ROM Hack Lost-and-Found

this build of Sonic Thrash is also missing.

 

I believe this is the build you're looking for:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H4243W9OjJqTKbm_lRpkg_oUYYzKQyog/view?usp=sharing

I also have another build, this one after the hack's reboot and subsequent shift to Sonic 1:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tiiCPAmSpABPqmROlZu7zrLzJPUIzKYI/view?usp=sharing
(this one is unfinished btw)

 

SSRG has a similar thread here, so, if you're looking for lost ROMs, that's also a good place to look.

 

Big thanks! Been locking for it for ages.

 

I was debating on whether or not I should upload this here, especially because it is awful; it is basically my personal equivalent to that one "Lime Python" hack being full of stolen code and just completely broken. But, since it has been years since it came out, I think it is time I share this masterpiece of shit with you all.

Set zone ID to 07 if you want to play an unfinished Bridge Zone.

 

I remember playing that Sonic 2 hack by Cinossu back in the day. I'll have a hunt through my archives, maybe it's tucked away somewhere.

Speaking of lost rom hacks, I'm not sure if my Sonic CD 409 beta hoax survived the ages. Anyone know if that's up anywhere?

 

YouTube video with download link.

 

Ah! The 409 hoax! I remember playing that on my old Windows XP laptop because I had difficulty properly getting Debug Mode working in the 510 build if I remember right. The discussion of the 409 hoax does remind me of another hack I saw ages ago that's been eating away at me for years but never had a good place to discuss it. It's probably a long shot and I have no evidence on hand that actually proves this really 'exists', but here goes:

Spoiler: Description of a Sonic 3 ROM Hack Hoax I saw ages ago (Spoliered since it's a bit long)

Back in like 2008 or 2009, I found a video from a YouTuber who played through a ROM hack of Sonic 3 that was disguising itself as a legitimate early build of the game. The author of the video was pretty confident that it was a hoax, but played through it anyways. They were very open about it in the video description to the point I had trouble accepting this was something the video author themselves set up for attention. I'm curious if there are any actual records of this hack existing?

The hack as far as I remember only let the player play through Angel Island Act 1 (and maybe Act 2?) before force resetting the player back to the title screen after the Act was cleared (using a fade-in/fade-out). I don't recall any level design differences, and I believe the hack also removed the HUD and Title Cards in their entirety (or dummied them out). The hack also replaced Sonic's sprite with the one from Sonic 2, and restored the unused 'surfboard' introduction. I remember that really impressing me since that seemed a bit harder to properly restore back during that time period. I don't remember if Tails was following Sonic or not, or if there were any notable differences with the File Select
screen. It might have forced the player to always default to Sonic Alone.

What was even weirder is that the hack was using music from Sonic Crackers/Knuckles' Chaotix. I don't recall what tracks were used, but I vaguely recall Angel Island using something that sounded like a heavily corrupted/awkward Door Into Summer. The video author was open about this and addressed it in the description, saying they were equally as confused. I remember the sound effects lining up with the video too, so I don't think it's a case where the author muted the video.

I'm almost positive I didn't dream this up at all because I remember rewatching the video several times on different days. However, the author of the video never provided a download link and claims they got it from a defunct website I believe? That or they couldn't recall where it was from in the video description and never provided a mirror. I cannot find this video now for the life of me and the last time I got curious about it, I couldn't find any proof at all that this hack (or the video) existed anywhere. I think it was just called 'Sonic 3 BETA Hoax(?) - Playthrough (READ DESCRIPTION!)' or something kinda generic like that, and that's become harder to search for since we now have an actual in-development build in the wild.

A long shot, but does this video sound familiar at all anyone? I swear it sounds like I'm making this up, but I'd love closure in at least finding the original video. I'm fairly confident it was recorded with Unregistered Hypercam 2 with Kega running the ROM. The hack just seems a bit too 'advanced' for the time period to not make some sort of splash over here, but I can't recall any obvious red flags when it came to video editing. I assume a ROM doesn't actually exist at all (perhaps it was made private), but anything related to what I'm describing would be satisfying to see again.

EDIT (01/30/2024): Actually ended up checking my old XP laptop. Amusingly, not only did I still have the 409 build available, but I think I found some other hacks that have poor documentation or were lost to time. Here are what are probably the most noteworthy ones:

• A Rick Roll hack by Cinossu. No freaking clue where this was originally released. Starts the player out at Green Hill Zone Act 3 and ends with a boss that force kills Sonic while playing a Genesis cover of Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up'. As far as I can tell, I don't think this was archived on their YouTube channel or anything?:
  
  
• A really old Sonic 2 'Beta 3' hoax that I found on YouTube ages ago. No clue who the author was and this was already uploaded to an itch.io page (along with a reupload of the 409 hoax), but it was made well before the CENSOR prototype was rediscovered by Hidden Palace. The biggest noteworthy thing about the hack is that it intentionally removes segments of Hidden Palace Zone's background to make it appear as if the developers were in the process of removing this level. Again, not sure who the author of this was? Any notes on that would be lovely!
• Sonic 1 Adventures v1.5. Can't find much information about this hack either. Has at least one edited level and a weird instant spin-dash move activated by pressing A or B:
  
