Lupin Sansei: Pandora no Isan

Lupin Sansei: Pandora no Isan
Also known as: Lupin III: Pandora no Isan Developers: Namco, TOSE Publisher: Namcot Platform: NES Released in JP: November 6, 1987 This game has hidden developer credits. This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden level select.

Developer Credits

At 1FF70, there is a copyright string, along with the names of the programmers:

Copyright 1987  
Namco Ltd.  All 
Rights Reserved 
Programmed By.. 
HARUHISA.UDAGAWA
 &  KUMI.HANAOKA

This is used as part of the CRC test mentioned below.

The game also checks for the string

Yoshikawa

(stored in the ROM at 1C8F2) to see if the game performed a hard or a soft reset.

Debug Leftovers

Using the Game Genie code AENYVNNY, you can re-enable the debug mode. First of all, this disables the title screen warp cheats. Instead, it enables the invulnerability toggle at the player selection screen: just hold Left and press Start to toggle it on and off. During game, press B on Controller 2 to skip to the next stage. Also on Controller 2, press Right to select the item slot, press A to add more items. Finally, there is some scene skip after the Stage 2 and message "Game Over" will change to "To Be Continued".

Level Select

At the title screen, enter one of the following button codes to warp directly to the corresponding stage:

• Up, Down, Left, Right, B, A - Stage 2
• Left, Right, Up, Down, A, B - Stage 3
• Down, Up, Right, Left, A, A - Stage 4

CRC Test

There are a series of Namco games, made by the same programmers Haruhisa Udagawa and Kumi Hanaoka, that contains the same self-test for data integrity (Babel no Tou, Dragon Buster, Family Jockey, Mappy-Land, Pro Yakyuu: Family Stadium, Sanma no Meitantei, Sky Kid, Super Xevious: Gump no Nazo, Valkyrie no Bouken: Toki no Kagi Densetsu).

To enable any of these tests, you need a special device that should be plugged into the expansion port. The operation of that device is very simple. It should accept the data bit from the data input port and return it back inverted to the output data port. The device consists of a 4-bit shift register, working as some sort of FIFO buffer. The input bits goes to the input and then shifted to be output after 4 cycles.

At the game's boot, it tries to send some special data to the device. If the data output doesn't match the data input inverted, then the game continues normal operation. But if all data (usually 32, rarely 64 bytes) matches, self-tests will be performed. The program calculates 24-bit partial checksums for the PRG (excluding the last 8K) and the CHR data, summing only every 15th byte, and comparing it against the etalon.

Before testing of the PRG data, the background color turns red, before testing the CHR data, it turns green. If any of these tests fail, the program will jump directly to the reset routine. It means, one of these tests will be performed infinitely, but until the special device is unplugged, or until the tests are passed.

Normally, you'll see the red to green flash just before the game's boot. Or the static red screen if the PRG data is bad, or the flashing red to green screen if CHR data isn't good.

Using the Game Genie code GAXYNTEI, you can skip tests for the special device presence and jump straight to the integrity tests.

(Source: Cah4e3)