There were questions on IRC about Dendy mode and its potential use for this game. I'll try to elaborate on every aspect of it.
Here is a
map of countries and video signal standards used in them. Note how huge the PAL/SECAM zone is. Compare it to
which countries the NES/Famicom console was sold in. You will notice that most of the world has never seen official NES/Famicom release. That led to pirated clones of this console being sold all over Eurasia in early 90's.
A Taiwanese hardware manufacturer,
TXC Corporation, developed a device compatible with Famicom and with PAL/SECAM signal at the same time. They called it
Micro Genius, and it was sold under different names all over Eurasia, where no PAL NES or Famicom was sold.
In Russia it was sold as Dendy, and by that name it was
recognized by the emulation scene, because it was Russian enthusiasts who studied how Dendy operates and how it differs from official consoles, and they convinced several emulator authors to add Dendy mode, in addition to NTSC and PAL. In most emulators it's called Dendy mode, but in fact it was a Hybrid mode technically speaking: NTSC games working on a PAL console, and Dendy wasn't the console this mode originated from, Micro Genius was.
Most of the time pirates were simply ripping off NES and Famicom games, occasionally adding cheats to them, sometimes breaking them by this. Some games were developed for PAL Famiclones from scratch, but it's not easy to find them (TXC themselves
developed some of them). And finally, there were ports of other consoles games to this platform.
One of the developer teams doing such ports was
Hummer Team. There is a HUGE article about its history, in Russian, called
Hummer Team: все, что вы хотели знать о главных пиратах.
Right now I have no info on whether such bootleg games were sold outside Micro Genius area. Since they were perfectly compatible with Famicom, there is a high chance they were sold in Japan. But carts such games were released on are incompatible with NES, and PAL NES timings were incompatible with those of Micro Genius. Considering that even official PAL NES wasn't very popular in Europe, bootleg games had vanishingly little chance to ever exist on the PAL NES market.
This leaves us with a conclusion that bootleg games made by Asian developers for Micro Genius market were basically only spread within that market, with little possible exception of appearing in official NES/Famicom area.
On the other side, emulators don't store Dendy mode in movies: neither bizhawk nor fceux. And Dendy timings are different from both NTSC and PAL NES ones. It means even if we record on one of these modes and watch on another, it might desync.
But for cases when it works,
I think it's sensible to allow Dendy mode for Asian bootlegs for PAL/SECAM area. That way they look and sound more authentic to how they played on actual consoles. Still, there should be no requirement about this. I think others would agree that neither banning not forcing Dendy mode helps with anything. And we already have a precedent:
[3540] NES Super Aladdin by TASeditor in 05:36.25
Funnily, this particular submission was done on QuickNES core, which has no Dendy mode. But while we're at it, and since it was questioned on IRC, I thought I'd explain this situation.
