Has anyone gotten ahold of the "undistributed" NTSC version of this game? Every hack I seem to come across is always PAL. Apparently an NTSC version exists, but I haven't the slightest where...

Halp!

i'll check mine.

sorry man, UK here.

An NTSC version doesn't exist. The PAL NES provides far more drawing time than an NTSC NES will provide. You'd need to blank out about 46 scanlines at the bottom of the screen (Nearly the whole status bar) to get an equivalent drawing time.

It was at the very least planned and made it to the prototype stage.  I purchased a loose EPROM that I have been unable to dump properly that contains a work in progress version of the game for the NTSC market.  This is what I've been able to pull up in TLP:



The image on the left is from the prototype, the right is the final version.  The chip can be seen here:



Wish I could give you guys more, but it looks like this is likely the best I can do.

Now how on earth would it actually work? The original version updates at least 64 tiles in the span of a frame. Even Battletoads couldn't update that much data at once.
Since the PAL version appears to be quite stable on the NES in terms of the screen not jumping up and down, maybe they masked off the top and bottom scanlines, and shrunk the status bar or playfield.

I wish we could tell you, but we've never been able to properly dump the chip, and it may very well have succumb to bit-rot.  It would be great if we could get at least a demo of the game going, but we've sent it off to a number of programmer-savvy members and even they came up with nothing.

Mark and I should really invest in a top-end programmer.  We have a number of titles that are EPROM only, many of which we've been unable to properly dump.

moving on over to proto heaven.