That's quite the musical find. The main theme isn't too bad either, but the rest are a bit bleh. This seems to be a common theme with 2D Sega arcade games from the early 90s - clearly all the musical talent was being diverted to the Model 1/2 games.
It still surprises me how much we think ends up on the cutting room floor actually ends up in the recycling bin. That's fucking crazy.
Huh. So it's an SMPS 68k driver with FM drums. Neat. EDIT: Or it's just ADPCM, derp. Still, ADPCM support is interesting.
I don't really know much about music, the correct terminology and such, but bits of track 85 sound a lot like the Sonic Jam credits theme to me. It's not 1:1 or anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SERdCIuiouo&t=19s What do you guys reckon?
Either FM or ADPCM; this would need further investigation. System C2 has an NEC uPD7759 ADPCM chip, which can be used to play one sample at a time. Most C2 games that have samples use the ADPCM chip instead of the YM DAC, since using the YM DAC would take up too much CPU time.
I think that the only appropriate response to track $8B is "OMFG". And I never posted in this topic before. But this, wow.
I think Sega was just in a pick and choose to reuse mood in the 80's and 90's Let's not forget the first stage from Quartet that LITERALLY got used as It Doesn't Matter (1:12)
I'm out of the country visiting family, so I can't disassemble the code right now, but I'm playing around with it in the debugger for now. Here's a quick MAME cheat to set the gameply level: Code (Text): <cheat desc="Set Level"> <parameter min="0" max="255" step="1"/> <script state="change"> <action>maincpu.pb@e0b0d6=param</action> </script> </cheat> edit: Here's another to set your next drop to be a Chaos Emerald Code (Text): <cheat desc="Set next drop to Chaos Emerald"> <script state="on"> <action>maincpu.pw@e0b076=0808</action> </script> </cheat> edit2: P1 score is the dword at 0xe0b0e6. When this maxes out at (decimal) 9999990, you "beat the game" by maxing out your points. In addition, your clear time is stored on the hi score screen.
Uploaded some sprite rips of the game to the SFGHQ discord, Neo suggested I share there here as well. Spoiler I will try to do more as I go along. If anyone has any specific sprite requests you are more than free to ask.
It's hard to see but there's like a single grey pixel beneath their eye...... bridge, thing that constitutes their nose.
Forgive my ignorance of all things MAME, but is it possible to view VRAM while playing this? All I can seem to get to is the palette viewer, and the normal switch between screens does nothing. That said it's great to be able to finally play this thing, although you can unfortunately tell why they didn't push it to full arcade release. That the Sonic 3 Special Stage music is in here is certainly a shock, and it also stands out an absolute mile compared to the other tracks.
After fighting with the cheat engine, I was able to get RyogaMasaki's cheats working. Here's the last few levels of the game! Level 50 - Starlight Zone Level 60 - Fish Background from the Sonic 1 Special Stage Level 70 - Scrap Brain Zone Level 80 - Rings (Game Gear Special Stage?) Level 90 - Chaos Emeralds The game also ends at Level 99! So it's max level or max score. Good luck reaching either. That's everything from the game on the outside. Can't wait for some of you disassembly guys to bust this thing open and find some more stuff. And maybe even get it ported to Genesis somehow.
So, I just downloaded this thing. I am not going to set up MAME because I hate MAME, but that doesn't prevent me from doing some cold research. Once you deinterleave ic32 and ic31, you can find the SMPS data from $20286 to $2649B. It's indeed 68000 SMPS, but it doesn't seem to be 100% compatible with the Sonic 1 flavour. Once injected into Sonic 1, aside from the obvious differences in the drum IDs, the songs start correctly, but they get broken after a while, so I guess that some loop-related coordination flags are different. Still, the mere fact that the songs almost work right off the bat across different games is amazing in itself. The special stage music sounds fine for a while if you mute the DAC, but it goes haywire at the beginning of the fourth verse. I'll edit this post soon. Sadly, I have to go out now, otherwise I'd research those nasty coordination flags. Also, since I currently lack any sort of webspace, and dropbox became stupid a few months ago, I don't really know where I could host my findings />
With the music being there it's a pretty funny coincidence that both this game and blue sphere involve forming outlines around filled areas to remove them.
I haven't looked at this particular game yet, but MAME's graphics viewer doesn't fully support certain games. I know that Flicky, Golden Axe, and Space Harrier, for instance, only support viewing FG / BG graphics and not sprites, while other games (like this one, apparently) don't work at all. I'm not entirely sure why, something to do with the way the graphics are decoded.
Support for graphics viewing is different per driver, but normally it's F4 to bring up the viewer, and Enter to cycle through the modes.
From the ROM header: Code (Text): 00000100 53 45 47 41 20 4d 45 47 41 20 44 52 49 56 45 20 |SEGA MEGA DRIVE | 00000110 28 43 29 53 45 47 41 20 31 39 39 31 2e 4e 4f 56 |(C)SEGA 1991.NOV| 00000120 53 4f 4e 49 43 20 42 52 4f 54 48 45 52 53 20 20 |SONIC BROTHERS | 00000130 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 | | * 00000150 53 4f 4e 49 43 20 42 52 4f 54 48 45 52 53 20 20 |SONIC BROTHERS | 00000160 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 | | * 00000180 4d 4b 20 30 30 30 30 39 39 39 39 2d 30 30 20 20 |MK 00009999-00 | 00000190 4a 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 |J | 000001a0 00 00 00 00 00 07 ff ff 00 ff 00 00 00 ff ff ff |................| 000001b0 52 41 f8 20 00 20 00 01 00 20 ff ff 4d 4f 53 45 |RA. . ... ..MOSE| 000001c0 47 41 30 32 2e 31 31 30 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 |GA02.110 | 000001d0 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 | | * 000001f0 4a 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 |J | I took a look at another C2 game (Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car), and it did *not* have a Mega Drive header. I'll need to check a few more C2 games to determine if the header is actually supposed to be there or not.