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I dumped Chobi Ren Sha 68k

This is going to be a slightly long post, so the TL;DR is the following:

What is this thing?

Chobi Ren Sha 68k is a conversion of Cho Ren Sha, which swaps out sound effects, boss sprites and music to other assets. Gameplay is unchanged.

It was created by Fumi of the doujin circle CYNTHIA in 1997.

The most interesting part of this release is that it’s semi-official, in that Yosshin apparently collaborated with the doujin circle that made it, and the original composer for the Cho Ren Sha music Loser Kachigawi wrote the music for this as well (this can be confirmed by looking in the dev diaries present on the floppy).

Somehow it has gone undumped until now. This is likely since I suspect not a lot of these floppies were sold, and I’ve only ever seen it up for auction twice. This one which I managed to snag, and in a huge doujin bundle a while back which went for too much money (see pic below).

The old auction I didn’t win

While this is a VERY niche release, as a big fan of CRS68k, I’ve been very curious about it, and it’s been a bit of a “grail” of mine to find.

Version differences

At least three versions of Chobi Ren Sha 68k exist. This one, which is a conversion that’s applied to an existing CRS68k 0.6 installation, a later floppy version for CRS68k 1.0, and then an even later CD-ROM release, which I believe also has a version for Windows (see discussion here).

Existing videos on Youtube like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRBLrHm8ZFI seems to be from the later releases, since sprites and music has changed.

Since this early version was made before Stage 0 was added to Cho Ren Sha, there is no updated Boss sprite in the 0.6 release.

One very fun find is that the Boss 1 BGM from Chobi Ren Sha 0.6 is actually a PCM version of the TLB music that was used in the 1.0 version of Cho Ren Sha! See video below:

Examples of some sprite differences between the versions:

Stage 1 Boss in 0.6
Stage 1 Boss in 1.0
Stage 2 Boss in 0.6
Stage 2 Boss in 1.0
Stage 3 Boss in 0.6
Stage 3 Boss in 1.0

I am hoping to track down the other versions too at some point, but it’s at least nice to have one preserved dump out for this now 🙂

Gameplay

Here is a quick video of me playing through the first loop of the game.

As you can see in the video, some of the boss sprites are quite different from the release used in other Youtube videos right now.

Installation instructions

Instructions are for original X680x0 hardware. I don’t have much experience using emulators, but I assume it should be similar there.

This version of the game is really made to run with Cho Ren Sha version 0.6 (Comiket 52), but since that version is undumped, and you probably want to play a later version anyways, here’s what I did to get it running with CRS68k v1.01. That version lacks a few of the earlier PCM files, so they need to be grabbed from an earlier version.

It seems to run fine like this (see video above), but it’s possible some stuff is wrong compared to using this with CRS68k v0.6.

Requirements:

  • X68000 or X68030 with at least 15MHz cpu frequency.
    • This is apparently to handle the additional PCM, as noted in dev diaries on the floppy.
  • A HDD . This game can not run from floppies
  • Cho Ren Sha 68k v1.01
    • (Available in x68k_flop/chorensa for MAME)
  • Cho Ren Sha 68k v0.45
    • (Available in x68k_flop/chorensa for MAME)
  • The Chobi Ren Sha dump from archive.org

Steps:

  • Copy CRS68k v1.01 to a folder on your HDD
  • Copy pcm_dat/shot2.pcm and pcm_dat/fmake0d.pcm from CRS68k v0.45 to pcm_dat/ for the v1.01 install
  • Copy all Chobi Ren Sha files into the same folder as well
  • To get the TLB music to work, you need to add the lines at the code-block below this list to BGM_DAT/sz2_bgm.cnf at the top of the ボスBGM section*.
  • Run チョビるぜ!!.BAT to start. (You may want to rename this to something easier to type)
  • Enjoy!

*Stuff to add to BGM_DAT/sz2_bgm.cnf:

* True Last Boss
BGM_No.$20 : FILE = BGM_DAT¥るざりん¥SZ2_B3.MDC

I do realize that these instructions are somewhat complicated. Someone else might want to distribute a pre-patched LZH file with the contents of this at some point and/or include this in the SCSI HDD images with games that people tend to use nowadays.

Misc stuff

The only footage I’ve found of people playing this game (the later version):