Thunderbolt II Rom

[Nick420]

Nothing to do with me, just posting it here for all you guys.

During a search for undumped/unemulated MD games, I stumbled about this unlicensed shooter which was apparently part of Gamtec series and is considered to be
quite "rare" by the people who own a copy.

From the link below, it seems the game was dumped but the dump never released publicly because it "did not work on emulators or flashcards" (well, like most of those unlicensed original games which have on-board copy protection... until someone cracks them)

Out of curiosity, I contacted one of these fellows to see if they still had the "non-working" dump so I could had a crack on it.

Hopefully, it appeared that the dump was complete and that the copy-protection used by the game is identical to the one in many other unlicensed games from this area (16 Tiles Mahjong II, Smart Mouse, etc) so it literally took 10 minutes to crack it.

Basically, the game expects hard-coded value to be returned when reading address $400000 and $400006, which are normally not mapped on traditional cartridges (or flashcarts) but maps to extra cartridge hardware in these games.

So much for the talk, here is a link to the patched ROM, which should work on any emulators (tested on Fusion) or flashcarts (tested on Mega Drive Model 2 with Everdrive MD)

I have no clue how to add pics so maybe a mod can do that?

I presume it's against the rules to link to roms so just google this baby.

[IseeThings]

Hi, if the unmodified ROM isn't currently recognized by MESS could you forward it (drop me a PM) we like to support these things in their original uncracked form

It sounds typical of the protection schemes used on many chinese bootleg carts.

If the mods feel I shouldn't post this request here please remove, and I'll send a PM, I just think it's important to spread the info that MESS (and thus my UME project) is interested in preserving the games in their original protected form, all too often only the cracked versions surface.

[Nick420]

PM,d

[IseeThings]

ok, thanks, the protected dump will be supported in the next version of MESS / UME when launched with the software list feature (MAME style)

[Nick420]

Glad to help