Let's poke this side of the forums and see if I can get you interested: This is a bootleg version of Sonic 1 that starts you off with 40 lives. The Sega logo is stripped, the "Sonic Team Presents" screen hidden (at the start) and the title screen unceremoniously cropped to hide the Sega logo there too. It's otherwise identical to the normal (revision 00) version of the game, including the ending credits, presumably because the bootleggers couldn't get that far. Because this version of the game is clearly not the real thing, it's treated as scum, but if you lived in the developing world and this was the version of Sonic you grew up with, it's an important piece of video game history, no less "pure" than playing the game on a 50Hz machine, or through Sonic Jam, or one of the many terrible emulators of the 2000s. It's not the Sonic, but it's your Sonic, and I think our wikis should care a little. Granted, I don't think they should care a lot, but we can do better than our current coverage, which is just to list it under its GoodGen identifier, "Sonic The Hedgehog (W) (REV00) [p5][!].bin". "Pirate 5", the... fifth pirate - the dumps were saved, but the context was lost, and now everything's a mystery again. It's almost as if GoodGen isn't actually all that good (and yes I did have to wade through four other "pirates" before I found the version I was looking for). Incidentally this version of the game isn't uncommon if you know where to look. There could be many similar "easy" versions of games that are hiding in plain sight.
Just found this on ebay. It seems to be a stylebook for Sonic Adventure 2, like the one for Sonic Adventure that was scanned a few years ago. Price is a bit steep for me. I wonder if people might be interested in pitching in for the purposes of archival? Unless anyone's aware of the files on that CD being made available elsewhere?
No but like this is extremely important. Do we have any idea where it was developed? I suppose it's impossible, but it's extremely important to take note that Sonic 1 should have a version "on trainers", made separately and with nothing but a very simple change, probably in response to some kind of complaint that the game was too hard. The many gaming contexts in which Sonic found itself in, and what the solutions were at the time, are very precious to me -- being from a country in the developing world.
Doesn't even necessarily have to be the developing world - I have a copy of that version on a multi-game pirate cartridge I got a few years back.
It seems to be related to SMPS Z80 (the Type 1 FM variant?). Here is the code for reading the music header: Code (ZiLOG Z80 Assembler): loc_4430: ; CODE XREF: sub_4003+451↓j push bc ld hl, (word_F035) ldi ldi ld (de), a inc de ld (word_F035), hl ld hl, (word_F033) ldi ldi ldi ldi ld (word_F033), hl And here's the same code from the Mega CD BIOS's sound driver: Code (ZiLOG Z80 Assembler): loc_548: ; CODE XREF: PlaySoundID+A3j push bc ld hl, (word_1C35) ldi ldi ld (de), a inc de ld (word_1C35), hl ld hl, (word_1C33) ldi ldi ldi ldi ld (word_1C33), hl There are other similarities too, like the presence of the coordination flag system. The driver seems to have been heavily modified, making it hard to compare with vanilla SMPS Z80.
I'll fill in the blanks for the 0 people who care: "Pirate 1" Completely removes the Sega screen and the initial "Sonic Team Presents" text (although you can still see it after stopping a demo or finishing the game). This means there's a long pause on a black screen before this Sega-less title sequence. Pirates 2 and 3 are the same as this one. The only differences are some byte changes in the header at $180: Actual Sonic 1: 47 4D 20 30 30 30 30 31 30 30 39 2D 30 30 26 4A (GM 00001009-00&J) P1: 47 4D 20 30 00 00 00 00 30 30 39 2D 30 30 26 4A (GM 0����009-00&J) P2: 47 4D 20 30 30 30 30 31 30 30 39 2D 30 30 26 4A (GM 00001009-00&J) P3: 47 4D 20 30 50 50 55 55 30 30 39 2D 30 30 26 4A (GM 0PPUU009-00&J) what a thrill. Does it mean anything? Probably not. "Pirate 4" This removes the Sega logo and jingle, but not the screen, and not the "Sonic Team Presents". This means the screen now goes white for no reason before going black. The logo is the same as pirate 5 above, i.e. pretty bad. I suspect there's probably more pirate copies of Sonic 1 than GoodGen is accounting for, but I guess people would have to buy these things first. Probably en masse so we could build up some sort of picture of where they came from. If you have more money than sense, there's one for sale right now for 50,000 Indonesian rupiahs (~$3.37 USD, £2.69)
Speaking of ROM variants – I tried to find this version of Sonic 2, identical to Simon Wai prototype, but with SEGA logo at the start. Is it documented anywhere?
If it's not on the wiki, then no Anyway to finish this off: I can't pretend these are interesting. The old adage is true: pirate versions of games tend to remove Sega logos and copyrights with limited degrees of success. Sometimes the headers change slightly for some reason. It was never super sure of the Simon Wai beta being hacked to bits, seeing as there's still a Sega credit on the title screen (even more so now we have a later prototype that also skips the Sega logo), but it's obvious just by playing a few other bootlegs why people came to this conclusion. The coverups are very inconsistent.