  
• Sonic the Hedgehog - Purple Island by Spyro52. A hack with an intentional 'overwhelmingly purple' aesthetic that has some cute level design edits:
  
  
• A weird ROM just titled 'timeparadox'. It seems to be regular Sonic 1, but pressing A force freezes all object behavior in the current level (Rings stop spinning, Badniks do not properly animate, etc.).
• Sonic Fantasy by 'Jof'(?). Has a couple of level design edits and a couple of edits to Sonic's sprites. Not sure if the author name here is correct:

A lot of neat stuff! Sadly the way I organized these ROMs is incredibly messy. There's a couple of personal hacks I made when I was really young that were just palette swaps/messy sprite edits with one or two poor Green Hill Zone level design edits. I might have re-named a couple of the ROMs which makes things messier. I can share screenshots of the whole archive and can obviously upload any of the ROMs here to my own personal MEGA account if need be. Just would like to confirm if there's more information or if I'm mistaken about things (Cinossu did save the Rick Roll hack).

 

Your wish is my command! I left a majority of this folder untouched, so there's a lot of duplicate/unnecessary personal junk in here. Again, I should preface that this laptop was something I used back in 2004 to like 2010, so I was pretty young. A lot of this is super messy. I can clean it out later if need be, but I did try to make a list of every hack in here:

Spoiler: List of Hacks from my old ROM Folder

- Mr. Needlemouse (Green Hill Zone only Demo)
- Mr. Needlemouse (Slightly later demo?)
- Sonic - The Lost Land 2 (V2)
- Sonic Delta 0 V0.03
- Sonic 2 Delta 4 V0.01
- Sonic 2 Delta V0.23
- Sonic and the Secret Extended Edition (Version 4.2)
- Sonic 1 Harder Levels v005 - Beta 2-
- Sonic 2 - S3 Edition (Pretty sure this is the last public build)
- Amy Rose in Sonic 1 by Kilometers Prower (S2 Hack)
- Ashura's Journey 1 and 2 (My work)
- Atomic Sonic
- Sonic 2 - The Night by campbellsonic
- CarrascoZX0's Sonic the Hedgehog ZX (GHZ/FIZ Demo)
- Robotnik's Revenge by Centurey (Not to be confused with the boss rush hack of the same name).
- ChimpoQ!
- Metal Sonic the Robot (Also mine)
- Sonic the HedgehogDL205 Edition (Mine -was named after my old YouTube user handle)
- Eggman in Sonic 1
- Sawnik Teh Hedgehog by Jimmy (Not sure what revision this is)
- Sonic Fantasy by Jof
- Kid Sonic! (Also mine)
- Knuckles in Sonic 1 (by Stealth)
- Mecha Sonic in Sonic 1 (Proof of Concept hack)
- Metal Sonic in Sonic 3 (Likely my work)
- Not So Super Sonic 2 (version 2)
- Sonic 1 Oergomized by Oerg866 (November 7th 2008 build)
- Ray the Flying Squirrel in Sonic 1 4.0
- Sonic 2 Advanced Edit
- Sonic 1 Extended Edition
- Sonic 1 Adventures v1.5
- Sonic 1 Alpha Hoax (?) (File name S1ALPHA.BIN - Force starts the player in Green Hill Act 1 with Debug enabled and freezes pretty shortly into the level - Don't remember a thing about this.)
- Sonic 1 Bouncy Edition
- s1built.bin (Unknown revision of Sonic and the Secret Extended Edition - has new title screen and HUB, but no selectable characters)
- Sonic Genesis (Genesis) V2
- Sonic 1 Mobius Adventures
- Sonic 1 Neko Edition v1.11
- Sonic Unlimited by shadowbeasts (NO clue what this is - isn't titled like my other work and only seems to edit the Sega logo)
- Sonic 1 Boss Arena (pretty sure this is mine)
- Sonic 1 - Mini Boss Hack by Cinossu Marc (the Rick Roll hack - Level Select and Debug are intentionally disabled)
- Sonic 1 - Return to the Origin v2
- Sonic 1 Beta Hoax
- Sonic 1 Easy Edition
- Sonic 1 Megamix v2.0
- Sonic 1 Megamix v3.0
- Sonic 1 Oergomized v5.0 - Hacking Contest 2009 build
- Sonic 1 Pixel Perfect - Beta 1
- Sonic 1 Plus [v0.1]
- Sonic 1 Remastered v.1.1
- Sonic 1 True Blue Edition (Mine)
- Sonic 1 With Fries - Public Demo 1
- Sonic 2 - Delta Enabled by Esrael(?)
- Sonic 2 - MTAM The Perfect Existance
- Sonic 2 Delta - Versin 3
- Sonic 2 Delta III V0.2(Hack)
- Sonic 2 Delta v0.24 - Demo Release
- Sonic 2 Extra (Pretty sure this is my work?)
- Sonic 2 Megamix
- Sonic 2 SMB Edition (Also mine - There's a lot of rubbish in here folks!)
- Sonic 2 Beta 3 Hoax (Author unknown - Any information would be appreciated!)
- Sonic 3 Early Beta (Hoax) (Likely mine and is not the hack I was talking about earlier)
- Sonic in Choatix
- Sonic in Paynt
- Sonic the Hedgehog - Mecha Island (Also mine)
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - Aluminum Edition
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - Lost Level Ruins (Pretty sure this is mine)
- Sonic the Hedgehog Plus (v.0.2)
- Sonic the Hedgehog Remix WIP - Green Hill (???)
- Sonic Uno v0.3a
- Sonic 1 Brother Trouble v1.0
- Sonic 1 True Blue Edition (Mine)
- Sonic 1 With Fries - Public Build 5
- Sonic 2 Advanced Edit
- Sonic 2 Homing Attack
- Sonic 2 Recreation Demo
- Sonic 3D - No Flickies
- Sonic 1 - WTF Lame Edition
- Sonics spooky adventure (Mine)
- Sonic the Hedgehog - Purple Island by Spyro52
- Sonic the Hedgehog - Westside Island
- Tails in Sonic 1 v1.5
- Tails in Sonic 1 v2.1.1
- THE NEW Metal Sonic in Sonic 1 (Mine I'm pretty sure)
- Thorn's Sonic 2 Retro Remix (Not sure what build this is)
- Time Paradox (Press A at any point to freeze all level objects - No clue who made this one)
- Zippy the Chao (really old collaboration hack with my brother I made when we were young)

