Contra Famicom Sample

This Contra sample was purchased on Yahoo! Japan Auctions back in June by Chris Covell for 14,025 yen (around $174).

Chris ran into some trouble while backing this up, which caused him to create a new program that allows anyone to send their cartridge data to a PC as an audio stream. You can find out more about that here.

But as for Contra,  unfortunately, once it was dumped, the game was found to be pretty standard of other Famicom Konami samples.

Like the Goonies II sample, Konami locks the game so you can’t play all the way through. A screen comes up that basically tells you to go out and buy the full game.

However, if you input this Game Genie code, the whole game will unlock:
AUEYSZPA

And you thought unlock codes only happened in this current console generation!

Some of the player/enemy/item sprites were removed in later stages to make room for the promotional graphics, so you’ll run into things like:

I finished the game, and everything appears to be there, including the credits roll.

(Thanks, Chris and Skrybe.)