It's fun to discover all those modifications and prototypes, like Sonic The Hedgehog 40 Lives Version, Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Simon Wai with SEGA logo and Sonic Spinball with Howard Drossin's remix of Masato Nakamura's STH theme. Drossin did not know that Nakamura wanted a lot of money in case SEGA would like to use his music in future Sonic titles. Hirokazu Yasuhara pointed this out during one of the meetings, so Drossin rushed to his recording room and composed a new tune for Spinball. What else... Oh, yes – it's 30th anniversary of the game this year. And only recently I noticed that Sonic and Doctor Eggman have 4 fingers on their hands (American cover).
I'm not sure if this has been previously mentioned, and I would like for someone to double-check this, but I think Knuckles the Echidna in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (prototype 0618) actually matches the final Knuckles in Sonic 2 ROM. If so, there only seems to be 5, rather than 6, KiS2 prototypes.
This is the closest thing to a "General Q&A" thread there is in this forum section. Does anyone remember there being line-art of Mighty and Ray from some magazine circa SEGASonic the Hedgehog that was bright red lines against a white background? It had Ray in an uncharacteristic laughing expression and Mighty kind of looked like he was T-Posing. The art was rotated and was slightly cut out, so not only was there a colorization attempt but also an edit to get them to a proper orientation here in this forum. I've been struggling to find it, though.
I posted some Sonic Band / Mighty and Ray images on Tumblr, trying to compile them in one place: https://www.tumblr.com/flyking-data...ances-of-sonic-the-hedgehog-band?source=share Maybe one of them is what you are talking about.
This is it, thank you so much. Just need to find the post in Sonic Retro that has a colorized edit of these. EDIT: Found it. https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...a-disassembly-and-analysis.39732/#post-971994
Iizuka's interview with Beep21 just released. Still don't have a subscription to it yet so haven't skimmed over the article myself, but some good new info is most probably in there.
Busy now so just skimmed it, but one of the things that caught my eye: Iizuka talks about writing a full proposal for "Sonic RPG" on the Saturn after they finished NiGHTS, for the simple reason that he loves RPGs. However, he describes it less as a Dragon Quest-style RPG and more of what would now be called "action adventure". His original proposal had it featuring an overhead (or isometric) perspective, but that was never incorporated into a game. They also made a test level for it in 3D, but then it was decided they would port the Mega Drive Sonic games to the Saturn, so the project was put on hold. They made Sonic Jam and decided to include the test level there (the 3D level). Once the Dreamcast came into the picture, it was decided to re-do the project as Sonic Adventure. Iizuka says that Sonic RPG might be considered the base for which Sonic Adventure became, but the scope of the two games was completely different. The original Sonic RPG on the Saturn was a small-scale proposal. From the way he talks, it seems that it's wrong to say Sonic Adventure was originally designed for the Saturn. He wrote two separate proposals: one for Sonic RPG on the Saturn, and one for Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast. These are two different projects, albeit similar in basic design.
All these years of ignoring the "DID YOU KNOW SONIC ADVENTURE WAS ORIGINAL AN RPG?" factoids have finally been proven to be right! It REALLY didn't make sense. It's also funny that they would go with "action stages" and "adventure fields".
Erm... There were people ignoring that? It's been long stated aloud that there had been a "Sonic & Knuckles RPG" title or so that gave way to SA1. The only news on that statement of Iizuka's is the fact the RPG project was a smaller-scale one that inspired ST to create SA1 for Dreamcast. Instead of said RPG project having evolved directly into SA1. And the Sonic World 3D field having been that RPG project's test level, rather than having been SA1's base predecessor... Interesting. Yet, given a few things found on SA1 over the years, Sonic World can still be deemed as such, so both projects have some degree of relation. (Actually, I'm having a dumb moment, all this portion was already a known fact as well ^^")
I'm not super knowledgeable about it, but I think there are some important points in what Iizuka's saying that aren't generally known. First, "Sonic RPG" wasn't really an "RPG" in the usual sense. I left some of this out (sorry), but he specifically says: "The title of the proposal was Sonic RPG, but it wasn't at all an RPG like Dragon Quest. Nowadays, we'd call it an action-adventure game. Something where you discover secret rooms and such as you explore." Second, I think many people consider the Sonic Jam 3D World to be the remnants of some early Saturn version of Sonic Adventure. According to Iizuka, it was simply an experiment to see how Sonic might work in 3D for the Sonic RPG game: "In working on Sonic RPG, we created an experimental test to see how we could move Sonic in a 3D field on the Saturn. Because we went to the effort of making it, we included it as a bonus in Sonic Jam." Third, Iizuka seems to be clarifying that Sonic Adventure did not begin as a Saturn game. Sonic Adventure may have borrowed the concept of the Sonic RPG proposal, but it was its own thing intended solely for the Dreamcast: "I guess you could call the Sonic RPG proposal the base for what Sonic Adventure became, but we really developed and improved it... At the time, we were only thinking of releasing a game on the Saturn, so the scope was really small. After that, we heard about the new Dreamcast hardware, so we came up with the concepts of 'doing everything we possibly can' and 'making the biggest Sonic game possible.' Based on that, we wrote the proposal for Sonic Adventure."
what amuses the hell out of me is that I didn't think "Sonic Adventure" when I read this. I thought of Sonic Adventure 2, a game that is overtly far more linear than the first one...but the hunting levels are chock-full of secret rooms and passages in them.
