The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

That's less of a Sonic reference, more of a Sega one - Hi-Tech Land Sega Akihabara.


Yes someone should make a proper page and help us find more.

 

Well, you're pretty much just counting any game with a reasonably accurate setting in Akihabara, then. Including Steins;Gate and Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds, for example.

 

(I mean a page for the arcade, and find more arcades)

 

Ah, that makes more sense. :v:

 

I remember this being posted many eons ago but we've now got a source

http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3A16BitVideoGaming_US.pdf&page=34

This off-shoot of GamePro has a "pro tip" for Sonic 1's Labyrinth Zone. Being able to jump off-screen at the start of the stage and run past a good chunk of the level, Super Mario Bros. style.

This is a feature of the old layout:


but was blocked off in the final game:


IIRC it's an object that blocks the path, rather than being built into the level layout, so was likely a late fix.

 

After the second checkpoint in Sonic's version of Sky Deck, people usually take either the forward path after reaching the cylinder in the middle of the area or they take the right path, which has a moving hook that Sonic can hang on to. However, I have never seen anyone take the left path after reaching the cylinder. It's the most hazardous of the three paths because you need to use the homing attack against two enemies in order to reach another rotating cylinder and a platform with a rocket that sends you to the bottom pathway near the end of the first part of the stage. This route isn't very apparent, which is why very few people take that path instead of the other two.

 

New Sonic 2 prototype footage, curtosy of the Channel 4's GamesMaster, series 2 episode 1. If by "new" you mean, "nobody's pointed it out in more than twenty years 'new'".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iP3ySOKV9I&t=10m

(10:07)

Nothing hugely important - old title screen, "GREEN HILL", curved Chemical Plant loops. Music doesn't seem to have been optimised for 50Hz yet either. An earlier build than beta 4, but later than the Simon Wai one.

Casino Night Zone's layout is different though?

 

Interesting. It's like an in between title card, still using the black background from Sonic 1 but with Sonic 2's font. I'd love to play this prototype. And two things I could tell were different in Casino Night was that section towards the beginning above the half pipe with 4 flippers instead of 2, and I think the Jackpot graphic was different. Could be wrong on that though.

 

What interests me the most is the fact that the slowed music almost implies that there were prototype carts produced for PAL regions (unless the game is being played on a console that allows multiple regions, or something).

The un-optimised Chemical Plant Zone music sounds really subdued compared to what we all know (and love).

 

Most Mega Drive games, like Sonic 2, are not region locked.

 

I assumed it was recorded slower on purpose to make it easier for the guys programming the music to catch everything.

 

No... That's because they hadn't optimized the music for PAL systems yet.

Sonic 1 does that, too.

 

Derp. Thanks for clearing that up. I now wish nine year old me knew of this (I got into the Mega Drive game pretty late in its life, despite being a Sonic fan from a much younger age).

 

Yes it's definitely PAL slowdown. Although curiously the first scene of Green Emerald Hill plays at about the right speed - speed shoes?

Though while you're talking about music - EHZ 2 player still uses the 1 player track.


p.s. I've scavenged the rest of GamesMaster and found nothing of interest as far as Sonic goes. Wonderful hyped up competition in series 3 though - win an Amiga CD32, Jaguar, 3DO and CD-I! It's the most 90s TV show I've seen in years.

Also the reviews are terrible - something good in 1994 is the worst thing ever in 1995. Also all these "journalists" look about twelve and aren't really fit for television.

"This game is a right corker". 78%.

 

Uhh... yeah, saying that was intended is like saying the classic series was meant for 50fps. I can just as easily speculate that it was a case of 'Masa composed the music as if it were for a movie, but Sonic isn't a movie, so it was sped up to suit the bouncy, fast-paced feel of the game'.

Anyway, the fact that the footage of 1P EHZ looks 50fps, yet has correctly-timed music, can be traced back to the fact that the earlier Wai beta's sound driver lacked PAL correction. Beta 4's didn't. As for 2P EHZ... I can only imagine that uses its own music ID, which points to EHZ's music data regardless. Hey, it's not unheard of: in the Wai beta, OOZ's music (then DHZ's, probably) has two sound IDs: 90 and 91. Anyway, the tables that handle sound ID allocation also define if a song gets PAL correction. In the case of, for example, the drowning music, you don't want PAL correction being applied to it, because it would end long before the player actually drowns. The fact that EHZ 2P does it may just be an oversight. The feature was newly introduced, after all.

 

I remember booting up Sonic 2 on original hardware for the first time in years and thinking that my old MD2 must have been broken because it was so slow compared to the emulation I was used to. This was way back when, before I became an original hardware hipster, mind =P

It's worth noting that a lot of the games that came out later in the Mega Drive's lifespan (1994-95) ARE region-locked, but are generally PAL optimised if that's the case. Sonic 3 is a good example of this: The PAL version runs at full speed (albeit with boarders that aren't present in NTSC games), and will give you an error message that's something like 'This software is intended only for use on PAL/SECAM systems' or 'not intended for use on NTSC systems' if you run it on a US or Japanese machine.

The region lock works by checking if the language is Japanese or English, and if the console is running at 50hz or 60hz. 50hz/English = PAL/SECAM, 60hz/English = NTSC US, 60hz/Japanese = NTSC JP. There's theoretically an unused region of 50hz and Japanese, but nothing uses it. You can get full compatibility with all titles by modding your Mega Drive with a 50/60hz switch and a language switch, it's fairly quick and easy to do, but does require taking a soldering iron to your MD. Since most PAL games are just the US versions with different packaging, flicking the console onto 60hz mode will make the games run at the correct speed. There's also some extra plastic on the Western models to stop the Japanese carts fitting, but this is easily filed off. The 32X just checks if it's running at the same frequency as the Mega Drive, and the Mega CD checks region based on the BIOS.

Apologies if I'm telling you to suck eggs, but I figured it might be useful to any budding importers.

 

Sonic 3 (& Knuckles) is no more PAL optimised than Sonic 2. The music runs at the proper speed, and a few other specific things are sped up to match (e.g. the scrolling credits scroll more lines per frame so that they still finish in time with the music), but the gameplay is as slow as ever. The only difference between EU Sonic 3 and the other regions is one letter in the header.

The few PAL optimisations in the game are controlled by a RAM flag that's set on startup by querying the console regional settings, so if you start up at 50Hz, then switch mid-game, you'll cause the same glitchy effects as GoldS/ORKAL's LRZ "Megaglitch", which results from the 50Hz flag being set while actually running at 60Hz. (The "Megaglitch" is just serious RAM corruption that happens to touch this flag, as well as the player ID for the Blue Knuckles effect).