Castlevania Dungeon Forums
The Castlevania Dungeon Forums => General Castlevania Discussion => Topic started by: Nagumo on June 25, 2016, 07:32:29 AM
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I was taking a look at the Cutting Room Floor's page (https://tcrf.net/Castlevania_III:_Dracula's_Curse page) for Dracula's Curse and I noticed the following:
At the end of the PRG ROM is a text string identifying the date on which that version of the game was compiled. A similar ID is found in many other Konami games.
Japan US Europe
SAMP891007 MAST900000 MAST920117
"MAST" means it's the "master" version of the game, and the numbers represent the date. The Japanese version was originally a Sample ("SAMP") version built on October 7, 1989; the US version was built at some point in 1990; and the European version was built on January 17, 1992.
I was wondering if someone with more knowledge about this subject matter could check if Akumajou Dracula(FC/MSX versions) and Dracula II also contained built dates.
Also, a bonus question: is there perhaps also a string text that identifies which Konami branch was responsible for these games (Kobe, Tokyo, Nagoya, or Sapporo)?
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I can have a look when I get back home tonight.
If they have build dates they should be easy to find.
I don't know about identifiers for the various studios, but I'll keep an eye out.
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Did you manage to find anything?
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It would be interesting, yes. It's a nice trivia that the Japanese final ROM was labeled as sample. Maybe they were sure it was not going to be final, but ended up being, for whatever reasons.
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I keep forgetting to actually do this. Hold on a sec...
Initial findings don"t show much of anything. Not sure if I might have better luck with a table file.
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If they did, it is encoded. I could find no obvious dates in the PROMs.