One of the peculiar things about the games Cave released, starting with DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou is the way in which they mark bug fix revisions. It’s very subtle, even if in some cases serious bugs have actually been fixed.
The ROM chips on the PCB are always marked in the same way, in the case of the PGM boards, they have the game name and ‘V100′ which, even for the bug fixed revisions. Standard IGS practices would dictate that the later revisions be marked ‘V101′ and ‘V102′ but they’re NOT. Cave decided to leave the version on the sticker (and internally) simply as ‘V100′ which makes knowing which revision you have from just looking at your PCB impossible.
Every Cave game shows a ‘For use in Japan’ screen on startup. This screen has a YYYY/MM/DD date on it. The second most logical thing you might expect to happen with bug fix revisions is for the date on this screen to be updated to the date of the bug fix. Again Cave chose not to do this. Apart from the ‘Black Label’ releases (which they consider separate games, not bugfixes) all bugfixed versions bare the same date as the original release.
However, the date string IS still key to determining which version you have. Let’s look at the boot screens from the 3 known revisions of Ketsui.
See the difference? It’s all in the punctuation. Look at the exact date strings.
“2003/01/01 Master Ver”
“2003/01/01 Master Ver.”
“2003/01/01. Master Ver.”
The dates are all the same, but each new bug fix release adds an extra dot symbol in the string. The first release of the game has no dots in the string, simply showing “2003/01/01 Master Ver”, the second revision adds a dot at the end “2003/01/01 Master Ver.” and the 3rd (and newest known) revision had 2 dots, one after the date, and one at the end. It’s subtle, but it’s how you identify the version of the game your PCB is running.
DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou uses the same system, and thanks to it yosai was able to identify his DDPDOJ PCB as an older revision than any supported set, thus allowing it to be supported too.
As you can see in this case the version strings are
“2002.04.05 Master Ver”
“2002.04.05.Master Ver”
With the earlier version, found by yosai having no additional dot after the 05. The exact bug fixes made in the newer versions are not known in this case (the Ketsui fixes are better documented) but it will probably be interesting for somebody to find out.
The Black Version of the game is based on the bug-fix (05.) version of DDPDOJ. It contains code for both a White Label and Black Label version of the game, and displays the following screens
“2002.10.07 Black Ver”
“2002.04.05.Master Ver”
As you can see from the version strings, the included White Label ‘Master Ver’ is the same as the newer White Label standalone; the 2nd revision. The Black Ver has it’s date bumped, and the additional dot not present, indicating that it’s the first revision of the Black Version (and given the very limited production run, I doubt there were more)
EspGaluda (using the Ketsui graphics for now) only has one known revision; the first one, and displays the following
“2003/10/15 Master Ver”
As you can see, there are no additional dots in this string, it’s the first revision. I do strongly encourage those with EspGaluda PCBs to check the startup strings on your PCBs tho, it’s possible there are undocumented newer releases with unknown bug fixes.
Cave apparently carried on this tradition for their newer games too.
Source:mamedev.emulab.it/haze/
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