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Once again, Retro-Bit found a classic cult Mega-Drive shooter only released in Japan, made by an obscure, long defunct studio, and decided they had to rectify that for us westerners.

Twinkle Tale is now the latest game they’ve set their sights on. Pre-orders for a fully decked out cartridge of this newly translated Genesis/Mega-Drive shmup classic from Japan have already begun at the usual online retailers. The pre-order period runs from today until December 20th, 2026. Retro-Bit has given you a little more time than usual to get your pre-orders in, but don’t put it off for too long if you want one. Like many of Retro-Bit’s re-released games, original copies of this game are ultra expensive, so this is your best bet to obtain an official, professionally constructed physical copy if you don’t already own an original copy.

Wanna find out more? Go ahead and check out what this game’s all about right below the break.

Twinkle Tale released in 1992 only in Japan and only for the Mega-Drive. It was originally developed by ZAP Corporation and Studio Ducks and published by Wonder Amusement Studio. The latter was a company created by Toyo Recording, a company that mostly dealt with music and video related businesses, such as pressing CDs and vinyl records and managing video rental stores. Like many Japanese media companies in the 80’s, they got bit by the video game bug and set up Wonder Amusement Studio to publish console games from other developers. ZAP Corporation made games like Dead Moon (1992), Barunba (1989), and Pineapplin (1984). They’re believed to have passed on the programming duties for Twinkle Tale to Studio Ducks. Twinkle Tale went on to be the last game from ZAP Corporation and the only game from Wonder Amusement Studio.

Toyo Recording left the video game industry behind them after that, but they still own the rights to Twinkle Tale now. They are now credited as the publisher for Tinkle Tale in Retro-Bit’s new release. The game also features a new English localization by Nathan Deren with translations by Jeff Nussbaum. New artwork was made for this release’s packaging by Danmakuman, who had previously worked on Retro-Bit’s re-release of Shubibinman Zero: Shockman Zero for SNES.

As you can imagine from the story of how Twinkle Tale came to be, the game saw a low production run and only became increasingly expensive throughout the decades. It’s up there with Eliminate Down as a Mega-Drive shooter that will run you over $1k USD for a complete copy, and hundreds for a loose cartridge, if it ever shows up for sale at all. Retro-Bit’s new Collector’s Cartridge will only run you $59.99, which is a steal by comparison. It comes with the same high quality standards we’ve come to expect from Retro-Bit’s Collector’s Cartridges over the years too, including properly beveled cartridge connectors, gold plated contacts, and proper voltage chips guaranteed to never damage your precious Genesis/Mega-Drive console.

Twinkle Tale takes place in the magical land of Alphyrion and stars the young mage apprenttice Saria. She learns from the great fortune teller Raza about how Alphyrion was created after four special jewels: the Ruby of Power, the Sapphire of Life, the Emerald of Prosperity, and the Onyx of Destruction, fought with each other for dominance until the Diamond of Harmony steped in and settled their dispute. The chaos of their fight created Alphyrion and peace persisted ever since until the black mage Gado began investigating the magic jewels. The king had Gado impresioned for fear that his newfound knowledge would drive him mad, but that just accelerated his dissent into craven authoritarianism. Gado escaped and overthrew the king, installing himself as the new emperor Kaiser and taking over the world with extreme force. Raza then gifts Saria the Shooting Star bracelet, the Diamond Arrow necklace, and the Silver Comet brooch and sends her off to free the great mages so that she can take on Gado at the Diamond Palace and save the land.

The three items given to Saria are her main weapons throughout this adventure. Each one gives off a different rapidfire shot that can be fired with B and switched with C, under default controls. Pressing A will activate one of two different screen clearing magic bombs if you’re in a tight spot. The game is more of a run-and-gun type of experience instead of a shmup that sees you perpetually flying forward down a linear path. You can move and fire in any direction as you face all sorts of enemies and enviornmental traps, however you will be stuck on a linaear path and firing in one direction during boss battles. You have three hit points and your three main weapons will grow weaker the fewer hit points you have and strengthen if you regain any hit points. However, collecting Star Jewels can also power-up your currently selected main shot independantly of your health level.

