You know, I never really thought about it till now, but the background for the time periods in Palmtree Panic don't really make sense. The present has huge, monolithic spires that are close up, but the future, they become smaller, further away mountains with a different, cragier facade lol.
I'm trying to do a disassmbly of v0.02. I've got my current progress up at https://github.com/InvisibleUp/SonicCD_0.02_diasm, as a Ghidra project. (Exporting that as ASM takes a very long time, unfortunately.) I've come to the conclusion that this is a lightly modified version of Sonic 1. 90% of the code is identical, the variables are in the same order relative to each other, and there's a lot of leftover Sonic 1 data. The level headers are the same, the PLCs are in the same format, etc. That said a lot of stuff has been yanked out, especially related to the water level and LZ. The collision table is now 8 entries long for the 8 zones, but they all point to the same thing. It also seems to be based on REV0 of the ROM, as the code that matches matches that particular version. I haven't dug that deep, but I wonder how much of Sonic 1 is still there, and (unlikely but) if there's any hidden Sonic 1 content still lurking.
you can view the original livestream on youtube: Gotta say this was such a cool moment for this community. I really enjoyed how HPZ revealed this.
I don't see anyone talking about Round 1-2 C ( good future) yet.... DRX dropped some hex last night in the Discord that when you change the first 2 bytes at position 0xA1A to 0058, you can play good future for round 1-2. There seems to be a lot to see in 1-2C!
So since R2 is in time attack but already erased from level select, do you guys think it was ever in a build in the first place, given how early this one is?
I took a screenshot of the start of Salad Plain and compared it with the final game. It's... well: Sonic the Hedgehog CD (prototype; 1992-12-04)/Comparisons/Salad Plain This pretty much confirms it to me that at some point in development, they decided to tear up what they had of Palmtree Panic present, but not bother to fix the past or future versions of the stage. I think this might have been a running theme with Sonic CD (loads of detailed maps might prove this) - developers changing one timeline, but forgetting about the others, meaning things don't match properly anymore.
The pessimist in me says "no, if there ever actually was anything Taxman would have shown us alongside the badniks for it", but there's still half a years worth of protos to potentially find some day between this one and the next oldest one. Who knows what's out there still... I've been around long enough to remember thinking we'd NEVER see stuff like the Nick Arcade build of Sonic 2 or the prototype Windy Valley with our own eyes, but anything can happen. Big thanks to drx and everyone involved. When these things happen it feels so surreal and it gets my blood pumping. As bittersweet as no R2 (or R8) is, this is still quite the amazing find. The fuller past music is sending me somewhere with all it's extra flourishes, god I hope the rest of the past tracks are still out there in that format somewhere.
Someone already have a more detailed answer - but there's also one other thing worth mentioning - The music on the disc goes from Salad Plain to "Collision Chaos". I guess one question is why would they have music for R3 in there if all data other than R1 was cut, but also the fact that it was there, why skip R2's music? Unless the music was originally intended for the 2nd zone, but it seems to me like R2 was already omitted early on. Maybe they decided Marble Zone just wasn't fun so they skipped it and went to Spring Yard instead.
@Andrew75 I extracted the data and loaded them into SonLVL, and also made (shoddily made) object definitions.
Yeah this is much closer map to the final good future version of the zone than the present. Actually makes me wonder if this is the good future, just with the wrong music.
Internally, it's the present map. There's already a good future map (which I'm working on!) EDIT: Boop.
Being mostly sonic 1 at this point makes sense and is expected, it's great to see the super early conversion to sonic cd even at this level. The salad name and part of that level select menu just screams ristar style to me, idk.
They actually did a little bit more than add a stripe: They re-did his entire shoe... which was kind of them I guess.
