Running out of Spac

The Dumping Union (with help from hap, N. Francfort & Smitdogg) located the rather less common original release of Psikyo’s Space Bomber.

Chances are this version was intended for Japan only, because with the existing set the ‘Version B’ subtitle was only ever shown when set to Japan. Note, even from the first screen you see the localization isn’t quite right when the older set is booted as a World version. It appears they didn’t manage to fit the text on the screen, on the screen which is telling you how much of the screen you should be fitting on your screen… Oh dear. The text was rearranged for the Version B release to ensure it fitted correctly.




Title screens when set to Japan are the same aside the subtitle.




The ‘Space Bomber’ logo in attract mode appears in various colours in the original release, in the version B it’s always red.




Another bug when set to English, again relates to the text display, this time when continuing (also the original version only seems to ever display this one string, the B version has multiple strings) You can see they changed the colour of the Game Over text as well.




Furthermore, there are NO English (or Engrish) cutscenes in the original release of the game it simply jumps from the World 1 boss straight to World 2. This adds more weight to the argument that it was intended as a Japan release, and the ‘World’ region wasn’t fully tested / finished at this point.

Gameplay differences? There are bound to be some, probably game balance related, however I’m not familiar enough with the game to tell you :-)

I’ve been hoping this would show up since I wrote the driver for the Psikyo SH2 hardware many years ago.







Source: mamedev.emulab.it/haze/