Curiosities

Stage 7 comes from another cartridge

OPERATION X, -WRATH OF VENOM-, only exists with Nemesis 2 in the other slot. Its graphics are not in Salamander: the game switches slot, reads 1,137 bytes from banks 7, 8 and 9 of Nemesis 2 and copies them to RAM (p00:5B91). With that cartridge, and with the crystal, the ending is the good one.

The route turns

The stages are not a straight strip. In stage 1 the scroll stops twice and the screen goes down through another map; in stage 4, once; stage 6, which goes up, turns left and comes back (p00:4BE6, maps at p14:80FC, p14:815C and p14:818C).

A base you can barely see

In stage 4, between scrolls 0x100 and 0x150, the base is drawn only one frame in 64; the rest are dumped without the scenery (p00:5FC5, p01:6016).

You choose the order of the planets

After stage 2, a radar with a clock lets you choose the order of EIONEUS, LAVINIA and KIERKE (p10:988A); if time runs out, the game chooses.

Leek and Crush Blow

The subtitle of stages 3, 4 and 5 is -SET THE LEEK SYSTEM- in the Japanese version and -SET THE CRUSH BLOW SYSTEM- in the English one (p15:BF5A, p15:BF9A).

Konami and a boss sound the same

The Konami logo tune (0x4E) and the one played when a boss falls (0x25) have different headers but play the same thing, frame by frame.

The stage tune is asked for every frame

Every frame p02:8720 checks which tune belongs to the scroll (p02:876A) and, if it is not the one playing, asks for it again.

Still open

• The Japanese texts (p15:B002 and p15:B725) use kana and kanji characters: they still have to be drawn with the Japanese version's font.
• What EXCHANGE and DUALPLAY do, and when the SELECTION screen (p12:B877) shows up.
• Which item sits at each place in stages 3, 5 and 6 (0xE350-0xE359) and what results 2 to 4 change (p01:7B33).
• Enemy 0x06 in stage 4 and 0x30, 0x38 and 0x40 in stage 6 use sprite patterns that are not loaded when the stage starts (0x40-0x6F): they are shown without those frames.
• The six and eight channel sounds 0x1A, 0x23, 0x26, 0x29-0x2D and 0x49 last two frames and do not sound on their own.
• Three data blocks with no reader in sight: p07:647F (8 bytes), p07:7A32 (36) and p08:89D0 (61).