Sloppy SNES Capcom

[ReyVGM]

I was playing the SNES version of Saturday Night Slam Masters and noticed that the text in some of the endings ended abruptly mid-sentence.
I peeked inside the ROM and found all the game's text and indeed, stupid Capcom programed the text routine wrong causing the text to get cut off.

Example:



Text inside the ROM:

Hold on there Ol'hoss, I ain't
never wrestled a dry piece of
Beef Jerky before!

I can't grind ya so
I's gotta chew ya apart!



But then I remembered a similar issue with the SNES Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

Ryu's ending:




Text inside the ROM:

AS THE AWARD CEREMONY BEGINS, THE CROWD CAN BE HEARD WHISPERING...

"WHERE IS THE CHAMPION?"
"WHERE IS RYU?"


And there's even more! The SNES Megaman Soccer, has an ending and credits sequence but stupid Capcom forgot to program in a way to access it. When you beat the game, it just awkwardly goes back to the title screen. But even though the text and music was programmed in, not even by hacking the game can you get to the ending sequence. Trust me, I tried every experienced hacker out there and they all came to the same conclusion: impossamole!

You can extract the music and read the text with a hex editor though.

[vnisanian2001]

Well that sucks. Capcom happens to be one of, if not my favorite SNES 3rd party developer. I own 10 of the 35 games that they made for the system.

[megatronbison]

Agh! That Ryu Ending text used to really upset me for some reason.

[Feynman]

What's odd is that Capcom was one of the mot consistently amazing developers back then... a Capcom label guaranteed the game you were looking at was going to be awesome. How the hell do you make such awesome games and yet suck at coding endings properly?

(Granted their translations and English text stuff in general was ass back then, but still)

[megatronbison]

In fairness back then 90% of translations were dreadful.

[Shellshock]

They were probably just rushing the localizations to compete with Genesis version launches?

[annoyedgrunt]

If they made those mistakes I can only imagine that Breath of Fire 2 is riddled with them.

[jorpho]

I heard a rumor once that Mega Man Soccer was rushed out before it was truly ready because someone had leaked a copy of the ROM. I'm not sure if that's true, though.

[Ryu the Grappler]

Did anyone extract the game's ending graphics from the ROM? Or is this is one of those cases where most of the graphics are compressed?

[vnisanian2001]

Mar 11, 2011 18:41:02 GMT -5 Ryu the Grappler said:

Did anyone extract the game's ending graphics from the ROM? Or is this is one of those cases where most of the graphics are compressed?

I wonder if the same thing is also true about Return of Double Dragon? I thought I remember reading about how much of the unused stuff was inserted into the rom, but you can't actually see some of them for some reason?

[ReyVGM]

As far as I know, no one has come forward to perform such task.

But the ending could have been just still shots of each stadium or maybe credits with a black screen. Maybe that's why no one has found anything.

[Reiji-kun]

Mar 11, 2011 17:40:51 GMT -5 annoyedgrunt said:

If they made those mistakes I can only imagine that Breath of Fire 2 is riddled with them.

It's been a while, but I don't recall if BoF2 had any that I can remember, if at all. I could be mistaken, though.

[Feynman]

Breath of Fire 2 doesn't have missing text, it just has stupid text.

[Reiji-kun]

True. But I love that stupid text. For some reason, it charms me.

[Ryu the Grappler]

Mar 11, 2011 20:00:29 GMT -5 vnisanian2001 said:

Mar 11, 2011 18:41:02 GMT -5 Ryu the Grappler said:

Did anyone extract the game's ending graphics from the ROM? Or is this is one of those cases where most of the graphics are compressed?

I wonder if the same thing is also true about Return of Double Dragon? I thought I remember reading about how much of the unused stuff was inserted into the rom, but you can't actually see some of them for some reason?

Yes, there are unused graphics in Return, but they're only accessible thus far through save state hacking. Using a tile layer program only shows the main sprites.

It's really not uncommon for SNES games to have compressed graphics. It's a technique programmers used for the game to have access more several sprites without slowing down the game.