Amazing stuff here! I still remember some of this stuff's original release through Sonic Database like it was yesterday, but it's great to see even more has been unearthed after all this time! Of particular note - I love that the assets appear to contain actual Digitizer art for "Bee"! it's always looked so different to "Wasp" (aka Buzzer in the final) to me that I've long wondered why we represent it on the wiki with the early "Wasp" Digitizer art. (Also, holy crap - that's a LOT of extra Digitizer art for "Wasp" among the sketchy sprites. Combined with the existing pencil/paper designs, it seems like we now have a really clear picture of the development of that particular enemy...!) Also, it's nice to finally have some form of colour reference for Bubbler/Mother Bubbler/Ball etc - even though this may have changed had they made it further into development, it's nice to finally see what the artist's intention was. Of course, the absolute star of the show is definitely the unexpected surprise of assets from the original Sonic the Hedgehog...! Sounds likely these were provided as reference to the Sonic 2 artists - wonder if they did the same with level art too? If so, that may finally explain how Green Hill assets appeared in Brenda Ross' desert stage artwork...! The proto Ball Hog is interesting as it's not only our first clear look at it, but it's also a later revision than what we've previously seen in the existing prototype footage - that version hopped from foot to foot on the spit when idle, whereas this one jumps in place similar to the final Ball Hog. The colours used are also interesting - as well as the differing blues, some of the enemies seem to have been drawn in weird blends of colours, such as four shades of blue along with three yellow shades. Splats even has three green shades, which makes it appear very different to how it does using the final game's palettes. Of particular note is Burrobot - the use of yellow rather than red really makes it look like it's wearing a more traditional 'construction worker' getup. Perhaps it should have been assigned the second palette in the final game so this detail wouldn't be lost? Anyway, amazing stuff - kudos to all involved in ripping and preserving it~!
And suddenly connections click in my brain, I never knew this. =P Fantastic work on dumping these disks & doing these scans, thank you to all involved! Some of the content isn't that new thanks to Iceknight 10 years ago but the rest of it is fascinating - the fact we even managed to get a Sonic 1 prototype sprite out of it is insane!
Help me out here: https://retrocdn.net/File:Tom_payne_raw_disks.zip Made a mirror of the raw disks on Retro CDN. The contents need to be spread across Sonic Retro and Sega Retro. We'll want the raw images (even if there's tons of wasted space) - I can work some wiki magic at a later date to make it presentable. I'd grab all of ICEKnights mirrors but is that everything? Also if possible we'd want to make a note of the original file names. I don't want to leave anything behind, and I don't want to upload edited graphics unless it's explicitly marked as such.
This Ball Hog also has a quick moment where it opens its hatch (Also similar to the final game.), which I happened to miss when I first looked at it. (Probably due to my sheer excitement of all this!) ^o^
Hey everyone, this is Rich Whitehouse. I wrote up a quick spec for the Digitizer System III format last night, which is located here: http://richwhitehouse.com/pubdata/dig3_spec.txt This should give you everything you need to export this data into a variety of formats and dissect it. There are a couple things I hadn't gotten around to circling back on, but nothing that should really affect treatment of this particular data set. It would be nice to have more data to help verify some of the assumptions, too. The latest build of my program, Noesis, also supports these files: http://richwhitehouse.com/index.php?content=inc_projects.php&showproject=91 By default, it will export each piece into an individual image. For this mode, I recommend targeting a multi-image format like .tspr in the export dialog. It will spit out a bunch of png files referenced by a single tspr file. If you want to keep the palette intact in those files, you can add -pngpal to the "advanced options" when exporting. Since each piece has its own palette in the DIG3, each file will also retain the palette for that piece. To export all of the pieces into a single canvas using their offsets, you can use -dig3canv in the advanced options as well.
Rich Whitehouse posted the Digitizer spec on twitter. I'll whip something up tomorrow to export PNG with indexed color.
Ok. Looking at the graphics and stuff, is it possible that the B-Bomb tech tiles are Genocide/Cyber City zone?!?!?!? And good lord it's amazing to see more badniks being preserve. To think that in 2019, more Sonic 2 unused contents are still coming. Who would've thought S2 was going to be such a big ambition sequel.
Wasn't it confirmed at some point that the artwork made for Cyber City would inspire artwork for B-bomb before ending up in Spinball as The Machine? Edit: yeah, fixed wording Either way, there's definitely similar tiles in the Tech World that are in The Machine
From the Sonic 1 art, the water splash is also interesting; as well as the recognisable splash, there's also a smaller, angled one. Possibly intended for use with the water-surface skimming mechanic seen in one of the early level concept drawings? Also, unable to compare with the final at the mo, but am I right in thinking at least one of the explosion variants is also unused?
