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SCHOOL FIGHTER AP FIX
by rari_teh
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==THE GAME==

熱門高校 數碼怪獸III (or School Fighter, or Binary
Monsters III) is an unlicensed beat-’em-up for
the Game Boy Color, developed by the Taiwanese
company Gowin and apparently inspired by King of
Fighters. The game is pretty much as good as a
beat-’em-up can get on a two-button console
(which is not very), but the visuals are very
charming and well-animated and the character
design is adorable. It’s not a long game by any
means – it takes about an hour to 100% it –, so
it’s definitely worth checking out.


==THE PATCH==

In late November 2021, I stumbled upon a post by
Ankos on Bootleg Games Central Forum drawing
attention to this game. Apparently, the cartridge
shipped with a unique copy protection mechanism
that involved a small RAM buffer and a few logic
gates and is yet to be reverse-engineered, so the
game hangs upon starting in all emulators and
flashcarts. An AP fix was made in 2016 by takashi
for their friend inobscurity, but the link to the
patch was broken and unarchived. Since takashi
had documented the patch fairly well on their
blog, I took to recreate it, playing the game
through and patching the undocumented hangs as
they appeared until the game was over. The result
is this patch, which should make it compatible
with pretty much any Game Boy Color emulator.


==FILES==

Original ROM: School Fighter (Unl) [C].gbc
CRC32: 9F64FB1C
Patched ROM CRC32: 1C82E990


==CREDITS==

rari_teh – Hacking
takashi – Original hacking

Ankos – Raising awareness
inobscurity – Originally raising awareness


==FURTHER READING==

takashi’s original blog post can be found here:
http://low-end.net/blog/2016/04/22/reverse-engineering-the-past-copy-protection-in-school-fighter/