Aoki Densetsu Shoot!

This is a near final pre-production cart of Aoki Densetsu Shoot! By: Evan G Last updated: September 9, 2012

I got this cart in a lot of Super Famicom prototypes from Simon_Belmont off Assembler Games. Of all the six carts I got in that transaction, this is the least interesting. I played this game side by side with the final version, going through the options and gameplay, and I couldn't find any visible difference between them. Yet, directly comparing the two binaries, there are over 140,000 bytes different, over 9% of the total binary. Probably the biggest clue to why there is such a great difference in the binaries comes if you look at it in a tile viewer:

The last part of the binary through a tile viewer

As you can see, there is text from a J-League game in it. If you look closely, you can see the the katakana symbols "エポック", which in Roman characters is Epoch. I checked, and the tiles are identical to those in J. League Excite Stage '94, a J. League game released by Epoch. If you play this game, it becomes clear what the association between these games is - Aoki Densetsu Shoot! uses the same gameplay engine as J. League Excite Stage '94. They probably had J. League Excite Stage '94 burned on this cart before putting on the preliminary version of Aoki Densetsu Shoot! on it. As such, it is possible that the game is complete, but blank areas in the ROM have fragments of the previously burned game on it.

Prototype PCB board

Download ROM image here.