Shanghai III (SNES)

Shanghai III
Developer: Kuusoukagaku Publisher: Sunsoft Platforms: SNES Released in JP: September 15, 1994 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has anti-piracy features.

An SNES port of a Mahjong arcade game. It even supports the SNES Mouse, too!

Developer Text

At 0x7F80 before the cartridge's header is some copyright information regarding one of the development systems used to develop the game.

KUSOU KAGAKU DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM VER 2.08

(Source: Original TCRF research)

Anti-Piracy

The game normally does not contain any SRAM, but still checks for it every frame by inserting two different byte values at $700000 and comparing them for a mismatch. On original cartridges, the SRAM write will do nothing, but cartridge copiers tend to include large amounts of SRAM to support a variety of games. If the write is successful, whenever the game restarts after completing/failing a puzzle, the game locks up on a black screen. The game is still fully playable as normal otherwise, although having to restart the console after every puzzle would've likely annoyed pirates at the time.

(Source: Original TCRF research)