Hi. I'm doing a complete disassembly of Sonic 1 for the Master System. I have found various pieces of evidence to suggest that Sonic 1 was scaled back from a 512K game to 256K some way through development. The most amazing thing I've just found is that an 8-bit rendition of Marble Zone's music is present in the ROM! You can download a version of the ROM here with the Green Hill music replaced with the Marble Zone track: http://camendesign.com/_stuff/S1_MarbleZone.sms
Interesting! I wonder if the Master System/Game Gear version of the game was originally planned to have the same zones as the Mega Drive version. They included GHZ after all, maybe its possible that they started on MZ next before replanning the 8-Bit version.
I wonder if there are any remnants of Spring Yard Zone or Star Light Zone as well? I do find it interesting. I wonder why it didn't have identical zones... other than perhaps trying to be a somewhat original experience... but then why replicate half of the zones?
....Why hasn't this man been made insta-member yet?!?! Wow shit man nice find, how did we skip over this? is their just not enough research done on the SMS/GG version of Sonic 1?
It's good to know there's someone here making a complete disassembly of this game, mine was rather shitty. :v: Now this is pretty cool never really got too far into hacking this game but judging by your past activity on the wiki page for it you've done some impressive work. It would have been cool to see the 8 bit version have Marble Zone as it is one of my favorite levels in the game.
Not quite a .vgm rip, but it's certainly a VGM rip. Recorded from a real Mega Drive. FLAC. Don't break my monthly bandwidth plzkthx.
I would've never thought that Marble Zone could sound so awesome on the MS. Here is a .VGM rip. It's at 0xCD0A, that's between the Green Hill and Jungle Zone songs.
Wow, what a response -- in just a few hours! To answer some questions: There are a large number of unused objects in the game which have code, but probably missing graphics for them. (offsets: $9B75, $9BE8, $9C70, $96F8, $96A8, $8218, $83C1, $94A5, $AE35, $B0F4, $8ECA, $8F6C, $BCDF) When I can reverse engineer how the objects work I might be able to work out what the AI these objects have and give them new graphics. I'm in the middle of unpicking the music data, so I will post here if I find any more unused songs. There's a pointer table for the game music at $C716. Green Hill begins at $C7D0 and I discovered Marble Zone wedged inbetween it and the next song. You can find it at $CD0A. I used the music notes on the SCHG to unpick the bytes, so credit for this discovery must go to ValleyBell. I don't know how to do VGM stuff, but I hope this data helps the peeps who know. I've rewritten most of that page already and plan to completely overhaul it. When I started there were a large number of unknown bytes in the level headers and I've now gotten that down to 1: Unknown Byte "9" is actually a bank number for loading the sprite data -- more proof the game used to be bigger -- but I haven't added that info to the wiki yet. Since the response has been so nice, I'll share with you my current disassembly -- just be warned that this is only 5% done, but I've mostly got it formatted in ASM and have started commenting it. Sonic 1 Master System Disassembly: (23-NOV-13) http://camendesign.co.uk/_stuff/S1.sms.asm
Wow, this is incredible! Aside from the Basaran/Batbrain graphics found only in the Game Gear version of the game, I wasn't aware of any indication that Marble Zone might have been intended for the Master System version of the game at some point. Congratulations on the amazing find, Kroc! Sonic 1 on the Master System is a game that I've always had a soft-spot for, as my brother's Master System II with the built-in version of Sonic 1 was the first mainstream games console that we ever owned. I wonder what other secrets this game holds... That reminds me, does anyone know if the built-in version of Sonic 1 has ever been dumped? I can only think of one difference when compared to the emulated versions I've played since then - it didn't display the graphics of Sonic singing into the microphone that the cartridge version shows over the end credits, instead showing the overview of South Island that appears on the intermission screen between levels. That's stuck in my head very clearly - I remember my brother describing the "Singing Sonic" to me when we first completed the game, as he was surprised not to see it given that he'd previously seen it on his friend Rob's copy of the game, which was the cartridge version.
I added the info to the wiki: Game Secrets:Sonic the Hedgehog (8-bit). Feel free to add more info as you get it.
Holy shit!!! This is the best discovery I've seen in a long while ( and we have not been short of amazing research results lately...). Sonic 1 and 2 for the Master System are my favourite Sonic Games, and finding something like this is...wow. Great job there!!!
