Not counting LE/Prototypes there's 5 versions of the game out there as far as I know: Japanese US 1.0 (the one with the static title) Europe SA International US 1.1 (the one with the animated title) They were released J > U > E > Int, but the dates in their copies of ip.bin are pretty interesting: J - 12 December 1998 U1.0 - 12 August 1999 E - 9 September 1999 Int. - 20 September 1999 U1.1 - 5 October 1999 The majority of revisional differences are between the 1998 Japanese copies and the initial US ones: Character Tweaks (Running blur removal, giving Gamma more voices, making the holding animations less weird looking etc) Many Camera Tweaks Object Tweaks Additional Menus (Emblem Results etc.) Fixing Bugs (Like letting the player move before the timer starts after titlecards in SA1 J) Additional Languages (and removing a lot of Japanese clips that weren't used) Idle Lines (and stuff like "Welcome to Twinkle Park") Different Wallpapers in Track 1 From what I know these are the differences I've found between the 1999 versions: U1.0 and Int. add the Japanese subtitle to the title screen if the language is set to Japanese. U1.1 and E have no effect. Despite still working, the hidden level select's options are blank in all versions of the game that use the animated title screen (E, Int, U1.1) Reebok DLC only works in E (Vice versa for AT&T - works in any version except E) I put most of the stuff on TCRF a while ago if you want to see what specifically was changed: https://tcrf.net/Sonic_Adventure_(Dreamcast)/Version_Differences Don't know about the music thing though. Nights_A and Nights_S are in all versions of the game as far as I know.
Nights_S and Nights_A differ between the two International releases I have. Nights_S and Nights_A have a last modified date of 9/20/1999 on one, and 12/23/1998 on the other. I was wrong, the lengths of each are the same, but the bitrate of the '99 revision is lower (288 kbps vs 398 kbps). Both are labeled Sonic Adventure International. Thank you for the information.
Oh, cool! It's apparently not just those files that were changed. I just checked J, E, Int and U1.1 (I don't have a good rip of U1.0 sadly), It looks like the 1999 releases downsampled a lot of the songs in the game. Here's the list of affected files: Spoiler ADVE102 BOSSALL BOSSE101 BOSSEVNT CHAO CHAOGOAL CHAOHALL CHAORACE CHARACTR CIRCUIT CONTINUE E102 EGCARER1 EGCARER2 EVTBGM05 FISHGET FISHMISS HAMMER HIGHWAY2 HURRYUP JINGLE_1 JINGLE_2 JINGLE_3 JINGLE_4 JINGLE_5 NIGHTS_A NIGHTS_S ONE_UP REDMNTN2 RNDCLEAR SANDHILL SCRAMBLE SKYDECK2 SONIC_CD SPEEDUP SSRACING THEE102 TICAL TIMER TITL_EGG TITL_MR1 TITL_MR2 TITL_SS TWNKLPK1 TWNKLPK3 WNDYVLY2 They're all back up to 398kbps in SADX though. (Well, aside from titl_egg for some reason, which didn't get fixed until the PC version)
Specifying bitrate on an ADX is not..... common? ADX is an ADPCM based format, so the files are consistently 1/4th the size of an equivalent RAW PCM file. (E.g .wav files) I don't have the files in front of me, but I'm guessing they went from 44.1khz to 32khz? Or 32khz down to 22khz? Remember that 44100 is "CD Quality". On the Gamecube it wasn't unusual to see 48khz audio as well, because the GC audio hardware could only natively output PCM streams at 32khz or 48khz. Everything else was resampled at playback time.
Limited Edition/E3/Trial Version still have the 44Khz audio, it's just everything after that I think.
If I had to guess I'd say mainly so they could fit both of the voices files - those things're 60MB each. LE/E3/Trial Version only had the English voices, so they didn't need to tweak anything. There's also all those English/French/German/Spanish mission cards that stack up a few MB. EDIT: Turns out LE does have the Japanese voices. It's missing the web content and DLC music though, which take up about 70 MB.
Actually, I believe that depends on the system's region, rather than the game's. I recall playing the Reebok DLC on the US version with an emulator, or some shenanigans like that. So if, for example, you applied a region free patch to the EU version and played it on a US Dreamcast, it would be able to run the AT&T events.
The Dreamcast disc header has a version field, usually in the format v1.xxx. I've seen at least 7 different variants, so these should be examined properly. I'll re-rip my US copies sometime over the weekend to see what's what. Reference: http://mc.pp.se/dc/ip0000.bin.html
My personal copy is V1.005, date is October 10th 1999 like what is labeled as "1.1" on the previous page. Potentially not helpful, but if for some odd reason it isn't readily available I can provide it. When I bought GDEmu I ended up dumping every single one of my discs into GDI format.
Okay, so over on the x-hax IRC me and a fellow user got around to finding all of what we could on the versions a while back. I didn't note actual differences in the builds, just their revision numbers, write dates, and regions. Here's what I've written down as far as released/dumped copies of SA1 on the Dreamcast were revision/date wise. These were taken from gdi dumps that were all either from the original uploads or were checksum checked for accuracy with other dumps. Code (Text): [SA1 Versions] - Info taken from IP.bin 10-16-1998 NTSC-J Sonic Adventure AutoDemo v1.000 12-10-1998 NTSC-J Sonic Adventure v1.007 03-02-1999 NTSC-J Sonic Adventure Taikenban v1.002 06-04-1999 PAL Sonic Adventure Trial for E3 v1.000 06-08-1999 NTSC-U Sonic Adventure Limited Edition v1.002 08-12-1999 NTSC-U Sonic Adventure v1.004 09-09-1999 PAL Sonic Adventure v1.003 09-20-1999 NTSC-J Sonic Adventure International v1.003 10-05-1999 NTSC-U Sonic Adventure (Sega All Stars)v1.005
The E3/LE I have has those dates the other way around. I always found it weird how E3's localisation (Knux/sfx etc.) is much different than LE's despite coming out at the same time, but then again I guess they tossed in a bunch of old files or something. Also the LE on Hidden Palace has the date 06-03-1999 and revision v1.001. Other than that it's exactly the same as the other copies though.
I got the E3 build from Hidden Palace. I double checked my dates and builds as well just to make sure, and sure enough, I screwed up :specialed:/> I'm not sure where I got this LE version from. I though it was from Hidden Palace, but I guess not. It reminds me of the SA2 The Trial situation where it has several different write dates but are all identical data wise.
You wouldn't happen to know if the Autodemo items also had the 44Khz audio or not? The copies I have of the autodemo music are in .wav so I doubt that the original bitrate was preserved.
They're all 44.1 KHz actually in the auto demo. I have the original ADX files. The Dreamcast outputs 44.1 KHz (16 bits per sample) in 2 channel stereo. Exactly the same format as an audio CD. Any file that's 32 KHz is being resampled to 44.1 KHz. Which is what happens with roughly half of the music files from international versions of Sonic Adventure and of course Sonic Adventure 2 (final versions) has 95% of it's music like that from the get-go with some such as the chao radio songs being as low as 22.05 KHz and in mono.
