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Dezaemon 3D

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Title Screen

Dezaemon 3D

Developer: Athena
Publisher: Athena
Platform: Nintendo 64
Released in JP: June 26, 1998


CodeIcon.png This game has unused code.
GraphicsIcon.png This game has unused graphics.


Dezaemon 3D is a shoot-'em-up game creator for the Nintendo 64. Unreleased 64DD expansion disks would've greatly increased the size, complexity, and number of games that could be created and saved.

64DD Unlocked Features

Unlike other 64DD expansions, Dezaemon disks contain only stage data and blank system files. When one of these system files is found on the disk drive the game switches into "disk" mode. This unlocks and expands several features:

  • The number of stages is expanded from 5 to 10.
  • Limits on user-edited images is raised from ten 64×32 images to 150.
  • Limits on user-edited models is raised from 10 to 100.
  • Limits on music, animations, intros and endings, etc. are removed.
  • Multiple games may be saved to disk.
  • User games saved to SRAM cannot be played directly; you must convert them to disk first.

Except for the disk bootstrap for when the disk is inserted without the cartridge, there is no executable data on the disk; it only contains resources in a proprietary file system format. Due to this formatting, it is not obvious if it would be compatible with RandNet. Other known RandNet titles use the MFS library, providing not only a standard file storage system but also encoding the game IDs each file is usable with.

Unused Disk Filelist Icons

While in "disk" mode, a file select screen appears when you open the editor. Disk entries will have an icon indicating if they are on the ROM or RAM portion of the disk. There are also two other possible icons left unused:

Dezaemon 3D RAM Icon.png

The cartridge RAM icon is never used or set. Due to space constraints, only one save file can be stored in FLASHram, and this file is differently formatted than other stage data. There is a tool to convert these saves to disk format.

Dezaemon 3D ROM Icon.png

When initializing the five entries in the list, the icons are set to the cartridge ROM image, sizes to 500, and names to "AAAAAAAA". As the disk filelist is parsed, each of these is replaced with valid data. When setting the disk type, each entry that is not disk ROM is, by default, set to disk RAM instead. All invalid entries are then set to blanks using an ID of 5. There is no condition in which a cartridge ROM icon will remain set.

Even if the filenames for the games on cartridge were parsed, most of the stage data remains packed in an archive. These files are loaded by direct access, so their filenames are not present. Therefore, cartridge games would still never be listed due to missing filenames during lookup.

As an interesting point, ID 5 is skipped, but in the case it weren't it would be filled with a small robot icon, just like those for the image and model libraries. Although not unused (the same icon is reused in other dialogs in the menu), it does remain unused in the file icon list. There is an EXE filetype that will be listed in the Game file menu, but these are not tested for in this menu.