NBA Jam Tournament Edition/Bugs

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Mega Drive version

Save bug

The first 250,000 copies of the game that were shipped had a bug that prevented the game from saving properly. A workaround was discovered before release in that the user must play two warm-up games with the initials XXX and NBA to "initialize the AutoStat feature", and leaflets explaining the workaround were included with the shipped copies.

“	I was working on NBA JAM TE for the Genesis, which used a flash chip to store game data. The game had been tested for months, and everything was ready to go, so the publisher ordered 250,000 copies of the cart. But it soon became apparent that no one, for months, had reset the flash chips on the test carts to make sure the flash init routines worked correctly. Nor did anyone order any carts for testing. It was only after all the carts had been ordered that we discovered the flash init code was dead, and that the carts could not save games properly! The studio went into meltdown trying to figure out how to ship 250,000 broken carts. Suggestions of production lines adding extra resistors and other hacks to every cart were tried and failed. When all seemed lost, someone figured out if you played the games in an odd, and very specific order, the flash memory would sort of work. So an extra leaflet was added to every box explaining how to use this "feature."	„
— Chris Kirby

Fixed in later prints.