FBZ act 1 Map FBZ act 2 Map FBZ act 2 BG (includes path leading to the boss) The art for the secret big ring areas is different than final.
HOLY SHIT at the PC tracks for Sonic 3 possibly being the original songs for those zones all along. That's my biggest takeaway from this personally, given not only the whole MJ music fiasco; but also because I prefer the original/PC CN and LB tracks over the final tracks we got. Also really glad we actually have the original Genesis/MIDI instrumentations of the melodies. The Credits song is the one benefits the best with the original instrumentation, by far IMO. The fact Sonic 3 originally toyed with a proto-Drop Dash well before Mania came along (and by pure coincidence too, according to Whitehead on Twitter) is absolutely mesmerizing as well. Can't commend the efforts of those who were able to obtain these prototypes enough.
Kinda sloppy video I threw together showing the presence of the drowning double-death bug existing in the 11-3-1993 prototype (Had to use debug to get to a platform where Sonic could actually fall off and die - seems when I tried this anywhere else, Sonic would rebound off the spikes, drown, then hit solid tiles, and stop, hindering whether or not I could test if this double-death was doable at this point in the game's development)
A small detail I noticed that I didn't see mentioned in this thread yet: this prototype demonstrates why, in the final game, Knuckles' palette is different when he appears together with Sonic (as described here). In the prototype, the HUD turns green each time.
Let us not forget that "prototype" of Sonic 3 in December 1993. Literally one byte difference with the Feb 1994 copy, basically identical for all intents and purposes. For the alleged Nov 3 date, this is probably a bit out of date compared to the internal state the game was in on the workstations. At the very least, let's not pretend that there was a giant gap between this and February of the next year. Merely next month and the game was basically identical to the final.
It seems like they were originally going to handle the airship collapse by moving the path, and not the platform. That would likely have been a lot of trouble for something they could just achieve by moving the platform instead - which is why they do that in the final. Also likely explains why the Hang Mobile's position was changed. If the path moved, and the player would not reach the boss co-ordinates until after the path has finished moving, then the Hang Mobile would be fine where it was.
So I mentioned on the Discord that some of the songs seem to include a ton of extra instrument patches that go unused. As it turns out, many of the songs are "unoptimized" meaning that they don't rewrite bars into loops and instead plays everything "straight". It's almost as if the prototype is based on a loose conversion of some other sequencing data, and the final version is hand optimized for space. For example, check out Hydrocity Act 2. It sounds similar to the final, but it's actually very different: Proto: https://pastebin.com/aZrqRVTA Final: https://pastebin.com/qVPxQ4wV The proto version contains 34 instrument patches but only uses a few of them. The prototype does not take advantage of looping any pattern of sequencing data and instead just plays everything as is.
Yeah, I get the feeling we're going to need an expert to fix up these official MD versions of the PC tracks to be good. Valleybell, you have a job to do. :P
The last piece of Nemesis art I'm not sure of is this. I'm not sure what palette it's supposed to use, MGZ looks best, and the tiles don't fit together very easily. Anyway, Here's a folder of all the uncompressed nemesis art, with names. Not sure if it will be helpful to anyone?
btw, if people are going to bring up the whole mj timeline/involvement stuff - i think it's important to bring this up since I don't think it was brought up before here and I think it's very important to watch. 46:04 The Moscow part of the Dangerous World Tour was September 15, 1993. There was a tape consisting of 41 tracks made by pretty much everyone else besides Michael that was worked on for a "solid month". From the sounds of it, Michael hadn't heard the progress from Brad Buxer and his team at this point. And he most likely would've given final approval to send what was on tape to SEGA. Given that he was on tour for most of late 93, it's possible this demo tape was sent to SEGA at least some time after September. To me at least it doesn't seem like the "MJ" cues were even present until very late in development. This prototype seems to confirm that at least somewhere toward the late stage of development, that's when they began implementing the Brad Buxer stuff.
I dunno. Carnival Night and the Credits theme I think work with little or no changes, they seem developed enough to be (presumably) the final/intended tracks before the MJ replacements kicked in. For the most part I imagine some instrument additions/replacements here and there would be enough to do the trick for most of the tracks, nothing too extensive is required. Ice Cap Act 1 feels like the only outlier due to how lacking in instruments it is.
Seems there's lots to be documented that's not even been touched yet. Lava Reef is in there but nothing's been said how to access it. I heard something about a ring tossing move or something, too? This topic should be getting attention for some days to come.
