I feel like Knuckles body needs to be a bit thicker to accommodate his larger beta head. But besides that awesome!
it does play in this prototype tho? It plays when you encounter him in Angel Island 2, Hydrocity 2, & Launch Base. also, a couple of other gameplay differences I noticed - Tails can fly via holding the A button as well as tapping A, B, or C, and starting flight with Tails doesn't "unlock" your control after jumping from a roll.
So it only took a new Sonic 3 beta to bring me back here after another long absence! It also took me a LONG time to get through this thread, and some of the music discussion has been moved since I started reading late Sunday night. So many questions have been raised for me, that I had to take notes along the way. Granted, many of my thoughts and questions were touched upon and answered along the way, so kudos to all those have found so far, and to drx and everyone at Hidden Palace for this amazing find. Can't wait to load it onto my EverDrive to play around. The timeline is very interesting to me. I'm still finding the span between November 20's final build and the February release to be an interesting amount of time, and definitely not enough for this build's apparent release to get to final within two and a half weeks. I'm feeling good about the 2P competition 'team'/buld theory. I am also now more curious about the 'beta' builds we have for releases dated after Sonic 3's February release. I do not know much about those. I am still learning about the various ways in which music was programmed on the Genesis hardware. It would make full sense to me if the music people doing the actual music programming were somewhat separate from main programming team. It seems we don't know a lot about how builds were internally generated, but I'm going to gamble that if the game aside from competition mode is older, the music tracks are just as old, if not older work by the music team, depending on when their updates make it into the game. Presuming compatibility with the sound engine, new tracks could just get dropped in whenever. I've got some other theories as well I'll save for the other thread. I've also got some comparisons to do between the PC Collection MIDIs and the final Genesis game arrangements. I seem to recall some odd differences in the arrangements of the tunes that appear in both. This could inform my thoughts on the whole fork of them in general. Also a bit curious about the EPROM chips themselves--they go out of their way to print SEGA UK on them. I read earlier in the thread they were sent to Sega Magazine UK but was there also a local team working on the game out of the UK?
Anything is going to be speculative no matter what, but most likely it says SEGA UK on the chips to indicate who it's meant for rather than a local team. Seems like it would be an odd coincidence otherwise, too. But that's just my opinion!
Wow, I never noticed how big his tail was in the walk animation. Looking into the sprite sheet, it is a lot smaller in most of the sprites.
To clarify, those slot graphics are using additional colors that were taken up by other things in the final game, like the cycling yellow lights on the slot machine. They probably could have done a better job at updating them, though.
Indeed. I was able to get more decent results in a couple of minutes, using the same 11 colors as the final graphics: By the way, have the other slot graphics been ripped already?
Yeah, they have. If someone else doesn't post them here in the next two hours I will when I get home.
Yeah, this happened because they forgot to include ring colors in the original draft of the palette and had to scramble it all up after all the art was already done. There's a couple other casualties, like the Goal blocks, which in their red frame display a brown-ish shine.
I've been faffing about with Tails in the proto, and noticed a few things about him. Firstly, when you get Invincibility as Tails, he has a different star effect from Sonic, but doesn't play the invincibility theme. Just like Sonic's, it uses the graphics of the last Shield the player had: If Tails flies onto certain objects and jumps off of them, he will still be in a "flying" state. Also, if you start flying after jumping from a roll, he does not regain his air control: And if Tails tries to interact with certain objects, the game will either glitch out on emulators like Kega Fusion, or straight-up crash on emulators like BizHawk or on real hardware. Of course, Tails can't interact with these objects if he's following Sonic. The objects that I have tested that it happens with are: The swinging vines in Angel Island. The large tree in Angel Island Act 1, but only if Tails runs inside it at high speed. The downward loop pillars in Marble Garden. The giant rotating nets in Carnival Night. One last thing: I don't know how many people have noticed, but the early backgrounds of this prototype manage to survive into the final game in some form via the Data Select icons. I presume these were all drawn before the backgrounds were changed, and while Flying Battery's icon was changed for Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Hydrocity and Launch Base kept theirs:
It's a shame they changed the LBZ background the way they did, too. I think the darker water is easier to parse visually, and better sets up expectation for what's going on in act 2.
Speaking of Knuckles' appearance changes, it's bugged me for a while that in the final Sonic 3 & Knuckles DATA SELECT menu, Knuckles' victory pose does not completely match the one seen during gameplay. In gameplay, he's more hunched over/stepped forward, whereas in the DATA SELECT menu, he's more upright. His eyes look slightly different, too. In fact, I prefer how his pupil looks in the DATA SELECT variant, as the smaller pupil in the gameplay variant makes him look a little shocked/startled or something, haha. I wonder if 1 of the 2 poses were changed late in development, and the other pose wasn't updated to reflect this? Judging by this recently unveiled Sonic 3 prototype, it seems that Knuckles in general went through quite a lot of changes during development.