Silkworm (NES)

Silkworm
Publisher: American Sammy Platform: NES Released in US: June 1990 This game has unused graphics. This game has unused text. This game has a bugs page

In Silkworm, the NES port of the popular arcade game, players take control of an adorable Bombyx mori moth larva and fight back against—wait, there aren't any bugs in this game, just jeeps and helicopters and stuff? What a ripoff!

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Bugs

Tecmo Copyright

Although the game was published by American Sammy in 1990, unused graphics and leftover of meta-tiles shows that the game was originally going to have been published by Tecmo, the company behind the original arcade version (and likely the developers of this port as well), in 1989.

Most of the static screens in this game are drawn using the same method as for drawing levels. This involving using a libraries of meta-tiles 2x2 and meta-tile maps. Every picture may use its own meta-tile library or share with other pictures, but must use its own meta-tile map.

There are two mostly the same copies of meta-libraries at 0xB72C and 0xFAA2 in the NES ROM that contains meta-tiles with unused 2x2 blocks to draw the Tecmo logo and copyright texts. The first one is used actually only for the final version of the Game Over/Continue screens (utilizing only the few last meta-tiles, the rest is unused). The second one is completely unused by the game because it is a part of an early version of the Game Over/Continue handlers used as padding for the empty ROM area.

The final meta-library for the Title screen at 0x14212 is largely the same, but with the American Sammy copyright data hastily pasted over the original Tecmo data. It also contains the Game Over/Continue texts as well, but since they are used in other places, here they aren't used.

There are no meta-tile maps for older versions of the Title and the Presents screens. So we can only assume how the original screens look like based on the meta-tile blocks only.

(Source: Original TCRF research)