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Hidden Palace prototype releases

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by drx, May 3, 2016.

  1. drx

    drx

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    I've finally found some time to start releasing prototypes again. I have a bunch of those left so this will take a while.

    Here's today's list:
    • Jesse “THE BODY” Ventura Wrestling Superstars (Mar 2, 1992, unreleased game!)
    • Curse Unreleased Localization Prototype (Jun 26, 1990)
    • Mondu's Fight Palace (Slaughter Sport prototype) (Jul 3, 1990)
    • F1 Circus MD Unreleased Localization Prototype (Dec 28, 1991)
    • Klax Prototype (Jun 21, 1990)
    • Earnest Evans Prototype (Apr 19, 1994)
    • The Revenge of Shinobi Prototype (Aug 21, 1989)
    • The Revenge of Shinobi REV02 Prototype (Feb 1, 1990)
    • Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi Prototype (Oct 2, 1990)
    • Battle Mania Prototype (May 28, 1991)
    • Trouble Shooter Localization Prototype (Sep 12, 1991)
    • Phantasy Star II Localization Prototype (Jul 28, 1989)
    • Battle Squadron Revision Prototype (Jan 18, 1991)
    • Kid Chameleon Revision Prototype (Dec 19, 1991)
    • Super Hydlide Localization Prototype (Oct 16, 1989)
    • Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master Revision Prototype (Jun 29, 1993)
    • Ghostbusters Revision Prototype (May 1, 1990)
    • Aladdin Revision Prototype (Jul 31, 1993)
    • Devilish Localization Prototype (Jan 16, 1992)
    • Golden Axe REV01 Prototype (Nov 22, 1989)
    • Sega ROM Archive table

    More info, downloads

    [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG]
     
  2. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    Jesse "The Body" Ventura Wrestling Superstars is actually quite a weird one which was advertised but never saw the light of day. In fact, I think I read an official Sega response directing people to that game when the US release of Wrestle War was cancelled.


    Something weird about Mega Drive wrestling games I guess.



    Curse is also interesting because it was licensed to Intv Corp in the US, who despite getting a publishing license, never actually released anything for the system. And there was quite a lot of potential there too - Intv Corp held all the rights to Intellivision stuff, having broken away from Mattel in the mid-80s.

    Mondu's Fight Palace also sat in development hell for a bit because Activision pulled out of the publishing game. Not much happened for a bit, and then Razorsoft jumped in.


    EDIT: Ah yes, now that I can actually compare footage, Wrestling Superstars appears to have been a localisation of Thunder Pro Wrestling Retsuden - the two share graphics and music, though there was quite a big gap between the game being announced in the US and it arriving in Japan.
     
  3. Galvatron

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    Thank you for dumping these, more Shinobi prototypes are always good, but a proto of Earnest Evans, great! I wonder why Renovation decided to remove President Coolidge from the game. For the final version, all of the game's story was relegated to being in the manual and on the back of the box.
     
  4. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    Wow, that's some awesome work!

    Have you tried having a look at previous sessions stored in the CDs? If they burned them in various sessions, they may have deleted some of the ROMs they didn't think were useful, but they'd still be accessible with programs like IsoBuster.


    By the way, any possibilities for the headers in the wiki to show Shift JIS characters, for some of the Japanese titles?


    EDIT: Oh, I guess you've already tried IsoBuster. =P
     
  5. Icewarrior

    Icewarrior

    I'm a member of S.T.A.R.S !!11!!!1!! Member
    So gonna test those Shinobi prototype right away!
    Thank you so much Drx!

    Still hoping for more Streets of Rage prototypes someday :)
     
  6. evilhamwizard

    evilhamwizard

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    :)

    Another thing to note. The Final ROM Archive has good approximations of build dates for most of the final builds of games. This is very very important to SEGA history, because we essentially have a reference of when certain games could have been available in the market. Since a lot of the release date information on the earlier games are completely missing or ambiguous, the archive might be able to help pin point when the actual retail release might've taken place. There are some games that have obviously wrong file dates, but most of the ROMs that did match with the finals seem to be okay.

    There are some games that were kinda hard to identify either or not they're actual prototypes or just revision prototypes (something meant for after the initial release ROM).