Here’s what you can expect from Retro-Bit’s new cartridge release:

This time, there’s also an exclusive edition only available through Limited Run Games. It’s the same as the other version, but includes a Dragon Fire red cartridge instead of a Lucent grey cartridge. If you prefer a red cartridge over a grey one, then you may want to preorder from Limited Run Games if possible. Their pre-order will last the same amount of time and cost the same amount of money as ordering from anywhere else.

Preorders for the main version of Twinkle Tale are available at Castlemania Games, Rondo Products, Video Games Plus, and PnP Games for North America and Concept Entertainment, Dragon Box Shop, NedGame, Retro Cables, Sarugami, Spel & Sånt, Xtra Life, and Zed Labz for Europe. You can check out Retro-Bit’s official Twinkle Tale website for the most up-to-date preorder information. And hey, if you need new Genesis controllers to play Twinkle Tale with, Retro-Bit’s got you covered there too with officially licensed Sega Genesis and Mega-Drive controllers, as well as their Big6 controller, at various online retailers. Any local retro game stores near you might also be selling these controllers too.

So have you played Twinkle Tale before? Are you fortunate enough to have owned an original copy of the game? Whether you’ve played it or not, do you think it looks like another banger from Retro-Bit that you just gotta preorder? What else do you hope they reprint one day? Let us know in the comments below. (Also, tell Retro-Bit yourself what else you wanna see from them.)

Ditch the controller and wave your arms around, because today on SEGA Talk, we’re stepping in front of the camera for Sega Superstars on PS2! From flailing in Sonic to shaking maracas in Samba de Amigo, we’re breaking down how Sonic Team turned Sony’s Eye Toy into arcade magic. Let’s jump right in!

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In this edition:

Did Maegawa misremember which game the code was in? Or did Dynamite Headdy inherit the code from an early version of McDonald’s Treasureland Adventure? Read on to find out.

Treasure, the well-regarded development studio behind games like Ikaruga and Sin and Punishment, also made a couple of licensed titles for McDonald’s, the fast food restaurant. When interviewed about them, Treasure’s founder, Masato Maegawa, recalled the process of making them to be somewhat frustrating.

This passage, from John Harrison’s Legends of 16-Bit Game Development book (pages 98-99), describes one particularly vexing incident:

Another last-minute change that McDonald’s demanded—unrelated to food—did push Maegawa over the edge.

The game’s second stage features the character Birdie the Early Bird, one of the more recognizable McDonald’s characters. Partway through the stage, Ronald comes across Birdie locked up in a circus cage. In the original version of the game, he feeds her some hamburgers and she finds the strength to break free from the cage and then flies away on her wings.

Maegawa recounted what happened when a McDonald’s representative saw the scene: “They told me, ‘Birdie can’t fly.’ Huh? She’s flying all over the place in the videos they gave me! I got so annoyed, so I made it if you push something like B-A-C-A-Start on the Sega logo screen, it explodes (laughs).” “B-A-C-A” spells the Japanese word baka, meaning “stupid.”

As Harrison’s book notes, this code didn’t actually make it into the final game. There are cheat codes in McDonald’s Treasureland Adventure, but there’s no “baka” code.

There is, however, a “baka” code in Treasure’s next Genesis game, Dynamite Headdy. It’s entered at the Sega logo screen: B, A, C, A, Down.

If you put it in correctly, you’ll hear an explosion sound effect. Then the Sega logo will drop off the screen dramatically.

Here’s a video of the effect:

How does this code work? Here is how the logic that implements it looks in Ghidra’s decompiler with my labels added:

This is a standard cheat code detector. It compares player input to an array of patterns that represent buttons. Each match advances the array index, and each miss resets it. The array looks like this in memory:

After the last code button is entered, the 16-bit value at ffffe818 gets adjusted by -4 every frame. This controls the position of the Sega logo. Its default position is 0000, perfectly centered vertically. Subtracting 4 every frame moves it downward. The game doesn’t ever do it, but if you manually adjust the value to be positive, the logo moves upward:

I concur with SUDDEN DESU’s analysis in this Twitter thread – there isn’t anything similar in McDonald’s Treasureland Adventure. So did Maegawa misremember which game he put the “baka” code in? Or did Dynamite Headdy inherit from a build of the McDonald’s game that had it?

We may never know for sure, but my money is on the “wrong game” theory – here’s why:

The McDonald’s game was released in 1993, before the code ever appears in Headdy!

