I think that it only affects the bg and sprites layer because the animation is loaded in the FG layer, no? I guess it was going to be used where there were no objects in the foreground (like a menu, maybe?).
Some sort of aborted screensaver-like function, perhaps? Although why an hour, most old games that had a screensaver kicked in long before an hour.
Unused Chibi Shinobi actions! From his jump table, he's currently programmed to do the following: Code (ASM): ROM:0000F3E4 Obj_EasterEggPlayer_Tbl: ; DATA XREF: Obj_EasterEggPlayero ROM:0000F3E4 ROM:0000F3E4 ; FUNCTION CHUNK AT ROM:0000F54A SIZE 00000034 BYTES ROM:0000F3E4 ROM:0000F3E4 bra.w Obj_EasterEggPlayer_Init ROM:0000F3E8 ; --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROM:0000F3E8 bra.w Obj_EasterEggPlayer_Idle ROM:0000F3EC ; --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROM:0000F3EC bra.w Obj_EasterEggPlayer_Walk ROM:0000F3F0 ; --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROM:0000F3F0 bra.w Obj_EasterEggPlayer_Jump ROM:0000F3F4 ; --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROM:0000F3F4 bra.w Obj_EasterEggPlayer_WalkInPlace ; unused ROM:0000F3F8 ; --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROM:0000F3F8 bra.w Obj_EasterEggPlayer_Throw ; unused ROM:0000F3FC ; --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROM:0000F3FC bra.w Obj_EasterEggPlayer_Sit ; unused Three of these go unused because there's no way you can make them happen in game without modifying the object's action id manually in RAM. Here's Obj_EasterEggPlayer_WalkInPlace (04): Here's Obj_EasterEggPlayer_Throw (05, no projectile though so maybe it's not finished yet): Here's Obj_EasterEggPlayer_Sit (06, cute!) I'm going through the Smash Pack proto to find more stuff and currently there are maybe a few unused objects in the game. I can actually use Exodus now to rip the background from Stage 8-3 to see what's going on. Stay tuned.
Ooo, here's something huge. The ending is impossible to unlock in the prototype without hacking but it's there. For the moment, I found the bad ending. And there's one huge change they made to it in comparison to the final. http://I.imgur.com/l4ry2yG.gifv (Final for comparison) It looks like they originally wanted Joe to die, but was changed so that it was Joe's bride that dies (which makes sense, since if you were to fail in saving her she wouldn't just automatically free herself). The main subroutine for this ending is programmed to loop endlessly, so there's no going back to the Sega screen once this loads. I wonder if the final boss is different as a result of this ending... (edit: btw, coincidentally, the easter egg programming precedes the bad ending code. interesting...)
Wow! Revenge of Shinobi is besides Sonic and Streets of Rage among my favorite Megadrive game (I even based my SORmaker mod on it mostly!) and your discovery is huge indeed! As far as I know, Ancient planned to have the real final boss (after the Neo Zeed chief) actually be Joe's sensei! (the very same person we see in RoS intro). So I guess either you managed to survive a battle to the death or die with the boss while Naoko managed to escape. Or maybe Joe uses Minjin to destroy both the boss and the cell, which would explain why Naoko kept her sword. Thank you very much for your work anyway!
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!? :O I guess there's no leftovers of that ending in the final version? EDIT: I mean the graphics, the bad ending itself is obviously there. =P
Hmm... How interesting... I wonder if any of the Final product copies have this, as we know REV 00 doesn't seem to have it.
Sega-16 did an article on the development of Revenge of the Shinobi. Check this out: So I guess the mini game I discovered was probably meant to be a bonus game that got cut?
Kind of a thread derail, but this article seems to suggest that Wonder Boy in Monster Land's original version was the SMS one rather than the arcade. Am I not remembering correctly, or is this not the first time this is hinted at? Maybe something similar was said back when the Vintage Collection version was released...?
Sorry for the necro bump. Two people I know have tried to locate the ending you found and have been unable to. I know you said that the ending programming comes after the minigame code, but even with that info, they are unable to find it. Do you have any pointers to where they should start looking?
Thanks for the bump as I didn't know about this Shinobi mini-game before today and I'm super glad I just saw it lol. I should check if any of the devs are on Twitter (I don't really know the Shinobi team besides Ohba and I've never looked into him much). I'd love to see if anyone would be willing to share more about what this was intended to be.
No prob. Still holding out hope that evilhamwizard provides details on how to access the unused ending! *edit* Someone from the romhacking forums was able to find the ending and provide a patch. He said the subroutine is at "F5B8". Curiously, loading the unused ending with the patch he provided doesn't show all the glitchy graphics seen in the ending GIF evilhamwizard posted.
Ryuichi Nishizawa is really, really talkative on twitter and loves to discuss wonderboy. I'm not on twitter anymore, but if someone tweets to @wonderboywild I'm sure he'd be happy to clear this up, he's basically answered any other question I've ever had about wonder boy. FWIW I don't believe at all that the SMS version was the original. If it was, it would stand to reason that the Arcade version would have received everything in the SMS version, but it doesn't. There is actually quite a bit of SMS-exclusive content, notably the ending and the bonus round in the deserted town that can be skipped.
