Itadaki Street 2: Neon Sign wa Bara Iro ni

This is a near final prototype of Itadaki Street 2. Thanks to Matthew Callis for releasing this. By: Evan G Last updated: August 12, 2012

A game by the makers of Dragon Quest? I was excited about the prospect, as the Dragon Quest series is one of my favourites. However, this is a board game similar to Monopoly, not a sprawling RPG. I would suspect that this is the reason why I had never heard of it before. The Itadaki Street series has spawned a number of sequels that incorporated characters from Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and Mario games (the Wii version was released outside of Japan as "Fortune Street").

This prototype was for sale on Yahoo Japan auctions in June 2012, and ended up selling for 15,100 yen. This was on sale along with a bunch of other snes prototypes, which will be detailed at a later date.

The first thing that you see if you open the prototype in a hex editor is the build date. Here it is for the prototype:

TOMCAT SYSTEM Co.,Ltd. 93/12/20 08:36:45

And the final version:

TOMCAT SYSTEM Co.,Ltd. 93/12/23 10:51:03

As you can see, the build date for the prototype is only three days before the final version. As such, I would not expect to see any major visible changes between the prototype and the final version. Doing a direct comparison of the binaries, these are the sections that are different:

• most of the first 0x8000 bytes
• 0x17FD8 - 0x17FDB
• 0x1E34D - 0x1E380
• 0x3280E
• 0x5A000 - 0x5CA1C
• 0x662D5 - 0x662D6
• 0x6E011 - 0x6E020
• 0x1375C2 - 0x1375C4
• most of the section between 0x160004 - 0x167907

First, the major chunks that differ. In the first 0x8000, I found this chunk of text.. Prototype:

MODIFIED FROM SHVC MULTI5 CONNECT CHECK Ver1.00END OF MULTI5 CONNECT CHECK CHECKCK

Final

MODIFIED FROM SHVC MULTI5 CONNECT CHECK Ver1.00END OF MULTI5 CONNECT CHECK

I wouldn't be surprised if the prototype cart was overwritten a few times, and the "CHECKCK" is there because the offset of this text was a bit different in previous builds.

The big chunk of data between 0x160004 - 0x167907 appears to largely be caused by offsets due to some added binary in the final version, and injected messages like this:

MODIFIED FROM SHVC MULTI5 BIOS Ver2.00END OF MULTI5 BIOS

Looking at the official Nintendo development manuals, these messages come from Nintendo's official multiplayer adapter bios code (and is found in the binaries of several games that supported the multitap). I would assume these two sections of the binary are related to loading of the multiplayer adapter. Perhaps they made some minor tweaks in the three days between this build and the final one.

The chuck of data from 0x1E34D - 0x1E380 is another case of a likely offset in prior versions of the code, which was not overwritten in this particular version of the prototype. The following text appears twice at the end of the credits:

permission of ENIX CORPORATION.

As for the rest of the binary, I randomly played the game for about half an hour with the addresses set to break, but it did not happen. Whatever these changes represent, they are clearly not part of the main game, and they certainly aren't changes in the graphics (the graphics appear to be uncompressed). I would expect that are probably very minor edits, or parts of the binary that were not overwritten when they rewrote the game on the EPROMs.

Picture of the prototype from the original Yahoo Japan auction.

Download the ROM image here.