Thanks for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed this exploration of a 3-decade-old mystery. For more on hidden things in Treasure games, see my articles on

Many thanks to Michael Stearns for pointing out the “baka code” to me. Thanks also to John Harrison for collecting the interviews with Maegawa for his book and for reading a draft of this article.

On this SEGA Talk, we are NEW and in LIVE ACTION with the SEGA Saturn game Shinobi Legions! How does this game connect to the series? Who developed it? And why do the brits say they have the superior version? FIND OUT on SEGA TALK HI-YAH!

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Get ready to dust off your team formations and brace yourself for some seriously slippery physics, because on this episode of SEGA Talk, we are diving headfirst into Sonic Heroes. We are breaking down everything from its chaotic, multi-platform growing pains and that massive ensemble cast to the brutal industry crunch that nearly broke director Takashi Iizuka. Hit that speed dash, grab your rings, and let’s jump right into this episode of SEGA….TALK!

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We talk sometimes about how cheat sites like GameFAQs have quality control issues. Lots of games have bogus codes listed. Some are incorrectly transcribed, some are actually for other games, and some are totally made up.

Some of the codes for the Genesis version of FIFA Soccer 96 are bogus. Neither of these work, for example:

EA Dream Team: Press A(2), B(2), C(2), B, C(2), A(2) at the options screen.

Super Power: Press B, A, B(2), C, B, A, C, B(4) at the options screen.

What species of bogus are they? It turns out they’re incorrectly transcribed. As we’ll see below, they’re close to right – but not quite.

While I was looking into this, I found several other cheat codes for this game that I don’t think have been documented before. Furthermore, I found nearly identical codes for FIFA 97: Gold Edition. Read on for details!

Most of the time, examining an old game involves a lot of fumbling around in the dark. You’ve got its raw machine code, but you don’t know what any of it does. To get anywhere, you have to orient yourself by finding some bit of logic you understand. From there you can spider out to adjacent bits and build up a mental picture of how things are structured.

Things were much easier with FIFA Soccer 96, however. Its ROM has function labels! Most blocks of code in it end with an ASCII identifier. This isn’t quite as good as having a full set of debug symbols, but it’s pretty handy.

The function called FE_supercheat handles cheat input. It executes when you’re on the Options > Game Settings screen.

This function is a fairly standard cheat code listener: it checks controller input against arrays of bit patterns that represent button sequences – no surprises there. But what is surprising is how many button sequences it checks. GameFAQs has two questionable codes, but the game is checking for no less than 50.

The arrays of button patterns start at 001fb64c and use the standard Genesis mapping, so they’re easy to read off. The first 10 enable items in the Cheats menu, which is accessed by starting a friendly game, pausing, and pressing B.

Each of the menu items is activated by its own code:

You need to enter these slowly and deliberately – the game only registers menu button presses every 8 frames, so don’t speed through the codes. You’ll hear a sound effect if you get one right.

We can now see that the GameFAQs codes are only very slightly off. The Dream Team code is missing an A button in the middle, and the Super power code is missing two B buttons at the end. So close!

The first code after the ones for enabling cheat menu items is: C, A, C, A, C, C, C, B, C, A, B, A, C, A, A, C, A, C, A.

What’s it do? It changes the direction that the background image moves. Normally the EA and FIFA logos go from southeast to northwest; this reverses that. Here’s a video of the change taking effect:

This code stops the movement entirely: C, B, A, C, C, B, C, C, B, C, B, C, B, C, B.

The next code’s buttons are: A, C, B, A, C, A, C, C, B, C, A, B, A, C, B, A, C, B.

After entering the sequence, start a game. Then press:

The scores are randomly determined. Ghidra’s decompilation of the C+Start logic looks like this with labels added:

That is, a number between 0 and 3 is generated for player 2. That number is added to player 1’s current score, which is then incremented again to ensure a win.

Normally the Custom League, Custom Tournament and Custom Playoff items are grayed out in the Options menu. You have to win once in the corresponding mode to enable each item.

But there are codes that let you skip this process. 12 of them mark a league as complete; 12 mark a tournament as complete; and 12 mark a playoff as complete.

The full list of 36 codes is in the Appendix below. Here is one of each type – putting in one of these is enough to unlock that type’s custom mode:

That’s 49 codes – what’s the 50th? The button sequence is: B, C, A, B, A, C, C, B, C, A, C, B, A, B, A.

You have to enter it on the in-game pause menu (press Start, then select Options); it gets cleared if you do it via the main menu.

