Track & Field (NES)

Track & Field
Also known as: Hyper Olympic (JP), Track & Field in Barcelona (EU) Developer: Konami Publishers: Konami, Kemco (EU) Platform: NES Released in JP: June 21, 1985 Released in US: April 1987 Released in EU: February 20, 1992 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has regional differences.

To do: Document the changes made in the Genteiban release, which has a different sprite for the player character.

Track & Field is the NES port of the Arcade game, now with two controllers replicating the original arcade experience (at least in Japan, as the game was reprogrammed internationally to use the NES controller). Notably this version was released in Japan a year after the Olympic Games Los Angeles 1984.

(Chariots of Fire theme plays)

Build Dates

At the beginning of the PRG ROM is an ID string that lists the game version and date.

Japan	USA	Genteiban! (Japan)
RC800 1,0 850325	RC800 X,0 850919	RD001 1,0 861220

In the European version, this is found at the end of the PRG ROM.

MSTR911014

Regional Differences

The international versions of Track & Field take the original Hyper Olympic and add all of the events from Hyper Sports, with the added events comprising the latter half of the game. The controls were also changed to use a standard NES controller instead of the Hyper Shot peripheral, the latter of which were likely included with the Famicom version because the standard controllers are hard-wired into the console.

Title Screen

Japan	USA	Europe

As Konami didn't publish the original Track & Field in Europe, Kemco thought they'd release it even though Track & Field II had already been released several years earlier. So what they did was simply make a title screen change and release it in time with the 1992 Barcelona Games. So thoughtful.

Unused Code

The dash, hurdles, long jump, and javelin events are programmed with cycle-timed code to split the screen into 5 independently horizontally scrolling areas. Two of those areas however, the audience and back wall, are always written with the same scroll value. The original arcade version of the game does scroll the audience and back wall at different rates.