La-Mulana (2006)

La-Mulana is an indie Metroidvania-like (not actually based on Metroid or Castlevania) about an Indiana Jones lookalike exploring some ruins. Intended as a tribute to a lot of MSX games, it eventually got a remake that ended up more popular than the original thing.

Sub-Pages#

Development Info Prototype Info Prerelease Info Notes Data Bugs

Leftover Demo Sprites#

All of these can be found inside the image/ folder.

Older Sub-Weapon#

The Arrow is the first sub-weapon obtainable in the Demo. It was replaced by the Shuriken in the final game, reflected even by its slot in item.bmp. However, the arrow sprites remain in prot0.bmp.

Horizontal Spears#

Although the Spear sub-weapon can never be fired from the sides, there are sprites for doing so in prot0.bmp; in the Demo, that file has sprites for all sub-weapons other than the Arrow in all directions like this, even though they weren't implemented yet.

Ammo Counter#

This X mark used for counting the sub-weapons' ammo in the Demo was not used in the final, but it can still be found in item.bmp.

Stone Tablet Drawings#

There are four images intended to be used in stone tablets left unused in image/. The first three are leftovers from the Demo found in eveg00.bmp and eveg22.bmp, files with the Surface's object sprites. Angels, one of them carrying a bag of sorts. The puzzle associated with it is in the final game, but since it was transmitted by a skeleton (those don't use tablet drawings) and an NPC instead, its image was scrapped. It also contains Mulanese letters, but most of them are illegible; the only one that can be made out is "se" at the end of the middle ones, with a part of the E glyph missing.

Four stars around a ladder and many circles, likely the phases of the moon, as well as more illegible (save for 代 at the right) Mulanese letters to the sides.

What this was supposed to represent and why it was scrapped is unknown.

This last image is in the file with the Chamber of Extinction's object sprites, eveg06.bmp, depicting a mural and the Pochette Key. Probably meant for a tablet that does mention said item, but the same tablet just uses the previous image in the file, rendering this one unused.

Scrapped Area Graphic#

image/mapg03.bmp, the file with the Temple of the Sun's tileset graphics, has a chunk of tiles not seen anywhere in the game. It depicts Ellmac, the area's Guardian with two wolves besides it along two blue circles, what looks like an Egyptian symbol and mysterious glyphs above it - whether they are Mulanese glyphs or not is unknown.

Leftover Sound Effect#

The sound effect made by the Demo's equivalent of the Shuriken sub-weapon can still be found in the sound/ folder as se1A_01.wav.

Internal Music Track Text#

The .sgt files in music/, used for the SSCC versions of the game's music tracks, still contain a lot of interesting information about them inside. It can be found in their internal titles and a chunk called "Information" here after the track section of the same name in DirectMusic Producer, the program used to make these files. Tracks that have the same title as the filename or the album name and nothing else will not be included.

Unused Text#

Stone tablet text in data/script.dat at offset 0x8D6B hinting at how to defeat the sub-boss Nüwa, likely not used for being too obvious compared to other hints in the game.

 SSCC   SC88
This string is also inside lamulana.exe, the executable itself, at offset 0BD828. It was meant for when neither option of the Music Mode setting is selected and there is code for that at segment 08CD1C-08CD27, but you cannot do that in-game; you can only select between either options as the code for this option consists for a simple check as to whether its value is 0, and SSCC is already chosen by default, so both the code and the string are rendered unused.

Unused Dialog Box#

Segment 0C0DD8-0C0E57 of lamulana.exe contains a rather odd dialog box, with only the plain-looking options "OK", "ｷｬﾝｾﾙ" (Cancel) and a title of "ﾀﾞｲｱﾛｸﾞ" (Dialog) written in MS PGothic. This is notably absent in the executable of Aeon Genesis's English fan-translation from 2007, which was made by the director of the game Naramura himself; the translator credits him for "EXE hacking" and it has different compiler information (the Rich header has the mask 0x6AB503A8 as opposed to the original Japanese version's 0xA36414F7 and the internal timestamp is also later, 1/9/2007 00:59:49 UTC), indicating that he re-compiled the source code for it. Due to this and the fact that it's not called anywhere in the file, it was likely not meant to be shown.

Obscured Menu Behavior#

Pressing a number key from 0 to 6 in the F5 menu sets the sound effects' volume to a specific number, decreasing it by 5 digits from 100 to 60. Strangely, the menu only reflects this change the next time you open it. This is not even explained by the game's manual, but an image used there explains it as a leftover from its time, since that has a music option that fits this behavior.

Version Differences#

After the game's release, GR3Project still put out some revisions where needed. Strangely, the version number is still 1.0.0.1 in all executables available, so they will be categorized here by their release dates.

07/15#

According to GR3Project on August 13th,² a "second update" was released on July 15, 2006.

• Changes were made to the executable.*
• "Other bugs were fixed."
• A crash in the Hell Temple area was fixed.

* Since this version is not available, it's impossible to verify specifics of this.

07/22#

While there's no physical evidence of the above update, an executable with an internal timestamp from way later than that update's release to be it (0x44C1051A, 7/21/2006 16:47:22 UTC) and modified date of July 22nd can be found in the archive of GR3Project's website, but there's no evidence of it ever being announced there. Because of this, there's currently no changelog for it either.

08/23#

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: Addresses 027893 and 0278AB also had a value of 0x4B changed to 0x36, but the worth of this needs to be verified. Further in is code for displaying Music Mode text; see if that mode is related.

The final update made for the game, published on August 23rd.³ Its announcement on GR3Project's website doesn't specify what changes were made. One difference that lamulana.exe has from the previous version's executable is that its internal timestamp was changed to 0x44E749B6, 8/19/2006 (17:26:14 UTC), a date way earlier than the one when it was actually released.

References#