The Flintstones: King Rock Treasure Island

The Flintstones: King Rock Treasure Island
Developer: Taito Publisher: Taito Platform: Game Boy Released in US: February 1993 Released in EU: 1993 This game has unused modes / minigames. This game has unused text. This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden sound test. This game has a hidden level select. This game has a notes page

This Flintstone-themed Game Boy game is actually pretty decent. You should play it.

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Notes

Title Screen Button Sequences

Two cheat codes can be entered at the title screen, when the "PUSH START" message appears. A sound will confirm correct code entry. Note that if you enter either code, you can't enter the other one until you reset the console.

Hidden Minigame

Press Select, B, A, A, B, Select, B, A, Start to play a mini-game similar to the Game & Watch title Helmet: use Left / Right to move Fred, the goal being to reach the right side of the screen as many times as you can under the rain of rocks.

Inverted Colors

Press Down, Down, Down, Down, Up, Up, Up, Up. The whole game can be played with inverted colors.

Debug Menu

Download Debug Menu Restoration Patch File: GB_Flintstones_King_Rock_Treasure_Island_Debug_Menu_Restoration.ips (272 B) (info) Current version: 1.0

Apply the above patch to a US v1.0 ROM, then press Select on the title screen.

You can choose which stage (ROUND) to start at, how many lives (STOCK) you have, and whether or not enemies can hurt you (NOHIT; toggles FFC9 bit 1). SOUND will play one of 0x24 sound effects/background music tunes. The purpose of SCREEN is unknown (toggles FFC9 bit 2, which is never read). Press Start to start the game when the EXIT option is selected.

There is a bug in the code where, while using Select here will change the selected main option, the first three options also accept pressing that button as valid input to increment their respective value. As such, it's probably best if you don't use Select here.

Debug Tileset

Present at 0xF8BC in the US v1.0 ROM is a peculiar tileset depicting various arrows, slopes, cursors, icons, flagpoles, etc. This looks to be a remnant of a map viewer, if not editor. Icons for various items such as hearts and pickups (Dino, Gazoo) exist as selected and unselected as well.

There are no references to this tileset in the ROM, even though it uses a considerable amount of space and there is virtually no free space elsewhere in the ROM.

Alternate Copyrights

Game Genie code 28C-AD8-6EA will display an alternate Taito copyright on the title screen.

Unused License Message

There is also another license message written to the window, but it never appears on the title screen. It may have been intended for a scrolling effect on the title screen. It's also likely that it would've been used on a Japanese release, as other Flintstones games from Taito released there had that line about Nippon Columbia on their copyright notices. The Japanese version of the game was unreleased and was rediscovered as part of the September 2020 lotcheck leak. This message was shown in the unreleased Japanese version's title screen before an alternative Taito copyright appears, as shown below.