes I posted make the game skip the RAM clearing and allow the effect to be seen.
Also, while we're discussing Quackshot, use the code 004C20:9898 (REV00) or 004CA6:9898 (REV01), go to the Sound Test and listen to either Duckburg or Mexico's music. Which music is that?
Yeah, I can't recognize it, and there are a few sounds I can't place either. If anyone's interested, here's a tiny mod of Quackshot REV01 which modifies the sound test so that you can play any music/sound in the game. (Sound $8C is the ending Donald/Daisy cutscene music and it's loaded into Z80 RAM specifically by that cutscene so it can't be played normally). Controls are C to play a song, B to stop a song and A to advance $10 songs (actually advance by $10 in the list of playable songs, might be more than $10 song IDs sometimes). Also the PAR code FFEE07:00FF (KEGA) or FFEE06:00FF (GENS) enables a kind of debug mode in which you can move Donald freely throughout the level. Pretty similar to what happens if you pause in the World of Illusion beta. If you want to switch back to normal mode press A+Start (after disabling the PAR code obviously). Oh, and I think this would fit better in the Sega Retro forum, so if that's the case could someone move this please?
#98 feels suspiciously similar to the end of level tune in Castle of Illusion. I guess they had this one just in case they ended up adding score tallies. EDIT: #98, not #96...
While we're on the subject of Quackshot, there's something that I always wondered about. Does anyone know why REV00 is smaller than REV01? If the game was originally 512kb, it shouldn't be 1280kb for the second revision unless they decided to uncompress graphics or something... @IceKnight: It shouldn't be a coincidence, since Bo did the soundtrack for both games. :P Speaking of Castle of Illusion, someone should really hack that game to see what's up. Very curious if there's anything debug related inside that game...
Did you mean #98? 96 is Hideout. Technically they're the same size, except for some insane reason REV01 has $C0000 bytes of padding in the middle. Basically, REV01 is structured like: Code (Text): $0-$3FFFF: First half of ROM $40000-$FFFFF: Padding $100000-$13FFFF: Second half of ROM I have no idea why this is so, but it was certainly intentional, since even the checksum routine for example adds up everything from $200 to $3FFFF, skips the middle padding and picks up again at $100000. In fact if you look at the sound test ROM I posted you'll notice that it's only 512 KB despite being based on REV01 since it gets rid of this padding.
Coincidentally, the Sega Ages collection of QuackShot/Castle of Illusion for the Sega Saturn (yep, such a thing existed only in Japan) is using REV01, but the binary is split in two (512kb together), completely eliminating that weird padding. Not sure how the Sega Ages version of both games work - but both have executables. Quack Shot's executable has this in the begining of the file: Code (Text): =============================== QUACK SHOT FOR MEGA DRIVE ------------------------------- DONALD0.BIN = $000000 - $03FFFF DONALD1.BIN = $100000 - $13FFFF =============================== The MD_ABS.TXT file says this: Basically, "Ported from the Sega Mega Drive version". But I doubt they're ports.
Nice catch, that's exactly how the Mega Drive REV01 is structured too. I have no idea why they'd do it like that though. Does anyone have an original REV01 cart? Pure speculation here but maybe they did something hardware-related which made that route make sense.
The only thing I can think of is the fact that it's been moved to such a nice round number has to mean something. ROM chip sizes? Maybe it was sent out as a smaller chip for the first part for some carts. Maybe there was a compilation cart in the works at some point and they wanted to make the addressing easier? Who knows.
Maybe the ROM is still just 512KB, but the way the address lines are wired makes it look like the data is arranged like that, since it would be a waste to have a large ROM chip with a bunch of padding.
