Bio-Ship Paladin (Arcade)

Bio-Ship Paladin is a game where you control the titular bio-ship (called Gomorrah in Japan) and collect power-ups to become faster, chunkier and more powerful while fighting against other ships called "The Aggressors". The plot is not important, just shoot everything!

Also, AUTO BEAM

Surprisingly, this is one of the few games that uses the NMK004 soundchip to not have a bootleg version with Raiden music and sound effects.

Developer Messages#

Hidden inside the ROM are two different messages. The first and less egregious of these is in the Toshiba TMP90840 memory at 0x4000:

Space Battle Ship "GOMORRAH"(TM). 
Copyright(C)1990 UPL COMPANY LIMITED.
Under the copyright laws,this The hardware or The software 
may not be copied,in whole or part.
Understand?? Music & Effect by Yoshio Nagashima

The second and more egregious starts with this tidbit near the beginning of the 68k memory at 0x40:

STOP ANALIZEING THIS SOFTWARE !!

Followed by this message at 0xC0:

 Space Battle Ship "GOMORRAH"(TM). 
 Copyright(C)1990 UPL COMPANY LIMITED. 
 Under the copyright laws,this The hardware or The software 
 may not be copied,in whole or part. 
 Understand?? Programmed by Itsam Matarca. Message(JAPANESE SHIFT JIS): 
 おい、そこのヒマな、コピー屋のあならいずヤローみてんぢゃねぇよ！
 コピー基板作っている奴、本当に頭にくるんだよな。特に韓国、台湾、香港、
 おめーだよ日本人ぶってこんなメッセージ読みやがって、
 まぁいいや、このＮＭＫ製はクソだから。
 ちなみにＳＮＫのねおぢおもクソ基板だ（らしい）。
 ＩＴＳＡＭ・ＭＡＴＡＲＣＡ（イッツアム・マターカと読む）こと柳田　勇より

 Space Battle Ship "GOMORRAH"(TM). 
 Copyright(C)1990 UPL COMPANY LIMITED. 
 Under the copyright laws,this The hardware or The software 
 may not be copied,in whole or part. 
 Understand?? Programmed by Itsam Matarca. Message(JAPANESE SHIFT JIS): 

 Hey, I'm looking at you copiers with so much free time to analyze this!
 You bastards making copied boards really get on my nerves.
 Especially you wannabe Japanese from South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong
 who have the gall to even read this message.

 Well anyway, this NMK board is SHIT.
 By the way, SNK's Neo Geo also is (or seems to be) a SHIT motherboard.

 from Yanagida Isamu a.k.a. Itsam Matarca (pronounced /it-sam ma-tar-ka/)

Regional Differences#

Title Screen#

US	Japan

For some strange reason, American Sammy skimped on insert their logo this time, which UPL (as usual) did the opposite.

Ending#

US	Japan

Since Gomorrah is called Paladin in the US version, its name had to be changed during the ending sequence for obvious reasons.

Revisional Differences#

To do: Screenshot

• The Arcade Archives release removes the American Sammy copyright text from the US version's title screen.
• Any instance of flashing (e.g. when a boss is defeated) in the Arcade Archives release has been heavily reduced in an effort to lessening the chance of causing epileptic seizures.

References#