EDITED: Now with some stuff I remembered from years ago which may or may not be relevant. Scroll down for more.
Sorry, folks, I have yet to be able to find a video of BS Dragon Quest Dai-4-wa proper, so I thought instead to try recording the one “BS Dragon Quest” ROM dump to see what that’s like….
and it’s a bit peculiar.
Starting from that menu, I can apparently choose which week I want to start in – I picked the 4th one, conveniently enough. In that one the player seems to merely go through the last castle and fight the Dracolord.
Question is – what’s up with that menu? Why are all four weeks easily playable in this single ROM file like that? The Satellaview game surely didn’t originally work like that – being able to play the episodes in any order would desync with the Soundlink audio quite easily.
Some folks would say it’s just a hacked ROM. However, most hacked Satellaview ROMs are hacked for emulator compatibility, while this one is not. Also, apparently it’s got a valid BS-X checksum, which is highly improbable of a ROM hack.
Unfortunately I can’t investigate it any further. My own assumption, though, is that it’s a leaked Debug ROM of some sort.
EDITED IN PART STARTS HERE (I also posted this at the BS Zelda forums)
Since it’s been a while since I was told this story anyhow, I guess I’ll put this up here:
I recall a long time ago, Pachuka (Pachuka is a rather… imfamous person in the Sonic the Hedgehog community and in internet emulation communities) told me a bit of a story about how he “stole” the first Satellaview ROMs from a guy who’s alias was apparently “ROMar” and leaked them across the internet, which would probably be the origin of the BS Zelda ROMs and whatnot. Trying to verify this thing myself, I tried digging around internet archive and whatnot, and found a few scattered references to Pachuka hosting a “BS-X Cult” in the late 1990s, with no listing of the contents.
Unfortunately, I have not gotten anyone else to confirm/deny this story, couldn’t track down this ROMar guy, and I couldn’t even get Pach to remember the specifics of any of the ROMs he “leaked” (He even got basic info on the nature of BS Zelda ROMs wrong. I felt like I was talking to a complete idiot.)
I do suspect the BS Dragon Quest ROM was among the leaked ones, but when I asked Pach about it he threw at me a “I don’t give two shits about JRPGs” response (in other words, he’s really not being any helpful.) I was hoping sometime to track this ROMar guy down, ask him which are the ROMs that can be traced back to him, and if the BS Dragon Quest ROM is among them, ask him for some info about the nature of that one. Until then…
*shrug*
