The Wing of Madoola

The Wing of Madoola is a pioneering action-adventure game that never got a release outside of Japan... until 2024!

Sprite Viewer#

There is a sprite viewer hidden in the game's code, presumably to allow the developers to easily check how the sprites looked onscreen. Technically, it displays every tile in CHR ROM, but the tiles are arranged so the sprite graphics look correct, as opposed to the background graphics. The Game Genie codes LYKLZY and SLKLLY will jump into the sprite viewer when the game boots. Note that the sprite viewer doesn't load any palettes, so all the sprites will show with the palette from the title screen. The Select button will jump to the next sprite bank, and the Start button will quit the sprite viewer.

Sample Version#

The sample version of The Wing of Madoola was used for demonstrating the game to potential customers, press review samples, etc. It has a couple differences from the retail version.

Debug code#

Pressing A on the second player controller while starting the game will give Lucia the best versions of every weapon in the game, as well as setting her health and magic points to 9990 each (you can't get them past 5000 in normal gameplay). It also lets you skip to any stage in the game. This code was still left in the retail game, just dummied out.

Curiously, this can also be activated by pressing Select + Start to continue the game while $AB = 1 and $AC != 2, though neither the sample nor the retail versions ever fulfill the latter condition.

Sample code#

LDA     joy2               ; start a maxxed out game if
BMI     startMaxxedOutGame ; A was pressed on controller 2
LDA     joy1
AND     #$20               ; was select pressed? (continue code)
BEQ     startNewGame       ; no? start new game
LDA     gamePlayedFlag     ; $AB is set to 1 after starting a game, and 0 after the ending
CMP     #1
BNE     startNewGame
LDA     cheatFlag          ; $AC is only ever set to 2 after starting a game
CMP     #2
BNE     startMaxxedOutGame ; thus this will always fall through to handling the continue screen

Retail code#

LDA     joy2
NOP
NOP
LDA     joy1
AND     #$20               ; was select pressed? (continue code)
BEQ     startNewGame       ; no? start new game
LDA     gamePlayedFlag     ; $AB is set to 1 after starting a game, and 0 after the ending
CMP     #1
BNE     startNewGame
LDA     cheatFlag          ; $AC is only ever set to 2 after starting a game
CMP     #2
BNE     startMaxxedOutGame ; thus this will always fall through to handling the continue screen

This means that it can be restored with the Game Genie codes AUEZKP and IOEZSO. Alternatively, you can invert the condition so the debug code gets triggered if A isn't pressed by using AOEZKP instead of AUEZKP.

Anti-cheating measures#

Sunsoft ran a contest where if you mailed in a postcard with the keyword from Stage 8 (ねこだよ〜ん), you could win a cassette tape with arranged music from the game. Having a version of Madoola floating around where you could just skip to Stage 8 would have put the contest in jeopardy, so Sunsoft's solution was to censor the keyword:

Sample game	Retail game

Regional Differences#

On September 6, 2024, Sunsoft released an English version of their Sunsoft is Back! Retro Game Collection. As all three games in the collection were previously Japanese exclusives, they got new English translations for this release. Most of the text in The Wing of Madoola is already in English, so this amounts to yet another ROM variant with the text on the keyword screen modified. This time, they changed it to an Atlantis no Nazo reference. The music on the screen was also changed to the game over music to make the fake-out extra convincing.

Japanese ROM	English ROM

Japanese ROM	English ROM

Besides the modified keyword screen getting binary patched in, and some of the "ねこだよ〜ん" tiles getting overwritten by the new exclamation point and parentheses tiles, the ROM is identical to the Japanese version.