Nice find. There's a Sonic 1 MS prototype that I've been after that is supposedly more like Sonic 1 for Megadrive, this would be in line with that.
I would give one of my testicles to play a 512K version of Sonic 1 before they cut it down. I love the elegance and simplicity of the art (and backgrounds) that are able to communicate far more complexity than is really there -- I would love to have seen how they did Marble Zone (my favourite). My goals with this project are: 1. Understand what every byte in the ROM does -- it's old enough that we should really understand this by now 2. Create visual and intuitive interfaces to edit every aspect of the game worth editing 3. Use the above two to create my own total conversion game "Kroc the Crocodile"
Seems we get finds in clusters here on Retro.. The Jetzones music thing, this and Metal Sonic boss stage from sonic x-treme.
I've just finished examining the remaining music data and there are no other hidden tracks, except for what might be some overwritten music data from $FB27 to $FFB1. The last track in the data block begins at $FA26, there follows four words which are offsets into the four sound channels. No.4 (+$00FB) begins at $FB21 and only runs for a few bytes as it is essentially an infinite loop of silence (no white noise). Therefore all the sound data from $FB27 onwards is not, as far as I can tell, part of a known track. However, it is missing a song header, and looks like a partial channel 3 and complete channel 4 of an unknown song. I may, of course, be entirely wrong. Is there anybody who would know how to re-piece this together and get this to play? I've updated my disassembly to include these findings, search for "_fb27".
This is amazing, the discoveries just never stop even after all these years! I suspect the similar level art are remnants of attempts of making those actual levels.
That's insane! It sounds like there's a load of other secrets in the game too. I'm keeping a close eye on this!
Great find! It's good to see the 8bit Sonic getting some love again. If you ever need donations for that give me a shout!
Do you have any leads on who may have it? I don't want to know who, just if the trail's cold or not. How did you hear about it?
Wow, this is awesome and it's a pretty good sounding track too. 2013 is going out with a bang in the community-- all of you guys are kicking ass
When I worked on smps2mid, I verified that the music data of the MS and GG versions matches exactly. (except for one additional command in the Good Ending "sound effect") I tried to convert it with smps2mid and didn't get any useful results. I'm pretty sure that this is the data for sound effects though. (The first few notes looked like the ring sound effect and there are many special commands between notes.)
But how didn't Marble get caught in the SGC rip? It even got an unused credits theme in Sonic 2 SMS o.o
There is no reference to the song anywhere. You can not play something that you don't know it even exists. If you look at the Sonic 2 SMS/GG song list on SMSPower (search for "Sonic the Hedgehog 2"), you'll notice that it lists the unused songs. But Sonic 1 SMS doesn't have Marble Zone in its list. (Surprisingly there doesn't seem to be a music location list for Sonic 2 SMS on the Retro wiki, btw, even though there is one for Sonic Chaos and STT.) Small note to the area with unknown sound data ($FB27-$FFB1): It's referenced by the SFX list at $C740.
ValleyBell, is there a format (VGM, MID) that the Sonic 1 music could be converted to, that one could reverse so as to get back the tune data in the ROM? I ask is because for my level editor I want to store the project data in easily viewable / accessible formats -- PAL for palettes, BMP for graphics, CSV for grid data, INI for text & metadata etc. -- so that for what my editor doesn't offer (for now), people can use external tools for. With music though, I don't know what format is reversable.
Ah so it's the same case as the Boss in Sonic 3D. I bet there's more unused Songs in the other 8 bit games. Or even in the 16bit games/protos, who knows?
There is no format that's directly and easily reversable. Reversing .VGM is pretty much impossible, since it just logs what the sound driver writes to the sound chip. (almost like .wav files) MIDIs are okay in general, but they lack support for loops and don't have direct support for all special commands. Reversing them is not impossible though, as mid2smps proves, but there are some limitations. I would probably just save them as .bin files, that worked pretty well for SMPS music in the past years.
I thougt as much. I wish to avoid copyright problems, but also for other reasons my editor will not ship with, nor store in the portable project files, any subsection of the ROM binary. For the music data I have imagined an ASM-like script specialised to the particular commands the S1 music data uses.
All I can do now is just wonder and picture what Marble Zone would have been like. To be honest, I think it's a good thing that they decided to do unique levels in the end. That makes it age better, because if it had used the same layouts and zones as the MD counterpart, it would be worthless now, being just a lesser-spec version of the same game. The different zones help to keep it relevant, since it's something you can't get on the MD version. There's good reason to own both.