    Kid Chameleon is a strange one. There are no apparent differences from playing the game a little bit side by side with dual gens, but comparing the bytes between this and the US final is a different story. I used saxman's tools to take a look at the ROM to see if I could find maybe some alterations in layout or graphic data but nothing really jumped out at me. The weird thing though, which might have been a side affect of using saxman's programs on a ROM with different pointer locations, is that this build contains four extra maps that appear to be duplicates of some other level. This might imply that this is an actual late prototype of some kind, but again I'm not entirely sure. Hopefully saxman takes a crack at this ROM since he'll know more about it than either drx or I. :P

    Another weird one was Golden Axe. It's definitely a prototype for REV01, since the ROM header hasn't been renamed to reflect the new revision number (you'd be surprised how frequently developers simply forget to update the month/year/product id information until the last minute). But the strange thing is that upon loading into the main game, the game will literally pause itself before your character appears. I have no idea why this happens. I thought it was some debugging thing, but it seems rather pointless (unless of course you could pause the game at that point to look at the RAM contents or something...). It's not like level select is enabled by default or anything. Might be worth checking out.

    Another weird curiosity are the files that are denoted Japanese by the "JP" tag at the end of the filename before the extension. Almost every single one of these are legitimate prototypes. Another thing to note, that almost every third party non Sega developed/QA tested game before 1993 is a prototype or revision prototype of some kind. DRX and I thought this was because the earlier contents of the archive were mistaken with ROM submissions for Sega standards, since many of the different ROMs present have basically the same things going for them. Pretty much every different ROM we found that had noticeable differences upon playing the game would lack copyright information or other things that would go against the things SEGA themselves required from every game at the time.
     
  7. Pirate Dragon

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    Oh wow, thanks! I'm looking forwards to checking out the Curse localisation. I had the Japanese import back in the day (it was really cheap, about £13 IIRC), and it was the first game that I created a Wikipedia page for ... over ten years ago now (I don't think that SegaRetro existed then).
     
  8. Galvatron

    Galvatron

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    I wrote up a page showing all of the Earnest Evans differences here, and another one for Shadow Dancer here. The Shadow Dancer proto has quite a lot of minor differences in it, such as different text in the intro, the 2nd boss only attacks with 1 arm instead of 2, and the credits are different. drx pointed out that for the final version, everyone was using an alias in the credits.
     
  9. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    This is actually a big-ish deal - some of those aliases are unknowns:

    Takubon -> Kajiwara
    Kazu.K -> K.Koba
    Hiro.K -> Kawaguchi
    Rew -> Yamamoto
    Kankan -> Kanari
    Tantan -> Oshitani
    Hayhay -> Hayashida

    a puzzle for somebody more qualified than me to solve.
     
  10. muteKi

    muteKi

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    Whoa whoa whoa whoa what Hiroshi Kawaguchi was involved in Shadow Dancer?!?


    EDIT: after looking it up, that's a credit for character design?! Was there more than one Hiroshi Kawaguchi working for Sega at the time?!
     
  11. Eduardo Knuckles

    Eduardo Knuckles

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    These changes are not very strange to me. I'm familiar with the text FIEND'S PATH and THIEF'S THEME in Golden Axe. I'm sure I saw these texts when I played this game on the Genesis when I had it.
     
  12. drx

    drx

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    :rolleyes:
    Back again for another continuation of the Final ROM Archive releases, part 2! This time we have a ton of goodies (more than last week!).

    [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG]

    Prototypes:
    • Thunder Force III Prototype (Aug 1, 1990) (one of my favorite games)
    • Star Odyssey Localization Prototype (Jan 16, 1992)
    • Sorcer Kingdom Prototype (Nov 8, 1991)
    • Street Smart Prototype (Jun 29, 1990)
    • Final Blow Revision Prototype (Jan 16, 1990)
    • Gain Ground Prototype (Jul 27, 1990)
    • Master of Monsters Prototype (Apr 26, 1991)
    • Twin Hawk Prototype (Apr 6, 1990)
    • Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf Revision Prototype (Mar 22, 1990)
    • Beast Wrestler Localization Prototype (Sep 13, 1991)
    • Budokan - The Martial Spirit Revision Prototype (Sep 25, 1990)
    • David Robinson's Supreme Court Localization Prototype (Apr 15, 1992)
    • John Madden Football Revision Prototype (Nov 7, 1990)
    • Jurassic Park PAL Revision Prototype (Jun 14, 1993)
    • Mystic Defender Localization Prototype (Sep 14, 1989)
    • Pebble Beach Golf Links Revision Prototype (Feb 14, 1994)
    • Sol-Deace Revision Prototype (Feb 3, 1992)
    • Target Earth Localization Prototype (Feb 16, 1990)
    • Valis Localization Prototype (Oct 25, 1991)
    • Vapor Trail Localization Prototype (May 26, 1991)
    • Ys III: Wanderers from Ys Localization Prototype (Aug 28, 1991)

