Digimon Tamers: Battle Spirit

Digimon Tamers: Battle Spirit is a fighting game where cute little monsters struggle to prove they're the best at grabbing each other's balls. That is to say, in lieu of a standard health bar system, Digimon drop "D-Spirits" when hit, which their opponents must collect to win the bout.

The game was followed up by an enhanced Ver. 1.5 release, but is best known internationally for its Game Boy Advance port, Digimon Battle Spirit. The original version is notably one of the few WonderSwan games to be released in English.

Development Text#

Debug Menu#

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: Can the debug menu still be accessed somehow or are these strings all that remain?

TEST MESSAGE
DEBUG FONT
COMPANY LOGO
PUSH A
TITLE DEMO
PUSH A
NAME ENTRY
PUSH A
ENDHING
PUSH B
STAFF ROLL
PUSH B
SYNC WAIT
SYNC OK
SYNC FALSE
CANCEL

Beginning at 0x348420 are a series of strings which suggest a debug menu allowing the user to jump to various scenes. All of this text was cleaned out for the Game Boy Advance port.

Dimps Version#

At 0x3C5F5A is the following string, presumably relating to some tool in use at Dimps rather than the game itself. Unlike the above debug text, this string was carried over to the Game Boy Advance game.

DIMPS Ver0.72

Regional Differences#

The game features a complete English-language localization, enabled through reading a certain I/O port on the cartridge itself. Some WonderSwan games saw wider Asian releases in English, so this is likely to have been the intended market, and while the game has been released in South Korea, it is currently unknown what language a South Korean cartridge of it is set to.

Interestingly, some minor graphical glitching is introduced in the English title screen's backdrop, with some incorrectly placed tiles suggesting either that it was not completed or was simply poorly tested. Additionally, the option to connect to D-Ark "digivices" is only available when the game is running in Japanese.

Japanese	English

Debugging Context#

A main event call/jump table exists at C578:0069 (0x3C57E9) and called at C578:023B, C578:0245, and C578:035B. The table is grouped by triplet pointers, which correspond to the 3 calls.

Set a breakpoint at C578:023B and modify BX register and continue execution or more correctly set a breakpoint at C578:0227 and modify the contents of DS:004E (1000:004E).