2016.05.03
Accidentally, athene and nikita600 provided an interesting dump. Can't
guarantee it's genuine, but it seems that we have here an unreleased
prototype version of the Gimmick! game for Japanese region. There are some
little differences from the released version, the rest of the game is exactly
the same. There is the reason to tell that this is actually a proto version.
The copy protection code in this game uses a couple of 4-byte data chunks to
test its consistency. At least one of them is unused either in both released
versions. This is an intro copyrights text "TOMO". In this ROM, this is
actually part of the intro screen "A TOMOMI SAKAI GAME". This string has left
in European version and completely unused, in the Japanese version, most of
this string replaced with FF, the only "TOMO" is left to not to break the
protection.
Also, there are other small differences: developer name "SAKAE" here is
"SAKAI" instead in all other places, the debug buttons on the controller 2
are the same as for the European version, but enabled by default (see in my
cheats data base, even if you disable it, you can't actually control the
black enemy in the stage two on the ship, you just can jump with Select),
instead of "AUTHENTIC ENTERTAINMENT" here is "GIMMICK ENTERTAINMENT TEAM"
(this string is also present in european version, but with partially removed
GIMMICK part) as well as the part of the title screen contains "original of
e.g.t." instead of "presented by sunsoft". And finally, the "BLACK HOLE"
message of the protection code here should be "IMPERFECT VERSION".
Gimmick! (J)(Prototype)
http://cah4e3.shedevr.org.ru/dumping/2016/Gimmick!_(J)(Prototype).rar
http://cah4e3.shedevr.org.ru/dumping/2016/images/Gimmick!_(J)(Prototype)-0.png
http://cah4e3.shedevr.org.ru/dumping/2016/images/Gimmick!_(J)(Prototype)-1.png
http://cah4e3.shedevr.org.ru/dumping/2016/images/Gimmick!_(J)(Prototype)-2.png
http://cah4e3.shedevr.org.ru/dumping/2016/images/Gimmick!_(J)(Prototype)-3.png
来源 http://cah4e3.shedevr.org.ru/dumping_2016.php