I would actually vote against this - there was that time when that Sonic 1 prototype hoax was going around, and people were directly contacting Yuji Naka about it. It was uncomfortable reading.
I suspect that showing the game at retro expos before releasing the ROMs may have been part of the deal with whoever sent the board to Shoutime, so I wouldn't rule out the possibility of seeing it emulated in the (not so far?) future. + - Unless we're in another Marble Man situation. In any case, the ROMs have already been dumped as somebody pointed out before, so it's very unlikely that they'll get lost now. Not from bit-rot, anyway.
Here's a great big bump: This game is actually quite a lot of fun! It's very different because you're not trying to match colors, rather you're attempting to make lines that connect to the sides or form some kind of loop. Still trying to work out combos, and as you can see, I start to get the hang of it a little bit more by the end. MAJOR thanks to GerbilSoft for compiling the version of MAME that supports this thing. Cheers bro!
About time we got some clean footage of it. Just from looking at the playthrough, the way to get combos look a bit confusing and tricky.
A magical fairy dropped this off. Music rip (including tracks that go unreferenced in the sound test) There's a nice surprise in there.
This is way juicier than a proper Sonic the Fighters debug, holy shit EDIT1: HOLY. MOTHERFUCKING. SHIT. 8B. EIGHT MOTHERFUCKING BEE.
It definitely stands out among the other songs, which I feel are incredibly forgetful. Either something is up, or they knew 8B was a winner that they had to use -somewhere-.
Wow. Definitely unexpected. I absolutely love that stuff like this is still being discovered. Thanks for the video for easy listening.
Just in case you were wondering, the Special Stage music is in the game, it starts up at level 40. Dunno what's past that since 46 is currently my max. Kinda hard to make out, but here's where some footage of it playing.
That's really interesting -- considering how the instruments sound identical to the S3 track (save for the DAC, anyway) it's quite likely that the pool of music Iizuka mentioned in the Sonic Jam strategy guide was already in SMPS format, ready to be thrown in the game. This was not obvious to me until now.
As a technical sidenote: Sonic 3 uses the SMPS Z80 sound driver. SegaSonic Bros, which runs on System C2, can't use SMPS Z80 because there is no Z80 on System C2.
