Landerig posted:

I've been rather fascinated by Action 52 for a long time. There were a lot of unanswered questions, such as the size of the ROM (2 MB when NES games typically didn't exceed 256 KB. The Sega Genesis version, programmed by a more competent company clocks in at 1.99 MB) The music, some of it which was good or decent, and the weird jumping controls that improved in later games.

I've found answers to most of these questions. The huge ROM size can be partly attributed to many many game tiles and sprites that were not used in the game, including a title screen for The French Baker.

The sound engine was stolen, as was most of the music. The menu code was likely stolen from another 52 in one multicart.

The only explanation I can think of for the jumping is the team of three college students who programmed this started out with one jumping engine, then very late in development came up with a better engine, but it was too late to go back and redo the games.

Also noteworthy is NES emulation these days is pretty flawless. Even so, Action 52 can behave wildly different depending on which emulator you play it on. On some, it may run better then it does on the NES and you can play the two games that crash on the NES. On other emulators, games may have no enemy sprites, or sprites that float in a weird diagonal fashion, or they crash as soon as they load. Or like Cheetahmen, have the game freeze with the hit sound playing repeatedly, the character stuck in their walk/run animation, and the color palettes randomly changing.