Now this was a great treat to see! I kind of wish some of those badniks were used in the final game, like the frog and of course Bubbler/Bubbler's Mother too. I'm glad the pill bug badnik made it's way into Sonic CD and the final product looks better. Also Spinny and Spike looks like it would have been a fun game, same with b-bomb too. (I honestly wasn't aware of these unreleased games until now, though they've been documented before in the past. :v: ) The stupid gif was hilarious though! xD
I took the liberty of exporting all of the DIG3 files to paletted PNG files with -dig3mincanv -pngpal: http://richwhitehouse.com/pubdata/tom_payne_sti_png256.zip The canvas is expanded to 320x224, which seems to be the standard. All of the original palettes and indices are intact. For multi-part files, where multiple palettes are stored for each part, I'm intentionally only collapsing palettes if every entry in them is fully identical. So you'll see duplicate colors in the palette, with each part's palette laid out sequentially. Areas of the canvas which are never written to reference palette index 0xFF, as none of the files go that high. This allows you to change that palette entry's color to conveniently change the background color, which by default is black. Oh, and on the note of digging through images for deleted data in the unreferenced sectors - I did check a couple of the disks already. I found very slightly older versions of the material we already have, and a dig3 version of INTRO.LBM. The INTRO.LBM on the disk was produced by dig2lbm, you can tell because the colors aren't expanded to their full range. (viewing the dig3 source in Noesis will show you better color contrast to the converted lbm) That said, I didn't go searching for dig3 headers in all of the disks, or start searching for scrapped lbm headers or other likely candidates. Many of the disks look to have never been written more than once, but there is still a bit of extra digging to be done.
Ah boo, and here I was hoping I could contribute something. Ah well. Thanks for putting it out there quickly. I'm halfway done writing my own tool, may as well finish for the fun of it.
Top stuff! Wiki editors: I have this full set uploaded and ready on the server. I just need one of my orange colleagues to flick a switch (hint hint). Someone still needs to sort out the Spinny & Spike stuff, and the Sonic 2 document scans.
Here's the palettes inside Yamaguchi's Sonic 1 graphics: arumagi.ds b_robo.ds bat.ds birdthng.ds bugcar.ds buta.ds buta02.ds catapill.ds chamelon.ds duckthin.g explosn.ds fish.ds fish02.ds hachi.ds kani.ds nbutaa.ds nmogura.ds nnarmagi.ds spikecar.ds splash splash2.ds uni.ds yarare.ds yarare2.ds Observations: -Each frame/object has its own independent palette. -Some enemies use the final Sonic palette. -Some use the Sonic palette, but with yellow tones instead of red. -Splats adds two green tones, similarly to what's used in the final game for Scrap Brain's Ball Hogs (but they're different shades). -Tom had some fun changing a few file names. =P I wouldn't pay much attention to the "Sonic palette without red colors" since we know that Sonic's shoes have always been red. Since the main enemy colors in the second palette can change between levels to green or purple, Yamaguchi might have just preferred to design them using Sonic's "standard" blue tones.
The "STUPID" animations remind me of animations in one of the Sega/Mega CD's BIOS screens. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7UxwtkNSjI
Palettes from "Sonic enemies backup": ball bubbler dino dinosaur fish gator gator.2 mamabub sandcrab snail snail.2 newsnail.3 wasp.2 wasp Observations: -Both the Gator and Dino's palette orders seem to match those I added to my site back in 2005. However, those have proper Mega Drive colors while there's a small deviation in these... And I don't think I tweaked them by hand (there's many more colors inside those GIFs). Weird. -Wasp and Snail share Sonic & Tails' palette -Fish has one extra orange which clashes with a yellow tone in S&T's palette. It's clearly a WIP, so it might have just been a temporary goof. -Ball and Mother Bubbler share palette, which is also compatible with Bubbler's. -One of Mother Bubbler's objects uses what seems to be a "Mega Mack" palette from Chemical Plant. -I don't think Sandcrab's palettes match any known level. Just temporary or perhaps they belong to Desert/Rock Zone? EDIT: Wasn't there a tool that showed the whole contents of a ROM as Mega Drive palettes? Could be useful here.
Tom Payne seems to have just been making as many enemy graphics as possible so there'd be a wide selection to choose from. It looks like they were considering Sonic's palette line, but the rest look made up. Which is fair - you could probably assume there was going to be level with green bits in it.
Have you actually checked the level palettes inside the ROM, though? There may be levels where some of these could fit (even if their shades aren't an exact match), like the gator almost does in Hidden Palace. EDIT: The palette used by the wasp, fish (save for that one color) and snail seems to be the regular Sonic & Tails palette, albeit with the usual slightly different color values. I have no way of posting the Mega Drive palettes to illustrate this since Gens outputs even weirder values, sorry.
this is an incredible discovery, i am honestly not finding the words to describe how seeing this feels for me
These are the sandcrab's palettes: Now this might be a coincidence, but the brown shades in the second one (used by the "sand" object) look eerily similar to those in Wood Zone's second palette (albeit in different indexes): So, if this is really an indication of anyhing, the sandcrab's palettes could indeed be a tiny glimpse into one of Brenda Ross' previous levels (presumably either "Sand Shower" or "Rock World")... Which would make sense, according to the Banper sketch.
