Just happen to come across this interestingly enough while searching for music within the Dynamite Headdy beta using Hex Workshop. If you go to the offset address 00061ACE and finish at 00062333 you will find the music track "Beat It" used in Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. Could this mean that Dynamite Headdy was originally built upon the original Moonwalker rom back in the processing stage? If you need access to the Dynamite Headdy beta just ask and I'll provide a link.
As you say, it might be just a leftover from a Moonwalker build stored in that same cartridge, but it's an interesting find anyway. The more pieces of code and data we get documented, the better. All the prototypes dumped from cartridges (I mean, not those that came directly from SEGA's archives) are bound to have stuff like this... Which means we might find Sonic 1 alpha leftovers in the crappiest prototype out there. I wish there was some tool that magically disassembled every prototype ROM and found the data that can't be accessed. =|
This is not actually true. There is no way this could physically happen. They are leftovers from the compiling process. The only exception is a whole full eprom which hasn't been overwritten.
This is interesting. especially since I'm a big fan of the final Japanese version. I've played the beta and I thought it was kind of interesting. (Although the information about it on X-Cult was inaccurate as they compared the US Final with the Japanese beta.) Anyways though great find.
Wow, this is pretty interesting. Have you compared it against the Moonwalker version of the tune to see if it's the same exact version of the song? It might be possible that the game may have been set to use Beat It in another context at some point and that this is some sort of leftover, after all... What I don't get, though—Dynamite Headdy is not only a Treasure game, but it was released several years after Moonwalker. To add to that, Treasure games generally use their own custom modified version of the SMPS engine that includes several new coordination flags and other extra bits of functionality. Between Moonwalker and Dynamite Headdy, there are several changes you would need to make to the music data to get a song from one working flawlessly in the other; simply copying and pasting the data would not suffice. If the case is that this is the version from Moonwalker, then that begs the question—why is it there? I can't make any solid connections between the two games in any way that makes sense other than the fact that they both use SMPS. Even that is a stretch, though, given the circumstances.
I would guess that it is simply just a placeholder at some early stage, only because I've recently seen footage of an unreleased game on YouTube and it had the theme tune to Robocop. =P But yeah anyway, nice find.
I've tried porting it to S1 without any changes whatsoever, and yeah, it's Beat It. The FM disapears, and there's no DAC playback, but hey, it's actually there! ... I don't know how to fix up Treasure songs.
I've just gave it a run through comparing it against the original found in Moonwalker and with the exception of some bit data changed, it is essentially the exact same data. I would also like to note that the ending offset should end at 00062333 and not 00062649 as stated before. Seems I added an extra bit of data which I also checked out but it crashes on play so I have no idea what it could be.
"From the compiling process"? Do you mean it just gets random data from the computers memory, for the empty spaces?
I think that the entire thing is cleared because it's possible to go from one state to the other but not vice versa. Same deal as with Flash memory.
Judging from the fact that we get stuff like symbol tables, etc. and that compilers back then sucked, yeah, that's the most logical explanation. And the only explanation, pretty much. There's a remote possibility that they are leftovers from some kind of eprom joining or splitting process, but that's highly doubtful (how would it even happen?). Actually, another possibility I just thought of would be decompression. Files were usually sent compressed, in ZIP files or LZH files. It might be that huge wads of e.g. 00s were just skipped over, and whatever facility they had for doing master copies or manufacturing the carts or whatever had a lot of ROMs and these things happened... But this is just a remote theory and there is no proof. I guess I could investigate it further.
Just throwing this out there: Gunstar Super Heroes has the theme from Afterburner hidden in it. It was supposed to play during a level where you're on top of a plane shooting down missles or something like that. It's possibly some kind of homage.
This reminds me of those Ninja Turtles graphics within that overdump of Crackers. Even recently going through a Bonker's proto I noticed the header reads Eternal Champions. Stuff just gets left over somehow I guess, no huge mystery.
I've always thought that those leftovers were just not overwritten when the next burn didn't have any data to be written in that place... Is that really not possible? That would explain the chunks of different Sonic 2 builds in Simon's proto, instead of being random parts of other completely different games (even though there is that one bit of Chiki Chiki Boys).
There is no way to erase an EPROM this way. EPROMs are erased wholly. You would have to be very surgical about it to leave holes like that. Plus, these leftovers are always in place of large packs of 00s (padding).
