Hinotori: Hōōhen – Gaō no Bōken (火の鳥 鳳凰編 我王の冒険), by Konami, 1987, catalogue number RC-747. It is for the MSX2: the first thing it does (p00:4D4D) is wait for the V9938 to finish a command by reading the CE bit of status register 2, and on an MSX1 it stays there.
It is 128 KB in sixteen 8 KB banks, with Konami's mapper without SCC (Konami4): bank 0 is fixed at 0x4000 and the other three are chosen by writing to 0x6000, 0x8000 and 0xA000. tools/reconocimiento.py measures it on the ROM: not one write to the registers of the SCC mapper (0x5000, 0x7000, 0x9000, 0xB000).
As in King Kong 2, every bank always goes to the same slot, and it is the remainder of dividing by three: banks 1, 4, 7, 10 and 13 at 0x6000; 2, 5, 8, 11 and 14 at 0x8000; 3, 6, 9, 12 and 15 at 0xA000. They are switched three at a time by p00:5408 (A, A+1 and A+2, with a copy at 0xF0F1–0xF0F3), which has five doors (5420, 5405, 5425, 542A, 542F); p00:53E9 puts 1, 2 and at 0xA000 whatever 0xC10C says (3 nearly always, 6 or 9 for a moment), and p00:5434 / 543D put a single one.
| banks | what is there |
|---|---|
| 0 | the framework: start-up, interrupt, states, VDP, sheet, map, texts |
| 1, 2, 3 | Gao, the enemies (58 types), the things on the way, the shots |
| 4, 5 | the tile lists of every stage and their sources; the palettes |
| 6 | Gao's sprites, the pause, the passwords, the ending |
| 7, 8 | the sprites of what appears in each area; 18 strips nobody uses |
| 9 | what appears in each area, the 18 gates, saving and loading King Kong 2 |
| 10, 11, 12 | blocks, superrows and maps of the 24 areas |
| 13 | letters and the title |
| 14, 15 | the sound player and its 120 tracks |
INIT (0x40B8) clears the RAM, looks at the other slots (p00:5DFF), puts the interrupt on H.TIMI (jp 0x4048) and stays on jr $: the whole game runs from the interrupt. Every frame, the interrupt plays the sound with banks 14 and 15 in, puts them back and calls the game (p00:4200), which branches on the state 0xC100.
If there is a King Kong 2 in another slot, Hinotori does not start: King Kong 2 starts, with a hook of Hinotori's (see Findings).
After the AB and INIT, the header carries a second header at 0x4010: 'C', 'D' and a list of addresses in this game's RAM (the stage at 0xC161, the lives at 0xC160…). No code in this cartridge reads it: it is for another cartridge placed next to it. King Kong 2 carries its own in the same place, and that is exactly what Hinotori looks for in it.