Holy hell drx, blood from a stone. Sounds like you all hit a nice new vein in the prototype mines with research old scene releases too. Looking forward to what else comes up. I played through a bit this morning and gave up at Aquatic Ruin. Used the Act 2 swing that breaks off and floats only to have it kill me when it hit the upper path's wall. The collision really is garbage. I did notice that Tails' behavior is definitely in its infancy still. It's like they have a hard spacing between him and Sonic when jumping which just comes off as jarring to me after years of playing he final. Also it doesn't look like he can damage any bosses either? Neat find all around.
Wow, nice find! I hope you guys can find all the unidentified prototypes that may be lurking in there (I think there was one TreasureLand Adventure prototype build that GoodTools renamed as a "bad dump" or something like that).
And to think some people out there (no-intro I'm looking at you) who would throw out "scene" ROMs in favor of only verified dumps. Good find, guys. Wonder if there are other surprises floating around out there.
(psst - "no intro") I can see why they wouldn't want modified ROMs - a clean set is desirable for most people, but there's a case for keeping a record of the earliest dumps - the original Mega Drive ROMs. Perhaps their original release dates affected sales numbers and marketing decisions - really niche stuff but I'm sure somebody out there would care.
Ok, got some news. I have been looking through looking for Hidden Palace assets, but haven't fully combed it to find them. However, I did find something interesting. First off, I have some notes for the class: Now, in this instance, if you look at the code starting from 0x3E378, you will find the Level Tile Table. You know, the table that has all the level art in a table. Everything in this table is longword, which is consistent through Wai to Final. Scrolling through, The HPZ relevant data is as follows. HPZ Tile Pointer 3E3D8 HPZ Block Pointer 3E3DC HPZ Chunk Pointer 3E3E0 Sadly though, this is a dead end. It all leads to the same point: 0xA0D0E, which as one can already figure, is just Oil Ocean's block data. (Also means I located Oil Ocean's block data =V) Moving on, two other points of conjecture. First, we have the collision data. Looking for a collision table, Primary starts at 0x53E0, while the secondary starts at 0x5424. Let's find HPZ's collision pointer. HPZ Primary Collision Pointer 0x5400 HPZ Secondary Collision Pointer 0x5444 Both pieces offsets point to the same place, 0x499EA. There is no other entry, so I know it it's null. So, is it HPZ's Collision? Continue reading. Last bit is the chunk layout. Had to hunt for it, but the Chunk layout table is located at 0x4BAEA. Once more, let's look for that HPZ location. HPZ Layout Pointer 0x4BB0A The table indicates 0x4D46E is the location of the HPZ layout. It isn't used anywhere else, and it isn't a null point, so this a good sign. Let's do an experiment. So, taking the ROM, and manually hex editing the points of HPZ to load the art to specified locations, then shoving that into a tiny asm file with the file bits aligned, let's see what we get.... The layout doesn't seem to work out correctly. I need to investigate, possibly it's the uncompressed leftover from the Wai build. Judging from earlier videos, they didn't change any layouts and were still using the SWS2B layouts, well until this build. Looking at the disassembled code, Naka had already started using the Kosinksi compressed layouts. I will study the data later and confirm my findings. On the other hand, the collision actually works! Seems they didn't completely trash everything yet. From what little I could run in earlier, all of it works. Slopes, halfpipes, it all checks out. For those of you curious, here's the edited ROM I made just for this demonstration. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ux2acsj4qgm0z6r/output.bin?dl=0 Go nuts!
Holly hell, never thought a new Sonic 2 beta would be discovered in this day and age. It's the early 2000's all over again. I need to rewatch Matrix tonight.
Wanted to drop in to say thanks! Your continued dedication to the release and preservation of prototypes is inspiring, drx. Sonic 2 prototypes are a door to nostalgia. How I fondly remember the days when I absorbed all the information about the Simon Wai beta like a nerdy sponge.
Oh, I'm not down on it. This is awesome! I'm all for more information on what's commonly agreed as the best game in the series. It's still a fascinating release. We just aren't getting 14 pages of hype over a cancelled badnik :specialed: If the fabled Sonic 1 beta ever turns up, that will be a hell of a party.
Didn't see if it was mentioned yet, but it seemed like the special stages were farther away from completion than in Beta 4, if that is the right way to phrase things. The special stages I entered had had nothing more than lines or waves of rings, no bombs to be found (whether individual, clustered, cemi-circular, or full circle it didn't matter, no bombs PERIOD), and there relatively low ring collecting goals in each stage (one stage with Special Stage 2's palette for instance had an initial goal of 20 rings, and for the last part, 70 rings). Additionally, I noticed some bugginess that I had not seen in prototypes following this one, like the palette for the upper part of the quarterpipe flickering red intermittantly. Perhaps between this build, and Beta 4, they were still ironing out the physics and testing things - and ironing out bugs with the graphical elements in the special stages?
So guys, I'm a fucking idiot. Upon further inspection. the "mysterious" layout I couldn't figure out, turns out to be a byte for byte copy of Hill Top Zone Act 2's layout....right above it. How the fuck I didn't notice it before is beyond me, but I hyped everyone. Some more disappointing news. Upon reinspecting Beta 4, these things are already present, the copy layout, the leftover collision, nothing new. All in all, that means HPZ was scrapped a few builds back. However, this is also somewhat useful, because we have confirmation that HPZ being scrapped was definitely not a last minute job, well, not two weeks away from release last minute.
I mentioned the ring requirements in a previous post. :P I couldn't get past the fourth stage, which that one does have bombs. Beta 5's SS don't have bombs until stage 4 as well.
Even without big changes I love seeing the progress between betas, really shows how the game was put together and edited over time.
Not to go off topic, but I wish I could learn how to go about searching for releases from different scenes to dig through in a hunt for prototypes of another sort - as I'd like to hunt for prototypes for Playstation and Playstation2 games (like Dance Dance Revolution specifically, since prototypes could aid me a lot in reverse engineering these titles)
