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New Music Discovered In Donkey Kong For Arcade

Posted by timothy on from the now-there's-dedication dept.

First time accepted submitter furrykef . writes Over 33 years have passed since Donkey Kong first hit arcades, but it still has new surprises. I was poking through the game in a debugger when I discovered that the game contains unused music and voice clips. One of the tunes would have been played when you rescued Pauline, and two others are suggestive of deleted cutscenes. In addition, Pauline was originally meant to speak. In one clip she says something unintelligible, but it may be "Hey!", "Nice!", or "Thanks!". The other is clearly a cry for help.

23 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Unused site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    BREAKING NEWS
    -- for immediate release

    Over 14 years have passed since Slashdot first hit the Web, but it still has new suprises. I was poking through the website when I discovered that the website contains an unused parallel site called "beta.slashdot.org", every article having a beta and a non-beta version. Is this article supersymmetry? The website's design lets it look like like it is a cry for help in designing the page.

  2. Video Game Nostalgia by Etherwalk · · Score: 5, Funny

    The more you bash video game nostalgia, the more Atari consoles will slip through your fingers...

    1. Re:Video Game Nostalgia by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      The more you bash video game nostalgia, the more Atari consoles will slip through your fingers...

      The more tightly you cling to Atari nostalgia, the more landfilled copies of ET will slip through your fingers...

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Using a Java plugin to play audio files... by ZorinLynx · · Score: 2

    ...is like using a steam engine to power a car. It's clunky, inefficient, and outmoded.

    WHY??????? HTML5 can play audio directly.

    1. Re:Using a Java plugin to play audio files... by _xeno_ · · Score: 2

      If you View Source, you'll see that they do, in fact, use an <audio> tag. They also have a JavaScript library that replaces it with an HTML GUI. I guess if it detects your browser is old enough to not support HTML5, it goes with a Java applet instead.

      So... update your browser?

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
    2. Re:Using a Java plugin to play audio files... by NotInHere · · Score: 2

      Most likely ZorinLynx uses Safari or IExploder, as the files are encoded as ogg, and those two browsers are the only ones not supporting ogg.

      They can install a codec plugin though.
      http://www.xiph.org/dshow/down...
      https://wiki.xiph.org/XiphQT

    3. Re:Using a Java plugin to play audio files... by godrik · · Score: 2

      But does it work with real audio files?

    4. Re:Using a Java plugin to play audio files... by solidraven · · Score: 2

      ZorinLynx thinks that Java and JavaScript are the same thing ... lol

      Shhh, don't disturb him. It's one of those sub-six or sub-seven digit ID geezers. He'll fall back asleep after he's through shaking his fist at "those dang kids" on his lawn...

      And rightfully so!!!

    5. Re:Using a Java plugin to play audio files... by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 2

      Can't you damn kids play some NICE music?

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    6. Re:Using a Java plugin to play audio files... by sound+vision · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Ogg Vorbis certainly isn't dead - development has slowed in the past 5-7 years, due to the codec reaching maturity, but it remains the best choice for an open audio codec in the transparent bit rate range (100 kb/s+).
      Recently, Opus has taken a clear advantage at lower bit rates and in applications that need ultra-low-latency encoding, like video conferencing. But there is really no excuse for these browsers not to include Vorbis support. From the point of view of someone needing to encode content, Vorbis has the additional advantage of being much more widely-supported vs. Opus, oversights in these minor browsers notwithstanding.

    7. Re:Using a Java plugin to play audio files... by machine321 · · Score: 3, Funny

      WHY??????? HTML5 can play audio directly.

      Duh, they didn't have HTML5 when Donkey Kong came out.

  4. Treasures by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    There's a secret Yoko Ono tune on the buried ET cartridges.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:Treasures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I thought you said "treasure", not "weapon"

    2. Re: Treasures by jd2112 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Have you ever *heard* Yoko Ono's "music"? I have, and yes. It can be classified as a weapon. Or at least an implement of torture.

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
  5. This happens every so often. by Myria · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As another example, in January 2013, I discovered a cheat code in the SNES RPG Breath of Fire 1 that allows you to create a save file at a few key locations in the story. This cheat code sat hidden for about 20 years, and it wasn't until I came along and reverse engineered the game that it showed up.

