Fascinating stream. Those ufo's in the special stages look so weird. I think I prefer the time travel sound from the 0.02 version. Someone needs to do a hack of Sonic CD and change the Palmtree Panic title card to "Salad Plain"
Edit: Ops was beat to upload music! ok removed than.... So yeah , when we gana get some Hacker Action to crack this Beast wide open?! Also would really like to see compatibility for SonLVL!
Address 0x469B into a Kega Fusion savestate is a byte containing the index of which entry is selected. Unfortunately, the image never changes. If you set it to 0x18 it selects Round 8-3, and you can press up to move through the list. Pressing down on anything below 1-1 will fail the menu's bounds check and kick you back up to the Exit entry at the top. Most of the normally unselectable entries take you to a permanent blank screen. Sometimes music plays. 3-2 goes to the past version of 1-2 and 5-1 goes to 1-1 past. They seem broken when accessed this way. Oddly, 7-3 takes you to the other level select, though any button on any entry there takes me back to Time Attack.
I'm sorry. In all seriousness, I'm just surprised something this interesting came out of these. Looking forward to next Saturday already!
That was gorgeous. How were the original CD quality past tunes never released in any shape or form? Such a crime, I can only imagine what we're missing
Whenever there's a debate over the name of a prototype zone, let it be known that Sonic Team at one point thought "Salad Plain" was a good idea for a stage name
EDIT: Also because I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else, Sonic still uses his S1 spring frame, except it's been corrected to add the missing white stripe. So they probably fixed that twice, once for S2, another for CD.
Though the cinematic sequence that plays if you let the demo go long enough in the earliest build has no sound, there IS some sound data in the OPN.STM file. I tried to open it in Audacity, and there are like bits where it actually sounds like the music, though I have no idea what the sample rate is. Is there video data in it too, maybe? The sound is interrupted every couple seconds with repetitive noises that I might suspect is some sort of frame data.
It's Sega CD PCM data (it's a bit of a weird format, look at the technical docs) at 16000 kHz. It's just the opening FMV music.
Ah, OK. (I'm not especially familiar with the format but I'm not surprised it's publicly documented). Still weird that it isn't actually played back during the intro animation! Presumably I could convert it to a more normal wave format with the Snatcher conversion tool if it's at 16k.
Look in the decompressed Time Attack art in the December prototype and sadly, "SALAD PLAIN" is the only zone art in there. Oh well. Really happy that all of these are out, by the way.