I snagged this cart off eBay a few years back for a whopping $20, in a positively fierce bidding war with… well, I don’t think anyone else showed up.
It’s a near-final version of Banana, a 1986 Famicom puzzler telling a tale of mole love across 105 underground arrays of dirt, fruit, ladders, and more.
Big thanks to T_chan on ASSEMblergames for translating the aging purple handwritten Japanese on the front:
バナナ
ビクター音楽産業（株）
Banana
Victor Musical Industries (Inc.)
“6/30” is presumably June 30th, and if the retail release date of September 8th on MobyGames is accurate, that puts this version a max of around 2 months before completion. Probably less given manufacturing time and any other waiting that might have happened. But, whenever exactly the final version was completed, they were definitely close here – just a few minimal differences and missing features are seen when you put the two head to head.
- No attract mode at the title screen: the characters loop their animation sequence forever instead.
- No game-over screen when you lose all your lives: you’re simply booted back to the title screen.
- The cheats are missing, unless they’re accessed differently.
Let’s take a look at the CHR ROM tileset:
The very top-left tile is just a bit of spillover from garbage data sitting above. Ignoring that means we’re kicking off the image comparison with nearly the most uninteresting difference possible: a line received a two-pixel change, transforming it into a dotted line. I’m not sure where that’s found in-game.
Identical here. Exciting!
Okay. Here we can see some things that haven’t been implemented: the talk balloon from the game-over screen, and the house & flowers from the ending. I haven’t managed to reach the end to see if anything’s there in this build.
We also get a glimpse at what looks like an earlier version of the lady mole.
More MIA ending graphics.
The title screen text used to be the ubiquitous white-on-black of the era before it was changed to a warmer yellow.
Finally, the Select screen has no Stage counter.
As for the stages themselves, the 25 or so I checked matched their final counterparts pixel for pixel. The other 80 will have to wait for another day, either once I get some Game Genie codes working or can invest a whole lotta time honing my mole puzzling skills.