![]() The 50th anniversary of Konami seems as good a time as any to celebrate that history.Īnd the recently-released Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection - part of a short series of games, with Castlevania and Contra compilations to follow - sets out to do just that a selection from the company's golden era, when it churned out classic after classic as it defined so much of what was good in the 80s arcades. If you're of a certain age and familiar with Konami's discarded 'bacon strips' logo, you'll also know that this is a company that was once responsible for out and out greatness. It's a bit of a shame, because I still get that little tingle on those all-too-rare occasions its logo comes up on a splash-screen for some new console outing. It's not as if Konami's bottom line has been hurt by this all, but its reputation has perhaps been irreparably damaged. You know the one I mean, I'm sure - the one that's the very first to pop up in response to anything Konami-related in recent years, as the company that built its name on superstar series such as Metal Gear, Castlevania and Silent Hill slowly - and, in some cases, messily - turned away from traditional big budget console development. KONAMI-VRC-1 (75) using multiple Konami VRC*.Yeah, so that isn't quite how that hashtag usually goes. I tested my Famicom games with Konami mappers and got similar results. The eyeball and the skull look mostly correct, as well as most of the border. Most of the bird looks correct when its wings are in this position. There are also some graphics that are correct or partially correct. This is a solar flare which has its tiles replaced by letters and numbers. I found where many of the text letters and numbers are used. This is the escape sequence, where your ship flies through some kind of rectangular tunnel. I'd really appreciate it if this could be fixed. I included some more screenshots below.Īnyway, this is the only official licensed game of mine released during the lifespan of the NES that doesn't dump correctly, aside from a few overdumps that were easily fixed by using a hex editor to truncate the file. The sound and music all seemed correct, as far as I could tell. So the dump does contain the game, just with mostly the wrong graphics tiles being loaded. Just thought I'd update to say that I managed to play through to the end of the game (with rewinding). An 8 KB save file is also created, even though Gradius II doesn't use a battery save and I didn't select the battery option when dumping. I dumped using the firmware "ntmv2_firmware_verJB6.2.bin" and later with "ntmv2_firmware_verJB6.6" and got the exact same file as output. The correct ROM file occupies 256 KB the dump I get of the game occupies 384 KB. ![]() My dumped ROM of the game runs (I haven't tried getting past the first section because the messed up visuals make it extra difficult, so I don't know how much of the game can be played) and the sound effects and music work in the portion of the game I have been able to test. Opening graphic of the player's spaceship, which appears to use the correct color scheme within the boundaries of the ship's form, thus resembling the actual ship's graphic.įor comparison, here is the normal version of the opening graphic. I used the corresponding "Konami VRC4.BIN" CopyNES plugin, and as you can see in the screenshots taken from the dumped ROM, the graphics are scrambled but bear some resemblance to at least the outline of the actual shapes. ![]() According to, Gradius II uses KONAMI-VRC-4, mapper 25.
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