Digging Home the Point

“Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery”

A few days ago the Dumping Union acquired an interesting looking Korean arcade title called Mr. Dig. The game was released by Korean company ‘Sun’ (no, not the Java people) and runs on an arcade PCB using the Hyperstone CPU. This hardware was used for a number of Korean games and the CPU wasn’t really used for any arcade titles developed outside of Korea.

From the screenshots the game looked like some kind of copy of Namco’s Mr. Driller. Unlike most Korean games we knew that it couldn’t just be a bootleg of Mr. Driller with various hacks applied because it was running on completely different hardware; the original Mr. Driller runs on Playstation 1 based hardware, which is driven by a MIPs based CPU and is ‘3d’ hardware. The Hyperstone CPU definitely isn’t binary compatible with the PSX code, and the graphics hardware is completely different. Screenshots also showed a 2 player mode, which Mr. Driller doesn’t have.

Let me stress again, this game is not a bootleg, it contains no Namco code at all. I actually don’t even think it directly steals any art from the original game, it’s a reprogrammed game, the code has been rewritten from scratch, and the art, while clearly influenced by the original art appears to have been redrawn too.

With that in mind, look at the screenshots below to see just how far ‘Sun’ went in order to try and imitate the look and feel of the original ‘Mr. Driller’ game when they produced their own version ‘Mr. Dig’ (note, the Mr. Driller screenshots are scaled for easier comparison, the original runs at a higher resolution than Mr. Dig)

I’ve also included some screenshots at the end which demonstrate the unique features that ‘Sun’ added which aren’t present in the original game. These include Bombs (which explode a few seconds after you touch them and are hazardous as a result) and ‘EXTRA’ letters to collect. In addition there is the aforementioned 2 player mode. You’re not prompted to start a 2 player game, but one can be started by pressing the 2nd player start button during the mode select screen. The winner appears to be the player who can survive the longest, or, I assume, get the the bottom first. You can’t simply wait around to avoid dying either as the game will kill you if you don’t move for a while.

I’d like to thank the Dumping Union for getting this PCB, I know it wasn’t the cheapest game but it’s a fascinating insight into Korean development, showing what was going on during a transitional period in the industry as they were moving from producing mostly bootlegs using hacked code from popular games with new graphics / sounds) to actually writing their own code; in this case writing their own code, but learning by imitating others. Cheesy as it might appear I think it’s an important part of history :-)



Source:mamedev.emulab.it/haze/