This causes a function named JOYPAD_move_farthest_to to be called when one of your teammates gets control of the ball or jumps. The effect is subtle, though – I wouldn’t be able to describe it in terms of gameplay without these labels.

If this makes more sense to you, leave a comment!

It’s not surprising that the next game in the Genesis FIFA series is similar to its predecessor. Indeed, the cheat detection system is virtually identical in FIFA 97: Gold Edition.

The only differences are:

The full list is in the Appendix below.

For more on the FIFA games for Genesis, see these articles at 68K Revival – they’re excellent:

Those cover images that are hiding in the games, and cover some of the same ground I do here. I was working on my article as these were being posted, so I’ve been scooped to some extent!

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back here at SEGAbits next week with another Genesis game examination. Check out my blog for more retro game reverse engineering in the meantime.

These 12 codes mark one of the leagues as complete in FIFA Soccer 96:

These 12 mark one of the tournaments as complete:

And these 12 mark one of the playoffs as complete:

Here are the cheat menu codes for FIFA 97: Gold Edition:

These are the league codes:

These are the tournament codes:

And these are the playoff codes:

On this SEGA Talk, we roll back into the world of Super Monkey Ball with a look at the Gamecube exclusive sequel! How did the series expand on the characters and their world? What additions did the development team make to the gameplay? And what role does the game play in undergoing surgery? Sharpen your scalpels and find out on SEGA Talk!

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Happy Labor Day, Sega fans. Now get to work and make us new Genesis/Mega-Drive games to play.

Who remembers MD Engine, the visual Genesis game creation toolkit being made by Two Black Cats, which was revealed last year? Now it’s finally come out. Originally only for Windows and Linux, the program has now expanded with Mac support, so the brightest new Genesis game visionaries have no shortage of options to start working on their new games. You can purchase a license for this program now on Steam or the Two Black Cats website.

There’s a lot of other new features under the hood that MD Engine didn’t have in its infancy last year. To hear more about it, go on ahead past the break and read more. It’s not like you have to do any coding to get there.

Here’s a quick refresher on what MD Engine is, straight from their own purchase page:

Since the program entered Closed Beta last year, a lot of new features had been added leading up to it’s final version 1.0 release. Before, MD Engine had no built-in sprite editor or music tracker, meaning you would’ve needed to rely on external programs for art and music production. Now, MD Engine has these built in. MD Engine now includes MiniPainter for creating sprite art and animations and MiniTracker for composing music, all right in the program. They’re still rather simple compared to dedicated pixel art editors and music trackers, but they can help you get started and you can still use art or music made with other programs.

There are also new tools to assist with developing separate PAL versions of your games, such as a sample template setting showcasing the speed difference in your game between 50hz and 60hz and a region timing correction tool to keep game speed consistent between 50hz and 60hz monitors and TVs.

MD Engine is now available to purchase on Steam or on the new Two Black Cats website for $19.99 USD. Until September 21st, 2026, a 15% off introductory sale has the program at $16.99 on Steam. Don’t forget to check out the Two Black Cats YouTube page for a few helpful tutorial videos to get started and the MD Engine website for extra documentation on how to get the most out of the program.

There are also three Genesis games made in MD Engine available on Steam right now: Inkventure, Square Brothers, and Prisonela MD. Check those out as well to see a glimpse at what’s possible in MD Engine, especially Prisonela MD, which is the only game among the three that’s absolutely free of charge.

So, do you think you have an idea for a new Genesis game and MD Engine might the program perfect for helping you bring it to life? Have you been looking forward to MD Engine since it was revealed last year? Fancy yourself the next Yuji Naka (except with a nicer attitude and no possibility of jailtime)? Let us know in the comments below. And, hey, maybe one day you’ll see your new Genesis game reported on right here on SegaBits?

What’s better than one legend in Kamurocho? How about FOUR?! Today on SEGA Talk, we’re cracking open Yakuza 4—4 protagonists, 4 fighting styles, and 4 times the drama! Don’t 4-get to settle in, because we’re diving right in!

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Smash your head into a Prize Block because on this episode of SEGA Talk we’re transforming into Kid Chameleon! How did this ambitious platformer come to be? Which teen heartthrob did they base the hero on? And what legacy – if any – did this game leave behind? Find out on this transformative episode of SEGA Talk!

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