This article has a talk page!This page details bugs of Balloon Fight (NES).
Reset Bugs#
The Japanese Famicom version relies on toploader consoles not resetting the PPU alongside the CPU when resetting the console, causing the game to hang on frontloader consoles. The unreleased FDS version and the NES versions fix this by introducing the necessary delay before writing to PPU registers.
Rank 47 Glitch#
The USA and European NES versions move several sound-related variables to a portion of memory which overlaps the Balloon Trip leaderboard and a special string used to distinguish warm or cold starts (HAL at $07FA).
This causes many issues:
- The lowest attainable rank in Balloon Trip becomes 47 instead of the original 50, due to the three lowest scores being overwritten.
- High scores are lost between resets, as the warm start check always fails.
- Resetting the game anywhere outside of the title or demo screens causes the triangle channel to play a portion of the Balloon Trip theme on the title screen.
Audio#
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Early-Model Famicom |
Famicom/NES |
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The Game Over music sounds different when played on an early-model Famicom console. The Famicom was released in 1983 with the letterless 2A03 CPU, and following reports of crashes Hiroshi Yamauchi ordered a mass recall of all Famicom units the next year.1 The Famicom's CPU would be replaced with the lettered revisions (E, G, H), which would also be used in the NES.
The Game Over music accidentally writes garbage bytes to the noise channel registers which happen to enable a "periodic noise" mode only present in lettered CPU revisions.2 This causes a loud buzz at the end of the song.
The unreleased FDS version fixes this by including the proper snare sound.
The Balloon Fight soundtrack release on Nintendo Music features the two glitched versions of the Game Over theme, as "Game Over (Early-Model Famicom)" and "Game Over", respectively. It's unclear as to why the fixed variant was excluded.