The FairyLand Story

Saturday release this time, as there was a last minute hickup yesterday.

History

This fixed-screen action game was developed and released by Taito in 1985. Compared to "Chack'n Pop", a game with a similar system released by the same company the previous year, the number of items and enemy types increased significantly, making it an epic game with a total of 101 stages. Chack'n Pop and FairyLand Story lead up to "Bubble Bobble" in terms of character design and mechanics. Sadly, I have not been able to find a Chack'n Pop board to document and extract schematics from. If anyone is willing to donate or loan one, please contact me.

The items that appear at certain locations in each stage follow a rule: the longer you play without making a mistake, the more powerful the item. There are also unique ways of defeating enemies (see below). The idea of the protagonist, Ptolemy, using magic to turn enemies into cakes was inspired by one of the developers' addiction to Namco's "Dig Dug".

The character can ride on the heads of some enemies, which is necessary to navigate certain areas. The game incorporates a strong puzzle element, requiring players to figure out the order in which to defeat enemies and the best movement strategies. Additionally, it is rewarding to discover ways to earn high scores by defeating multiple enemies at once!

Differences with Emulation (as of Dec. 2025)

The following features are present on the hardware and seem to be missing on emulators:

• sprite count limited to 8 per line without blinking, more than 8 sprites can be shown but some will blink

• there is a RAM that sets the scroll-sprite priority, not fixed values

• background tile flip control bits can be ignored by means of a global control bit

• some MCU features are missing, such CPU bus sharing via bus request/acknowledgement

• there are a lot of analog audio features that the sound CPU can control, such as balance, treble, bass... the balance feature of amplifier TA7630 is used to alter the relative volume of the two MSM5232 audio channels, so it plays an important role in how the melody sounds

• there are two palette banks (not one)

• there are two background tile banks (not one)

• the priority bits for sprites and scroll tiles are three and two (fewer used in emulation)

• there is support for a light gun on the board (maybe for NY Captor?)

  

Some of the GFX features missing seem to have an impact on other TAITO games, like NY Captor. For FairyLand, the most noticeable item is the music. The current version of the core is not implementing the bass/treble yet, but it implements the balance one. This is used to set the volume of each instrument on the MSM5232 chip, so it has a very clear impact on the music.

The game controls the bass/treble gains independently for the PSG and MSM sound chips, changing them during game play. Just by reading the datasheet of the audio equalizer and the schematics, it is not clear at all what the relationship between the digital value set by the sound CPU and the filter frequency response is. So we are working on measuring it on the actual sound board. For this beta release, the equalizer is disabled.

Note that JTFLSTORY does not fit on MiST because of the extensive use of multipliers for audio features.

How to defeat enemies

• Use magic to temporarily transform an enemy into a cake and then repeatedly casts magic on the cake to make it disappear

• Use magic to turn an enemy into a cake, then picks it up and drops it on the floor to break it

• Drop a cake onto enemies gathered directly below to defeat them

• Enemies can also be defeated using special items, such as the Star Tiara, Change Potion, Book of Death, and others

• Worms, giant caterpillars that live in warp tunnels in certain stages, will eat anything —friend or foe— so you can lure enemies near the Worm to have them eaten

• The last remaining enemy will automatically disappear after a certain amount of time

Other Updates

JTWC (compatible with Tehkan World Cup) sees two fixes:

• Correct behavior for game pause

• Fixes joystick detection

It took a bit of digging to discover why the joystick was failing for some users. JTWC detects the use of analog sticks to play and then locks the control to analog mode. But it turns out some gamepads will produce "analog output" regardless of not having analog sticks. That rendered the game unplayable for some users. In order to prevent this, control will be forced to the d-pad y default, and you can configure it as analog stick or automatic detection in the options (DIP switches) menu.

JTWWFSS (compatible with WWF SuperStars) was also updated with larger sound volume.