Open questions

The listing is complete: 32,768 bytes, none unexplained. That does not mean everything about the cartridge is known. What is not, is here.

What the first part actually gets you

CLOSED on 2026-09-09, at theNestruo's request. It is a drink that refills the player's energy bar when both bars are nearly empty, and the sign at 0x7525 is its announcement. Measured in openMSX with (0xE450) = 1: the bars go from (0x08, 0x0C) to (0x24, 0x0C). It is in the findings.

Where the wave screens get their tiles

CLOSED on 2026-09-24, at theNestruo's request (issue #2). From the fight screen's own bands: the twelve wave screens dump the same patterns and colours as the fights, byte for byte, in openMSX (tools/omsx_oleadas.tcl). What was wrong was the reader here — the nibbles backwards, and the curtain at 0x41D1 that wipes the title before a game starts was missing — not the cartridge. The twelve are in the game.

Is any other Konami cartridge doing the same?

The slot scan at 0xBF6C is a game looking for another game, which is not the Game Master mechanism. The obvious question is whether it appears anywhere else in the RC-7xx range. The trail to follow is a very early call out of INIT that touches 0xFCC1 and ENASLT.

Not checked across the rest of the series yet.

What decides which build of the first part matters

The scan tells the two builds of RC-725 apart, 5A 47 for the easy one and 23 70 for the hard one, and stores the same 1 in (0xE450) either way. So the cartridge goes to the trouble of recognising two builds separately and then does not distinguish them. Whether that is a leftover, a second table that was never used, or something read elsewhere, is not known.

The two unread sceneries

0x44E4 fills the strip at 0xE2C0 with ten sceneries, 0 to 9, but the round wraps at eight (0x4311). Entries 8 and 9 are never read. Whether that is a leftover from a longer game or just a round number is not known.

The endings

Scene 6 (0x425E) handles the endings and 0x58F9 holds their captions, which read as a congratulation. They have not been reached in play here, so what the sequence looks like end to end is described from the code and not from having seen it.