What in God's Name is This Abomination???

[Raistlin]

I started to collect the Russian bootleg games some years ago. If you wish I could provide a complete list of all games which aren't pure graphic hacks. If I am not wrong there are 5 different Mario games for Mega Drive. First they came without manual but one year ago they suddenly included a very thin one which explains the controls and not really more.

[babulya]

Hello! I am from Russia and I collect pirated cartridges. I can say that with the leadership of the cartridges - is a fraud. Manual does not exist. It marketing move to buy these cartridges foreign audience. I can recall only licensed guides and manual for a few Russian translations. This seller on Ebay sells cartridges quite different covers, ie, it's not something that I can buy at an electronics store. You can drive yourself into a search engine the name of MK8 games and Kolobok - the search engine will give out cartridges with different cover - this cover will be present. You can scan multiple manual?
P.S. purely hammered into Google translator)))))

[Ecco]

I didn't know that the actual hack of SMW has been dumped. I'll definitely be downloading and playing it. Graphics look good at least.

As for the other Mario hacks that I know about:

The Squirrel King hack is lame, because it's not Mario gameplay at all.

The hack of Mario 1 (SNES) on Genesis is good IMO, despite the strange controls, graphics are great and there are small changes to the game here and there.

There's a hack of that, with Sonic sprites instead of Mario, but pointless because the gameplay is still Mario, not Sonic (i.e. you can't spin attack anything, you can only jump on top of enemies).

There's also the NES version of Mario 1 on Genesis and this is sweet, just the colors are slightly weird.

I'm still wondering what the product for sale really is, but whatever, I'm more interested to download that SMW hack soon.

[marlowe221]

The rest of that seller's offerings are similarly bizarre. Of course, I mean no disrespect to our Russian members - I recognize how tough it must have been to get much in the way of video games for many years in that part of the world and, well, any port in a storm as the saying goes.

That said, I would be curious to play a couple of these if only to see what happened when I plugged it into the Genesis and hit the power button.

[Sik]

There's still more than that:

[goldenband]

Super Mario World 64 was dumped and really looks like SMW, but unfortunately, plays like shit!

What is that music that starts at 2:32? I know I recognize it...

EDIT: Yep, it's TaleSpin (says in the comments).

[Barone]

This bag though...

[Azathoth]

It took quite some effort for to dump the SMW64 cart a few years ago, it was one of the last few original unlicensed games from the 90's that remained undumped . Besides those mentioned in Ecco's post, there are 2 original Russian Mario games. One often referred to as Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario 4, the other as Super Mario 3 or Mario: Around the World. Both have absolutely fantastic music but leave a lot to be desired control-wise.

You can find a lot of info about these unlicensed Mario games at the Bootleg Games Wiki and the Pirated Games Central forums.

[Ecco]

I downloaded that SMW hack and I actually really like it. The control is not the same as Mario controls, but the controls aren't terrible either. He can't run by holding a button, and instead, he runs by gaining momentum. It's not as nice as Mario's normal controls, but it works OK.

Can anyone explain why these hacks tend to get strange controls? Like here, are the controls from a different game or something?

Also: I got the "fixed" download at the YouTube video in this thread. I realized that I had a few downloads of the same game already, but that they weren't "fixed," and they would never play in an emulator. Can someone explain what was broken and fixed with this hack?

[Sik]

Can anyone explain why these hacks tend to get strange controls?

Getting it to work smoothly requires subpixel precision (i.e. manipulating non-integer values). You can achieve this easily with fixed point, but the problem is that most of these guys don't realize it and instead try to use integer precision instead. It backfires miserably, but they're probably in such a hurry that they can't afford to care for it. (I recall hearing of a story of some Chinese guy who was given only two weeks to make a new game from scratch - who has the time to polish that?)

[Azathoth]

Can someone explain what was broken and fixed with this hack?

Unfixed version still has the original copy protection intact and require the emulator to have the protection for that specific game written into it. Fixed versions have the ROM patched to remove the copy protection so it will work in any emulator.

[cabear]

if these hacks could just get the controls the same as their original counterparts they would be halfway playable!

[Ecco]

Unfixed version still has the original copy protection intact and require the emulator to have the protection for that specific game written into it. Fixed versions have the ROM patched to remove the copy protection so it will work in any emulator.

So what kind of copy protection is on the unfixed version? Is it a region lock-out, or something along those lines?

[Sik]

Bank switching and encryption. The encryption is just rotating the bits and then applying a XOR mask, but it sure can be elusive to figure out.

[NeoVamp]

In short, they made it so you can not illegally copy their illegally ported game.

So then we cracked it so we can illegally copy their illegally ported game.

Illegally I might add.