Star Soldier

Star Soldier is a deceptively simple vertically-scrolling shooter by Hudson Soft, filled with all manner of crazy hidden items, secret bonuses, and unused things.

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Prototype Info

Unused Sprite Tilemaps#

A number of unused sprite tilemaps exist in the ROM, some of which hint at a slightly more ambitious game than what we ended up getting.

Sprites 04-05#

Unused frames for Caesar, the player ship, which suggest that other powerup transformations were planned. Unfortunately, the original graphics were overwritten.

Sprite 06#

Unknown; stored immediately after the ship tilemaps. This sprite actually uses four unique tile numbers (D4, D5, E4, and E5), but their original graphics were overwritten with the copyright symbol.

Sprite 07#

Unknown; stored immediately after the ship tilemaps. Its original graphics were likely overwritten with the Sopra graphics seen here.

Sprites 1D-1F#

Unknown; stored immediately after the "S" powerup capsule. Perhaps other powerups were planned?

Sprites 2B-2C#

Unused frames for Pendo, which fit the sprite's movement pattern nicely. Probably just an oversight.

Alternate "creepy" versions.

Sprite 3B#

Unused frame for Pling. Again, probably just an oversight.

Alternate "creepy" version.

Sprite 49#

Unknown enemy. Though it looks like Vita/Luke, these particular tiles are actually unused.

Swapping in the Star Brain sprite bank, we can see that it was originally a completely unique sprite! Why its graphics were replaced with duplicate Vita/Luke graphics in the main sprite bank is a mystery.

It even has an alternate "creepy" version!

Sprites 6E-71#

An unused animation frame for Jericho. Neither of the glitched tiles are used anywhere else in the game.

Hidden ASCII Text#

Version String#

The game has V4/11A stored at the beginning of the ROM.

Reset Check#

NONTAMA. is used by the game to check for a soft or hard reset.

Developer Messages#

Two additional hidden ASCII messages exist within Star Soldier's character ROM. They appear as "corrupt" tiles in tile editors, and can only be read in a hex editor.

= I love M.Akakura
= Madwoman Megumi.

It's likely that the Megumi Akakura referred to here is the same MEGU that appeared in some early Hudson titles, such as Binary Land and Challenger.¹ Note that in the Japanese version, modifying these tiles will cause the ROM to deliberately crash itself!

Unused Steria Design#

Found at the end of the Star Brain sprite bank, in place of the Steria. It's probably just an old design that was never updated, since Sterias can't coexist with Star Brains anyway.

Steria	Thing

References#