Found a couple of more interesting things in this folder I missed the first time around. A really old Sonic 1 'alpha' hoax of some kind is in here (as S1ALPHA.BIN). I'm almost positive this isn't my work since there are some kinda cool assembly edits here (which was way beyond my scope at the time). It force skips the opening logos/title screen, has no HUD, enables debug mode by default, and lets you navigate Green Hill Act 1 up until a bit past the first Buzz Bomber before freezing. Sadly I remember little else about this or where I got it from. I assume there are more differences if you force the game to start on another Zone or Act? It might have been from a YouTube video as well.

If anyone can put a name to some of these hacks (namely the Sonic 1 and the Sonic 2 Beta 3 Hoax), I'd greatly appreciate it.

EDIT: Yeah there's no way the Sonic 1 'Alpha' hoax is my work. It does a couple of other interesting things after I looked into it further:

• Sonic's unused 'greyscale death sprite' is used if you use debug mode to kill Sonic by going offscreen.
• Sonic's generic hurt/knockback sprite is animated and has an additional frame of animation. Pretty cool!

 

It is?

Also you could find a LOT of ancient s1 and s2 romhacks on the Emu-land. There were rar archives for these games, and inside of it you could find several revisions and old hacks (like Knuckles in S1 by Hivebrain, or Amy in S1 from 200..4? Idk). Now they have more complicated system and you can download just one of the final roms instead of rar archive with 100500 outdated hacks, but I still have some of these hacks on my laptop.

 

Romhustler has a whole smorgasbord of Sonic ROM variants: although as a kid I usually just picked regular Sonic and never actually did bother with the other ROMs unless I was on Sonic Retro's wiki.



Might be of interest for some of you folks.

 

Wow, I never saw a Sonic hack in 2003 where it had Amy Rose in it. I used to play a Sonic 2 hack where it had Amy Rose back in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, or 2008 and she runs super fast (not the Sonic 1 hack one though). If anyone can find that hack it should look like this.

 

Ha-ha! This is it! Thank you so much! I knew I didn't dream this up at all but could not find any information on it. For a hoax, this seems decently impressive for the time period just on the account of the surfboard intro being restored (and the Chaotix music). Honestly really happy to just see it again.

Again, I have difficulty believing this is something the author made for attention just on the account of the transparency they display in the video description. I'm curious if any actual public ROM ever existed or if the truth is more complicated than that.

It also turns out the Sonic 1 Alpha Hoax was done by drx ages ago and is still available on Hacking CulT. Not sure how I wasn't able to find this information the first time around. My bad! This hack wasn't really lost at all then. I'm still unsure as to how to bypass the freeze after the first Buzz Bomber. I found a very old YouTube playthrough of the hack that's in rather low quality that somehow bypassed it, but trying the hack on both BlastEm and Kega produces a freeze.

I still can't find much information about TimeParadox or Purple Island however. TimeParadox might have been an example hack I swiped from someone on SSRG? If anyone wants any of the hacks I uploaded in that folder removed lemme know.