Nightmare in the Dark

Nightmare in the Dark
Developers: AM Factory, Eleven, Paon Publisher: Gavaking Platform: Arcade (Neo Geo) Released in JP: November 2000 Released in US: December 2000 This game has unused music. This game has a hidden level select. This game has anti-piracy features.

Snow Bros. 3: With New Hellspawn.

Unused Music

Several unused audio tracks are included in the game; a short loop (22) and two fanfares (23 and 2A). The game's music begins at 21, so two of these appear second and third in the index, perhaps suggesting they were composed early in development. The third is situated between the game opening tune and the stage intro jingle and could be speculated to be an early title screen fanfare. All of these tracks can be heard using M1 or the Universe BIOS's jukebox feature.

Track ID	Audio
22
23
2A

Hidden Level Select

Normally, when you start a game loading a Memory Card, you start playing from the last level you saved. But, if you load the Memory Card with BIOS_DEVMODE enabled (see below), you access this fully functional level select. Use Up and Down to scroll the levels and press A to select and start the game. Consider that the timer (15 seconds), it's the unique thing glitched here.

Anti-Piracy

Nightmare in the Dark is one of just five Neo Geo titles which perform a slot check in an attempt to identify whether the game is running on bootleg hardware. This checks for a valid date in the calendar and that the hardware is internally consistent—specifically, that the game is not running in AES mode on MVS hardware.

When running with BIOS_DEVMODE set (10FE80 in RAM to 01, or via Universe BIOS/emulator settings), the game will report the version of the slot check program included, first on startup and again on first coin insertion.

If the slot check fails, e.g. because BIOS_MVS_FLAG (10FD82 in RAM) has been set to 00 (AES mode), the game will lock up with the following warning: