Bound High!

Bound High!
Developer: Japan System Supply Platform: Virtual Boy This game has unused code. This game has unused graphics. This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden sound test. This game has a hidden level select. This game has revisional differences.

This game was never completed and/or given a public release. As a result of this, keep in mind that the developers might have used or deleted some of the content featured here, had the game actually been released.

Bound High! is about a bouncing spherical robot named Chalvo who crushes his opponents from above in a top-down view. It's a lot better than it may sound.

This, along with Dragon Hopper and Zero Racers, comprised a trio of highly-anticipated Virtual Boy games that were announced to be coming as part of a system relaunch. Unfortunately, a planned February 1996 release in Japan never materialized, while in America it was pushed all the way to late August...and then Nintendo opted to just pull the plug on the system. A finished build of Bound High! was eventually leaked online.

The developer would later create a spiritual successor for the Game Boy in 1997 called Chalvo 55, which not only featured Chalvo and similar bounce-focused gameplay (albeit as a 2D platformer instead), but even arrangements of most of this game's soundtrack.

Debug Features

Download Debug Restoration Patch for Bound High! (Proto 2) File: BoundHigh-VB-DebugRestoration.zip (627 bytes) (info)

A number of debug features are present but inaccessible in the extant prototypes. The above patch for the later prototype (Proto 2) restores this functionality.

Cutscene Tests

Two button codes on the title screen can be used to skip to the opening and ending cutscenes for the Adventure of Chalvo mode.

Opening:

• Left D-Pad: Left, Left, Select, Start, B

Ending:

• Right D-Pad: Right, Right, A, B, Start

From the Score Attack!! or Pocket and Cushion menus, there are two more button codes for the cutscenes in those modes. These codes only play the cutscenes, they do not actually change the game completion state.

All 16 Stages Clear:

• Right D-Pad: Left, Left, A, B, Start

All 20 Stages Clear:

• Right D-Pad: Right, Right, A, B, Start

Stage Completion Shortcuts

The Score Attack!! and Pocket and Cushion menus have additional button codes which allow rapid progression through these modes for testing.

First 16 stages clear, unlock stages 17-20:

• Left D-Pad: Right, Right, Select, Start, B

Next stage selected will be marked as completed with maximum possible score:

• Left D-Pad: Up, Down, Up, Down, B

Pause Menu Codes

Round Select

• Hold R, then press Right D-Pad: Up, Down, Left, Right

Once in the Round Select mode, rounds can be cycled through one at a time using the Left D-Pad Up/Down, or entire worlds (12 rounds) at a time with Left D-Pad Right/Left. Rounds are selected by pressing A.

Sound Test Mode

• Hold R, then press B, A, L, L

The score counter becomes a tracker for which music or sound effect is currently selected. The counter uses the same controls as the Round Select, with the Left D-Pad cycling through entries. Both music and sound effects share the same counter: B plays the music track at that index, while A plays the sound effect at that index. The L button stops the music and Start returns to normal gameplay.

Automatic Play

• Hold R, then press L, Right D-Pad: Left, L, Right D-Pad: Right, L, Right D-Pad: Down

Chalvo will move automatically with some fairly rudimentary AI. A sound effect plays to confirm this has been successful. The CPU seems to move in the direction of the nearest enemy with no consideration given to whether there is anything to bounce on in the intervening space. This works acceptably on early stages that have more coverage, but deeper into the game, the AI is not a very good player. Repeating the button combo restores player control.

Enable Expert Enemies

• Hold R, then press Right D-Pad: Down, Left, Up, Right, Left D-Pad: Down, Right, Up, Left

Enables the tougher Expert difficulty enemies which shock the player on each bounce. A sound effect plays to confirm this has been successful. These are normally only accessible when actually playing on Expert difficulty. Repeating the combo restores normal enemies.

Change Difficulty

• Hold R, then press Left D-Pad: Up eight (8) times

Cycles through the difficulties in order. A sound effect plays to confirm this has been successful but the difficulty display will not change until the next round. There are only three difficulties: Easy, Normal and Hard/Expert. The Expert difficulty is the same as Hard but with the expert enemies enabled, so this code will cycle through Easy/Normal/Hard when they are disabled or Easy/Normal/Expert when they are enabled.

Frame Advance Mode

• Hold L and R, then press B

This code will advance the game by a single frame each time it is performed.

Unused Graphics

Beginning at 0x4C1B4 in the ROM are the title screen and main menu graphics.

Developer Logo Text

The company name in the intro is part of the cat logo, and on the title screen it's displayed in the game's normal font. This dedicated double-height "font" (with only these characters) is included with the other title screen graphics, however.

Early Mode Names

Stored along with the rest of the menu graphics is this text which, given the letters, are early names for the four game modes. It's not abundantly clear what said early names were, but an educated guess would be "QUEST", "PUZZLE", "RANDOM", and "JOURNEY". Notably, the "Score Attack!!" mode uses puzzle pieces as its background.

While "Quest" and "Journey" kind of make sense for their respective modes, the synonymous names were probably considered too confusing.

Alternate Auto-Pause Graphic

This unused graphic is stored with the other Auto-Pause graphics. The final game has "AUTO-PAUSE" written in the game's standard double-height font instead.

Revision Differences

There are two extant prototypes of Bound High! One was compiled from semi-private leaked source code for the game, while the other was dumped from a Nintendo of America prototype cartridge. The cartridge dump appears to be slightly more recent than the compiled version, possibly final.

Palette Bug

The source code has been privately confirmed to include a bug with the initialization of the BKCOL register. This is used by the Virtual Boy to determine the default color of any undefined pixels, i.e. how bright they should appear before anything has been drawn to them. On real hardware, this is sometimes noticeable as a red flicker on startup when booting the compiled prototype. This bug has been fixed in the later prototype dump. The source code incorrectly sets the address of the BKCOL register, so when it attempts to set 0 (black) as the default color, it instead stores that value into an unrelated register and BKCOL itself is never configured.

Password Characters

Source Compile	Cartridge Dump

In the prototype compiled from source, the password screen uses the full Latin alphabet as well as numbers from 0-9. The cartridge dump has replaced all vowel characters in-place with a variety of symbols: a cat, fish, pachin, smiley face and Pac-Man-like figure over A, E, I, O and U. Nintendo of America is known to have had a developer guideline at this time which forbid the use of vowels on password screens, as a way of avoiding confusion between similar characters like I and 1 or O and 0. The Japanese arm, Nintendo Co. Ltd., did not have a similar rule.

Since the prototype cartridge is known to have come from NoA HQ, this likely indicates either that this version was intended specifically for the North American market or that the same final ROM would have been published in both markets, following all of their individual and shared guidelines. Each of the prototypes includes the start-up warning in both English and Japanese, which supports the "World" ROM theory. The Virtual Boy was not region locked and a number of other games took this approach.

The game's password generation system does not use the vowel/symbol characters in its algorithm, so in any case, passwords which use them will never be given to the player.

(Source: Original TCRF research)