    Alternate finals:

    • Ariel the Little Mermaid (Oct 10, 1992 build)
    • Barney's Hide & Seek Game (Sep 18, 1993 build)
    • Chakan - The Forever Man (Oct 6, 1992 build)
    • Exile (Dec 13, 1991 build)
    • F-22 Interceptor (Sep 17, 1991 build)
    • Jurassic Park (May 26, 1993 build)
    • Landstalker (Jul 13, 1993 build)
    • NFL Football '94 (Nov 4, 1993 build)
    • Slaughter Sport (Sep 27, 1991 build)
    • Steel Empire (Mar 13, 1992 build)

    Grab it all here.
     
  13. Overlord

    Overlord

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    Thanks for your continued work on all this!
     
  14. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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    Yeah, this is an amazing data dump, thanks!
     
  15. drx

    drx

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    :rolleyes:
    Back again for another continuation of the Final ROM Archive releases, part 3. We have a couple of cool things for this week. The majority of the releases for this week are prototypes, some for very obscure Japanese games.

    [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG]

    Prototypes:

    • Advanced Daisenryaku - Deutsch Dengeki Sakusen prototype (Mar 7, 1991)
    • Darwin 4081 prototype (Feb 21, 1990)
    • Double Dragon II - The Revenge prototype (Oct 18, 1991)
    • Dynamite Duke prototype (Jun 21, 1990)
    • Ninja Burai Densetsu prototype (May 28, 1991)
    • Same! Same! Same! prototype (Jul 30, 1990)
    • Technocop prototype (Sep 12, 1990)
    • The Terminator prototype (Apr 15, 1992)
    • Traysia localization prototype (Jan 22, 1992)
    • Two Crude Dudes prototype (Nov 24, 1991)
    • Warsong localization prototype (Oct 1, 1991)
    • Whip Rush prototype (Jan 29, 1990)
    • Wonder Boy V - Monster World III prototype (Jul 25, 1991)

    Alternate builds:

    • Dungeons & Dragons - Warriors of the Eternal Sun (Apr 28, 1992 build)
    • Super Hang-On (Aug 18, 1989 build)

    All available here.
     
  16. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    Another awesome release, thanks again!
    From what I've seen in the video, the demo does different stuff and goes on for much longer... and that's the only difference I've noticed.
     
  17. NTxC

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    No way... you're back from the dead. Thank you for the release. Much appreciated.

    I'm going to start analyzing the Aladdin prototype right away.
     
  18. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    Judging by the build date I'd say this was for Winter CES 1990 (or more likely, shortly afterwards), but we haven't got it listed. That's not to say it didn't show up though.
     
  19. ValleyBell

    ValleyBell

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    The Ninja Burai Densetsu prototype is interesting, because song 82 (which exists as unreferenced data in the final) is still working. It doesn't seem to be used anywhere, but it wasn't in the final version either.
    The sound test can be accessed by pressing C at the title screen.
    Songs 82 and 8E are slightly different from the final version, songs 98-9B are missing. (This is probably the reason why they don't have song titles in the final version's sound test.)

    You have 99 (!) turns to finish the second map, btw. I didn't play further though and the level skip cheat doesn't work.
     
  20. drx

    drx

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    :rolleyes:
    Another release today. A couple of cool things for this week to wrap up the month. The theme for next month will be a bit different.

    [​IMG][​IMG][​IMG][​IMG]

    Prototypes:
    • Death Duel prototype (May 6, 1992)
    • European Club Soccer prototype (Oct 25, 1991)
    • Growl prototype (Aug 26, 1991)
    • Paperboy prototype (Oct 28, 1991)
    • Pat Riley Basketball prototype (Jun 14, 1990)
    • R.B.I. Baseball 3 prototype (Jul 18, 1991)
    • RoadBlasters prototype (Jun 27, 1991)
    • Speedball 2 - Brutal Deluxe prototype (Jun 7, 1991)
    • Tommy Lasorda Baseball localization prototype (Apr 30, 1989)
    • Turbo Outrun prototype (Dec 9, 1991)

    Alternate builds:

    • Centurion - Defender of Rome (Apr 24, 1991 build)
    • Home Alone 2 - Lost in New York (Sep 29, 1993 build)
    • Ren & Stimpy - Stimpy's Invention (Dec 9, 1993 build)
    • ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron (Sep 11, 1993 build)

    Grab it all here.