After The Wing of Madoola got its console release in December 1986, Sunsoft's sales department decided to enlist Kenji Sada (Madoola's game designer and main programmer) to port the game to Nintendo's VS. System arcade board. The result was The Wings of Madoola, which Sunsoft exhibited at the AOU 1987 tradeshow (March 4-5 1987). The game was mentioned in the May 1987 issue of Gamest as part of their coverage of AOU 1987. However, Sunsoft decided against publishing the game after it didn't perform well at its location test.
The story would have ended there, except that there's apparently at least a couple Wings of Madoola boards floating around. The first appearance was at the Game Legend 21 event, held on November 16, 2014. The arcade shop Hige Nekodo was exhibiting a VS. DualSystem cabinet that contained both The Wings of Madoola and Lionex, another unreleased VS. System game by Sunsoft. In January 2016, the YouTube channel FLN uploaded a full playthrough of The Wings of Madoola. In August 2018, Hige Nekodo uploaded their own gameplay video that showed gameplay up to midway through Stage 6. Finally, in August 2023, Sunsoft announced that they had found a Wings of Madoola board in their office. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the ROMs have never been publicly dumped and Sunsoft has not released the game on Arcade Archives.
Thankfully, there's enough information out there that I can make the page without the ROMs. However, there's some caveats. FLN's video is recorded at 30 fps and a low bitrate. The picture is dark and the sound quality is poor. His VS. System board also appears to be somewhat faulty (there's flickering lines in some of the blank tiles on the screen). Hige Nekodo's video is better quality, but it's incomplete and also recorded at 30 fps. This means that I've had to use recreations of some parts where I feel that video/audio quality is important. All recreations will be labelled.
The arcade version's title screen has been modified to be far more elaborate than the console version. Unfortunately there's not a good capture of it because it uses 60 fps transitions, so here's a recreated version. Before anyone asks, I'm like 90% sure that the palette cycling runs at 30Hz and it's not an artifact of the video captures (I've spent probably too much time framing through title screen footage to confirm this). The high score table contains a partial list of people who worked on the console version of Madoola if you read the names vertically.
The title screen loop includes an attract mode that plays after the high score screen. I'm not including a screenshot here because it just looks like normal gameplay, but here's a timestamped YouTube link. The main differences from regular gameplay are that there's no sound and collision is disabled.
The stage screen now shows the number of lives remaining, and has been moved before the status screen. The status screen's background has been changed from green to black.
|
|
| Stage screen | Status screen |
Because of the added high score table in the title sequence, there's a high score entry screen if the player gets a sufficiently high score. However, there's no publicly available footage of this screen.
Room 0's palette was changed to be the same as room 1's. This was likely done due to the garish palette used by the RP2C04 PPU in the VS. System.
 |
 |
 |
| Console | Console with RGB palette | Arcade |
The boss room door was moved to the bottom of the stage. This fixes an issue where Lucia couldn't jump back up to the boss door when she was at the bottom of the stage.
 |
 |
| Console boss door location | Arcade boss door location |
One of the screens near the end of the stage got replaced. This seems like a mistake to me, it looks pretty bad.
 |
 |
| Console | Arcade |
Yokko-chan's area was changed so Lucia touching him plays the "item collected" sound effect over and over. I think this change is fun:
Room palette changes due to RP2C04 palette.
 |
 |
 |
| Console | Console with RGB palette | Arcade |
Room palette changes due to RP2C04 palette.
 |
 |
 |
| Console | Console with RGB palette | Arcade |
Room palette changes due to RP2C04 palette.
 |
 |
 |
| Console | Console with RGB palette | Arcade |
Besides the palette change, there's a couple changes related to the fight with Darutos. After Lucia kills him, enemies start spawning again. This was likely done to prevent a softlock if Lucia kills Darutos but doesn't have enough MP to use the Wing of Madoola to get through the ending door. The castle music also keeps playing after Darutos is killed, it doesn't cut out like in the console version.
This is a new sound that plays when the player inserts a coin.
In the console version, the game over music gets played when Lucia dies. In the arcade version, this sound gets played each time she loses a life. The game over music doesn't start until the game over screen.
The boss music was changed to be more elaborate.
Here's a recreated version by marklincadet that doesn't have the poor sound quality and sound effects from FLN's recording.
The ending text was rewritten to make use of the lowercase font. It's also in better English now.