Densetsu no Starfy 3/Revision changes between v1.0 and v1.1

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Densetsu no Starfy 3 was only released in Japan; however it still quietly received two slightly different ROMs on cartridge.

This has historically occurred time to time with video games in general (prior to the introduction of Internet patches), for example various revision changes in other Game Boy Advance and Game Boy games (such as certain languages of certain versions of Pokémon games, Super Mario Land) would make adjustments like fixing glitches, removing typos, removing or adjusting anything that could be viewed as controversial, simply optimizing the code, and so on.

Identification

The original release (v1.0) of Densetsu no Starfy 3 has an MD5 hash of A9A2F5D60EA44E08901ABDFE69F2438A and a v1.1 release with an MD5 hash of EE4FBCEC249A68B796BE491F56FFE03D (also known online as Rev 1). It may be possible to identify which is which simply by tilting the cartridge and looking for an imprint with something suspicious (for example, a v1.1 of a game might have "A" next to the code; while a v1.0 might have just numbers for the code), as this is done to identify other games (example).

At present, the actual differences between v1.0 and v1.1 of Densetsu no Starfy 3 are poorly documented, but there are a few known changes; as described in the headers below.

A third revision with v1.1 as the base, was released digitally for Japanese Wii U Virtual Console; and has an MD5 hash of 4133D617F0A38053682FEFB3AE752F6B; confirming it as different to v1.0 and v1.1, but similar the differences are unknown or hard to find online.

Unused build date text changes

Thanks The Cutting Room Floor for originally finding these

The unused build date texts have some changes in the v1.1 revision, as such:

A build date unique to v1.0:

OptRls.2004/07/11 16:24:04

This may have been changed to the following v1.1 date; and the dates seem to be about two months apart:

OptRls.2004/09/14 17:03:31

V1.0 has three dates which are seemingly not in v1.1, and for some reason the text is encoded slightly differently to the rest. "."s in both the v1.0 and v1.1 build dates are artifacts from null (00) bytes and arguably shouldn't actually be in the text dumps, but the different positioning of the null bytes have been kept for illustration:

OptR.ls.2004/ 07.. 22:0.0:15
Opt.Rls.2004./07.. 22:.00:45
Opt.Rls.2004./07.. 22:.02:14


These three dates from v1.1 are seemingly not in v1.0:

OptRls.2004/07/07 22:02:02
OptRls.2004/07/07 22:00:32
OptRls.2004/09/14 17:03:31

Minor

This is a list of small technical changes.

  • Version number (offset 0xBC): 00 in v1.0 and 01 in v1.1
  • Complement check (offset 0xBD): 12 in v1.0 and 13 in v1.1

Offsets to structures

The locations to different areas in the ROM have changed between v1.0 and v1.1 (such as at least the offsets to the build date texts, the unused multi load texts, and likely other locations).

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