I've been playing it on real hardware using an Everdrive, here are my findings i haven't seen mentioned yet General Note: At any time if the sound driver screws up, you can pause and un-pause to stop it hurting your ears. Ring SFX appears to only come from the right channel If you leave the demo running, it will repeat with sonic's death until a game over, then return to the sega screen. Tails flight is silent, doesn't appear to have a time limit, and happens in 'bursts'. Tails can carry sonic underwater and can lift him out of it, but is slower. Flight animation used. Tails appears to come closer after waiting when an act starts No flashing effect on any shields The bubble shield animation direction changes when you jump, E: confirmed doesn't happen in S3 Invincibility stars are glitched, show bubble shield graphics Ending invincibility brings back the level audio, but getting a 1 up or a bubble while almost drowning does not The sound effect to notify you you're about to start drowning is different The dynamic loading between underwater and above water in some levels has a visible frame lag that causes the music and everything to skip a frame, sometimes. You can get sucked into the wall on moving spikes by standing on them Unused tiles? In red? . Moving pistons? Carnival Night There's a sound effect for grabbing onto and releasing from the vertical mesh tumblers Bumpers use a different sound when struck There's a yellow barrier that closes to prevent falling into the tubes that fire you upwards, but it tails is underneath it you can continually fall into it, in this area The sound coming out of a yellow pipe is different, but this may need to be checked because of the common sound issues CNZ Act 2, the water table moves up and down, pretty sure this is static in the final EDIT: to elaborate from below: I mean that if you just sit in the water, the water level moves up and down like in Aquatic Ruin S2, where in the final it just sits still. CNZ1 and 2 act music seem to loop... fine... on hardware. CNZ2 loop isn't fantastic but its not out of beat. (On stream people seemed to think it was looping badly?) Just a note, CNZ2 has musical 'trills' that sound like HCZ2's, making them sound more thematic to the rest of the soundtrack than the (probable) MJ version. Hydrocity The bubble shield doesn't stop you drowning Jumping from the arm conveyors in the water gives you a ton of height Hitting the turtle badnik locks gives you lots of bounce force backwards (Try spindashing into one, they act like Marble Garden bumpers) Angel Island Miniboss rockets have a more realistic sound effect when they launch. In the final, this is a comical pop kind of sound. When tails first appears in the game, he has a sweeping motion where you can grab on and be taken to the top section without any control from player 2 AIZ1 part two layout is quite different, and shorter. I think there's a unique melody in the middle, not just instruments being different. Also this appears to be the only song that's 'slower' , so I don't think the playback speed is a glitch. You can hit a yellow spring and catch a rope to swing upside down There's a small cave section with a spring where the water table doesn't line up properly Sound Test One could guess from the sound test order (Matches what we can see in the level select) that the level order is AIZ, HCZ, MGZ, CNZ, FBZ, ICZ, LBZ, MVZ, SZ, LRZ, HP (If it was planned for vanilla S3?), SSZ, DEZ, Doomsday, as all songs are present. SE40 is in between the shield spawn sound effects, but I don't recognise it, there's already one for the lightning shield, and for the lightning shield action, so I'm not sure what one this is. Appears that D8 and D9 are leftover from Sonic 2, after that the slots are empty 9F, A0, A1 are Mushroom Valley SFX EDIT 26: Credits (PC) 28: "No Way? No way!" - Used as the continue music in S3 2D: Competition mode (PC) 2E: Completely Unused
Sounds 26, 28, 2D and 2E that I'm not to sure of, 26 could be the earlier version of the ending of Sonic 3. That's all I have to say sadly. D8 doesn't sound like it is from Sonic 2, D9 is also from Sonic 2 it is the same the final version of Sonic 3 when you get a Super Emerald as well as when the Chaos Emeralds get "converted" to Super Emeralds in Hidden Palace. One thing I should mention that the 2 player levels is that you can keep going after completing 5 laps. The game keeps on going but the word "GOAL" would still appear on the screen for a few seconds and the timer would stop depending which player finishes first. You can make the counter go up to 9 laps then it would reset to 0. There's also two "map" indicators as an arrow on the middle of the screen to show the player's progress on the level. This feature would eventually be scrapped. EDIT: when 5 laps are been passed, the indicator sprite would glitch for some reason I don't really know. Pretty sure that the players weren't supposed to go more than 5 laps. Another Difference is that many songs would use different instrument patches compared to the final, this is apparent in Chrome Gadget and Hydrocity when they would use a different patch instead of the "synth brass" instrument which instead sounds like a low pitched trumpet. Flying Battery's Act 1 boss is missing the sound effect when it gets destroyed. In Act 1 of Flying Battery, where the 1up monitor is, if you jump up and hold right against the wall, you clip back to the platform above for some reason, this works similar to the "level wrap" glitch in Sonic 1 and 2.
So, A while back, drx posted some unused palettes for HCZ that predate this prototype, but this screencap caught my eye. I noticed that the palette resembled the palette that the exact same type of platform used in Sonic Mania. So I put together a little comparison... The left is how it appears in the final and in the prototype. The middle is how it appears in the unused palette from the prototype. The right is from Sonic Mania. I'm picking up more similarities between the middle and the right than the left and the right... Now, this could be a coincidence, but to me, this seems to suggest that Sonic Mania referenced the older palette for their version of this platform - suggesting that the Mania dev team had access to them.
Sound 2E is unused (but is in) the S&K PC version, and here it’s also unused. This MegaDrive version is one of my favourite theme songs from any game ever, and I’m disappointed it wasn’t used. It’s either an alternative ending theme of some sort, or it’s an unused Super / Hyper theme. It’s too heroic for a competition level or bonus game, so that’s my theory. Imagine zipping through the stages to it, that would be so, so cool. For reference, here it is again (17:30): Also, it’s distinctively Jun Senoue sounding, and someone on YouTube mentioned that it shares similarities with ‘Never Turn Back’ from Shadow The Hedgehog. Jun was instrumental in that game’s musical direction too.
