Open questions

What is not known, said as what it is. The listing is 100 % explained — every byte has its name and its reason — but that does not mean everything is understood.

The startup cheat, unrecorded

0x6F44 wants left and right at once plus the second button and a key, and one of the three gives twenty-six lives. This is code reading: sitting down at the emulator and recording it is still to be done. With the standard MSX matrix the keys come out as I, N and Y, but that depends on the machine's keyboard and has not been checked.

What the Game Master header says, exactly

The layout of the twenty-one bytes at 0x4010 is settled: it comes out of running the Game Master's own reader and it works out byte for byte. What is not settled is whether the 1985 Game Master (RC-735) can read a "CD" header from a 1986 cartridge and what it does with it. This cartridge is later than that one, so the header was most likely written for the Game Master 2 (RC-755), which is not disassembled.

Nor has it been tried with both cartridges plugged in.

The tenth enemy index

The table at 0x6A98 gives, per stage, a word with the base of the enemy records and ten indices, one per section. The first nine never go down and the tenth is zero in six stages — no enemies in the last section — but on stages 5 and 6 it carries on counting (48 → 50 and 44 → 45). Whether that is deliberate or whether those two sections have something different is not clear.

The overlapping blocks, on purpose or not

0x9C21 and 0x9C3E fall halfway into another block. One stretch of bytes serving as two different blocks saves room, but whether it comes out of a tool that looked for overlaps or whether someone placed it by hand is unknown.

The two cosine typos

They are measured and there is no doubt they are typos: they break the monotonicity of a table that can only go down, and they are the only two values that depart from the function. What is not known is whether they show. One would have to send a creature aiming at exactly those two angles and watch for a tug.

The hidden mark, and where it comes from

The last thirteen bytes are マジョウデンセツ backwards, its length, the catalogue number and an 0xAA. That Konami put that mark in its cartridges was uncovered by Manuel Pazos, and here it is read with tools/marca_konami.py. Why it is written backwards, we do not know.