So here's the problem - someone's going to have to actually invest some time and effort into this, and it won't be me. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 bug list Sonic & Knuckles bug list Some things are documented, others are not. Static screenshots don't do all of these justice, so you'll probably have to generate animated GIFs or something. I genuinely don't know how to do that though. Sadly I don't expect anyone will step up to the plate. Love to be proven wrong, but it's not happened in other cases.
For the sake of preservation, it'd be as simple as video capturing a watchthrough of the entire playlist. I'd be happy to do it.
I've started the process of converting the annotations to captions. I'll be done before annotations are gone...hopefully.
Regarding the annotations, I will need to process this for one of my Honey the Cat videos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUjNwLEitww Since Sonic CulT is gone, no source documentation exists indicating that the emulator which exposed her to the world initially did not render the pigtails or a tail due to a timing issue in the emulator. This was NOT observed by Ian Flynn, who put her on the cover of an Archie comic issue with no pigtails and blue eyes, similar to Trakker's popularized design. (Ian was also told to give her a tail to be consistent with both Blaze's and Big's fluffy ends, which I found really stupid and took away some of her originality, but that's just my own diet tribe. This was told to me by Ian in a private message on Bumbleking forums, since which he purged the PMs for NO REAL REASON but left the forums themselves intact.) But this is now the oldest documented, non-archived source that exists to claim she had pigtails before they could be properly rendered. I'd like to keep that intact somehow.
Just as a friendly word to give here. If you want to just back up valuable text in annotations, I've been using 4K Video Downloader. It downloads not just the video but also the annotations as a separate text/subtitle file (.SRT) that even comes with time stamps of when the text initially appeared in the video. I take that .SRT and import that as captions back into YouTube. It doesn't seem that elegant of a solution, but at least the info is retained. I've already ripped from 14 videos of mine and I haven't hit a paywall/roadblock yet. I'll think about it. =D
I haven't looked at the textures in quite some time, but IIRC there is no legible text and doesn't match any code structure I can think of. EDIT: To clarify further, in a rather bizarre way... fuck it time to break out debug and just texture dump the cache one sec.... Here it is in it's raw dump: The monitor dumped for comparison: And to go even a step further, to show a comparison of how just how stretched/enlarged this texture is on the floor, here is Sonic's(maybe?) eye: None of these have been resized.
Harmony: https://twitter.com/Mazin__/status/1027444014767734784 https://twitter.com/Mazin__/status/998893284364771329 https://twitter.com/Mazin__/status/1027448407428714496 Does anyone recognise what the images on issues 112 and 115 are? 112 has a pine tree and a rope, 115 has a purple building and what looks to be some square confetti...
No idea. All I can say is that I'm positive those weren't included in the the Sonic screensaver; I just checked.
Issue 115 is the artwork of Sonic jumping in front of a giant 1993 building with lots of different colored confetti floating into the air. I believe it was a New Year's Eve picture and it was featured as a Sega Freaks collectible trading card as well as a cover for the Sega Harmony magazine. Unfortunately, it was not featured in Sonic the Screensaver and we have yet to find a good quality scan of it online. All we have of the picture is some photos of the Sega Freaks card as well as an early draft version of the illustration which Naoto Oshima was kind enough to share with us on Twitter. If you look closely at the Sega Freaks trading card picture you can see that it says "Vol. 115" on it which matches the issue number of the Sega Harmony magazine. As for issue 112 that is something entirely new that has yet to be seen. I checked all of the Sonic the Screensaver artwork just to be sure and I cannot find any pictures that match that one. It looks like maybe Sonic may be holding onto or swinging from a rope or maybe he's standing on some kind of suspended platform that is held up by a rope? The pine tree and the mountains in the background are giving me a Hill Top Zone vibe but it's probably just a coincidence. Here's a look at some other rare Sonic the Screensaver / Sega Harmony artwork that is still currently lost. This is an illustration that was featured in a 1995 Sega World Japanese calendar. You can see what looks to be Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Eggman standing in a futuristic looking city with lots of buildings and strobe lights shining around which reminds me a lot of Stardust Speedway. The one building says "Virtual Land" on it while you can see what looks to be some type of Eggman shaped yellow building in the background. You can barely make out what looks to be his eyes and nose. This is an old Japanese Sonic puzzle. The artwork of Sonic was featured in Sonic the Screensaver but what is interesting is that the Jukebox featured on this puzzle is not the same as the one featured in Sonic the Screensaver. There are two different variations of this illustration. This is also a Japanese Sonic puzzle that features Sonic and his animal friends sitting in a forest with a miniature planet earth in the center. I'm sure that there is a lot more never before seen artwork like this that was featured on the Sega Harmony covers as well as on various Japanese merchandise that we have yet to discover. I'm really hoping that one day we'll be able to find good quality pictures or scans of all of these missing artworks or better yet that Sega will officially release all of them someday.
Speaking of which, I think it would be nice to create a page for these kind of artworks on the wiki, where we would compile all available scans, photos, sketches, etc. of said pics. Not sure what we would call it, though. I'm tempted to suggest something like "Harmony covers", but we're not certain they were all used in that magazine, are we? How about something like "Official illustrations by Naoto Ohshima"?
Well spotted! Thanks! What a mystery. I wonder why it wasn't included in Screensaver/Jam. It looks like the small planet appeared out of a treasure chest? --- On a semi-related note, a while back Yasushi Yamaguchi mentioned that around the time he designed Tails, he was told Sonic's favorite car was the Lamborghini Countach. http://info.sonicretro.org/File:SSS_SONIC18.png This illustration from the November 1994 issue of Harmony sure looks like a Countach! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini_Countach
Yuji Naka manga from 4/1999 issue of Jugemu: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1982390578511186&type=3 Edit: According to the manga, Yuji Naka's annual salary was only about 4 million yen ($40,000 USD) when he quit Sega after developing Sonic 1.
Slightly overwhelmed with recent Retro CDN uploads. Here's a top pick: Really is a very simplistic background in proto-Labyrinth Zone. It's really starting to look as if a good chunk of it was just black.
Clearest than ever that those are light shafts coming in from the ceiling, though -- they're even casting a spot light on the rocky wall below.
how on EARTH did I never notice those before In other news, I have backed up all of ORKAL's Sonic 3 videos with annotations: https://mega.nz/#!zO52wQqJ!KeDQRKr5C0BHI9JzQ0jnV9snCcAnUag-WH3pAlQSyWo The annotations are saved as subtitle files, which can be loaded in via your video player (like in VLC). I've found that once I loaded up the file for the first video, the other videos get their captions loaded in automatically.
