I believe it's generally agreed upon that later ports use earlier FMVs than the MCD version. Similarly, the ending FMV in said ports is missing the animation of Amy's skirt fluttering when Sonic runs off in the MCD version, and includes the Round 2 scene, which was cut from the MCD.
Yes, I expected it to be crashier and yet I never came across a single crash while playing it - even with the weird physics bugs. It'd mainly just be unpolished if not for the lack of other levels + special stages.
I don't recall how much space Sonic CD used but I don't remember it being anywhere near the data capacity of a CD. I had always assumed the tracks were PCM so that they would sound more "primitive" ...
I had assumed the same, until now that we learned PP originally used CDDA for the past. I just looked into it, and Sega Retro claims that MCD discs have a 500 MB capacity. However, the ReDump Sonic CD ISOs are 556 MB (JP) and 573 MB (US) respectively. What gives?
CD sectors are each 2352 bytes in length. For audio, the entirety of the sector is used, but for data, only 2048 of the 2352 bytes are used, with the rest being error correction and sync. The measurement on Sega Retro of 500MB (actually MiB) is referring to the amount of data that can be stored on a disc with just data tracks, where a portion of each sector isn't storing the data. In fact, if you take the sector count of the US Sonic CD (255826) and multiply it by 2048, you get 523931648 bytes, or 499.6 MiB, just shy of the 500MiB capacity. The max capacity of a standard CD-ROM would be more like 650MiB though, so I'm not sure what the Sega CD is doing differently to only support 500MiB CDs.
I believe 550MB CD Roms were common at the time, especially in Japan. I could be wrong about this but I think the larger CDs were either more expensive or not yet developed at the time....
Original Yellow Book standard CD-ROMs held 553 MiB / 63 minutes of audio. Perhaps that is where the confusion is coming into play. EDIT: actually, I was reading through the Mega CD dev manuals for s separate topic, and happened across this:
I do have a bunch of early protos of random games that specifically say 63 minutes on them, but I don't think I have any pics.
Using the OG past tracks would add probably another 6-9 minutes of RedBook audio to the game. It's plausible that this wouldn't fit on a 550MB/63min CDRom... although I haven't done the math yet.
The total length of the final retail version of the game is about 55:09:36 for the original Japanese version. The PC version has the PCM tracks recorded to CD tracks and these total slightly over 10 minutes.
Unless I'm missing something totally obvious, that would put it at over 65 minutes which wouldn't fit within the standard 63-minute Sega CD CD-Rom. So space constraints apparently are a totally valid reason for why the past tracks were downsized to PCM.
It's certainly interesting to find out there are full quality compositions of at least some of the past tracks. I always assumed that they used the PCM chip instead of CD tracks as a jokey reference to the levels being set in the past, before the possibility of CD audio.
So hey, that's some interesting information RE: Yellow Book. I know a little bit about the different CD formats and the rainbow books, but I hadn't heard of the 63-minute bit before. On a quick search I see that 63-minutes is the standard for the mini-CD format that didn't really catch on much, though. Is this a similar limit for full-sized discs? I'm out of my element here and am very open to being educated further! Changing subject, I should probably let this one go as it's already buried by a page but it was so off that I had to say something: lolwhat. That is a LOT of work to create something entirely new just for a one-off press event and it would go against every known pre-release game that has been found on the internet over the decades.
Well of course the Nick Arcade proto is more than a purposely built press demo, you don't have to look very hard to come to that conclusion. The fact that tails was fully implemented, but hidden by default, the fact that S1's Green Hill has its metatiles ported from 256x256 to 128x128, showing intent to improve the engine already, and a bunch of other stuff that just makes no sense to go through the trouble of implementing if you are just putting together a mock-up demo for the press. Vastly different from the Sonic CD 0.02 situation, where you only have pretty much what's strictly necessary for the demo and that's it. Doesn't necessarily mean that a more complete and/or broken build from this time exists, though, but there's reason to believe it doesn't reflect the state of development at the time in the same way that the NA S2 proto does.
There are differences between standard "compact disc" and CD-ROM. It's a bit confusing and I don't fully understand it, but I know someone who does! (incidentally Technology Connections is a wonderful channel).
80mm Mini CDs are usually 17-22 minutes, nowhere near 63 minutes. The 63-minute format was common in the early 90s due to the manufacturing processes at the time. As CD production got better, everything shifted over to 74-minute format. (I'm not sure if 80-minute format is used for replicated discs or if it's just for CD-Rs; it definitely isn't part of the CD-ROM spec, though.)