    Link to it: click me. Sorry for the quality; it is a really difficult thing to record when your only recording device is an iPad and there was nobody home at the time. Not to mention how hard it is to do that controller sequence and record with only two hands.

    --
    "Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
  6. Haiku is more interesting than the MIDI by Spy+Handler · · Score: 2

    Congratulation !
    If you analyse
    Difficult this program,
    We would
    Teach you

    1. Re:Haiku is more interesting than the MIDI by cfalcon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      By putting the caps like that, you make it look like they thought each of those was a sentence.

      Here's direct from the binary (c_5k_b.bin). It uses byte aligned 8 bit ASCII, which is not super common back then, but it was the actual standard. (and still is!)
      This is UNIQUE, however- the REST of the file uses binary 0x00 (null) to map to numeral zero, up to 0x09 for numeral 9, then 0x0A for A, 0x10 for G, etc. That means that unlike all the other text in the game, this was rendered in ASCII, in another language, and burned to the ROM just so that maybe some hacker, somewhere, would answer their call- or at least feel cool.

      It is most properly rendered:

      CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.

      The string begins with a null character. It has two spaces after "ANALYSE" and "THIS", and four spaces after the telephone 2141, and three spaces after the 304 and the "SYSTEM DESIGN". The entirety of it is exactly 160 bytes. There are no line feeds or other characters.

      So, no, they did NOT type:

      "If you analyse
      Difficult this program,"

      This represents around 1% of their total space on their final shipped product. 1% of their product to put this call in a foreign language to hackers across the world. Granted, Donkey Kong has a bit of spare space in the ROM, but... still.

    2. Re:Haiku is more interesting than the MIDI by furrykef · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Because it wasn't made by Nintendo -- at least, it wasn't programmed by them. Ikegami did most if not all of the programming for the game. But Nintendo designed and distributed the game. This became a sticky issue when Nintendo used this code as the basis for Donkey Kong Jr. without consulting Ikegami. Ikegami claimed copyright infringement and sued. They settled out of court, but it's possible that Ikegami still owns the rights to the code. This doesn't apply to the NES version or other ports, because they didn't use any of Ikegami's code.

  7. This was discovered a few years ago by Mr+Z · · Score: 5, Informative

    Carl Mueller, Jr. discovered these when he reverse engineered Donkey Kong a few years ago. He implemented them in his clone for the Intellivision, also. I believe he had had blog posts about these, but I can't find them.

    --
    Program Intellivision!
    1. Re:This was discovered a few years ago by Mr+Z · · Score: 2

      Ah, apparently he auctioned off his fully commented disassembly

      --
      Program Intellivision!
    2. Re:This was discovered a few years ago by furrykef · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, it's true. I found that out shortly after I submitted the story; my discovery of the existence of these assets was entirely independent. Somebody told me that he heard about unused music before and dug up the links, and indeed there are YouTube clips of a homebrew Intellivision port that uses the assets. I was a little depressed because I'd thought I found something special that nobody outside Nintendo or Ikegami had ever heard of before. But hey, at least l've brought the knowledge to the public.

  8. I dont see how this can be such a big secret... by jonwil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Donkey Kong uses discrete analog components for its sound and its hardware is documented both through the schematics and the MAME driver implementation of said discrete sound.

    1. Re:I dont see how this can be such a big secret... by furrykef · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, very little of the game's sound output uses the discrete logic. It's used for Mario walking, Mario jumping, and the boom sound used at various points (when Mario gets hit, DK pounds his chest, etc.). That's it. Everything else uses an i8035. The i8035 is a standard Intel microcontroller with no native sound capabilities; it only runs a program (in this case a 4K ROM). They hooked up one of its output pins to a DAC, and the music and other sound effects are generated through that DAC. It was in the middle of playing around with the i8035 code in the debugger, trying to reverse engineer the code, that I wound up making it play one of the unused tunes and discovered the game's hidden content. Some of MAME's documentation was immensely useful in giving me a starting point for my disassembly, but that's all it did.