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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.

7 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...

  3. 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
  4. 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 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.