LOst, I am not intending to derail the thread, but I've been waiting years for your theory on the music, what is it already?
From the Sonic CD symbol names list I found a few years a go. The two games have a lot of similarities with one another, so it's understandable they share the same symbol names too.
Yes, it was a matter of reading disassemblies side by side. The Gamecube port of Sonic CD doesn't do any queueing, but it does have most labels matching Sonic 1's (such as order of variables mostly equals the original RAM addresses if lucky). Then the Sega Saturn C dev documents match the port in its syntax/naming and structure, so things started to get pretty clear at one point. But it was the port of a boss that made all the difference (I think it was one of the Tidal Tempest bosses), as it still had the queue table index matching the Sega CD one. After that, I think some of the labels from the earliest Sonic 2 ROM made much more sense. So divdevwk IS the name of the RAM area $FFF680 ($60 in size), and that area (work) contains a queue list of the patterns to decompress into VRAM, mostly it is used for knowing where it left off last frame, so it could continue the work this frame. The system is not flawless as it contains bugs that are visible in Sonic 1 (such as overwriting patterns on some enemies and bosses if unlucky, like the Roller and Eggman's feets while jumping on the switch). Many Genesis games use the pattern compression, but I think only the Sonic games use this div dev queue (I could be wrong, also the name suggest div meaning it divides patterns into smaller pieces, or divides upload to VRAM over multiple frames). Also remember to not confuse this queueing with Sonic 3's LZ queueing/buffering of levels and art as that was new for Sonic 3 and was more effective (the name for that one is unknown, and so are the names of the all three compressions). So with labels from Sonic CD, labels from S&K Collection, and very early Sonic 2 labels, as well as the Sega Saturn C devkit docs, names and the structure of the code got pretty clear. As for music theories, I think most of them were blown away with the release of Masato Nakamura's Sonic the Hedgehog 1 & 2 Soundtrack album. And to be a little bit on topic, I LOVE the early Sonic 1 art style. It is still pretty clear that Sonic 1's art style was kept from beginning of the development until the final release, and that is impressive.
http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3AEGM_US_015.pdf&page=36 EGM #15, November/December-ish 1990. Nothing to write home about, but it's an alternative screenshot of the Tokyo Toy Show build. Maybe it's useful, maybe not.
Sorry for going off topic here but after checking that out I saw this and had to share it. That last review there is hilarious. Reading old game journalism is strangely fascinating.
In fairness, I'd argue that review is spot on. Almost everything about the Game Boy was shit, but Tetris and Pokémon worked and made it successful enough to get revised into an eventually decent handheld.
Battery life and price also helped, 11+ hours on 4 batteries was better then 3+ on 6 in most other devices at the time.
http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:EGM_US_015.pdf&page=31 check out the early large bullet bill! No mouth!
For those who haven't checked out that magazine, besides the Sonic, Shadow Dancer and Mario World early pics, there's also a few other oddities in it. There's a different title screen for GG Wonder Boy (improved yet scrapped in favor of the old one), MD Ghostbusters is being called Ghostbusters II for some reason (although it kinda makes sense, videogame-wise) and there's also this really odd Mega-CD mockup. By the way, what's with that section where people send their questions but they get no answers? Wtf.
Personally, what I took away from it was mild bemusement that ActRaiser was, at one point, called Act-Lazer.
Actually I'd like to know more about that Columns screenshot. I don't recall there being any pyramids or brickpatterns in the GG version's background. Anyway, crazy awesome stuff in those old EGMs :D
This isn't even remotely new, but it's always nice when we have a proper source: http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3AEGM_US_016.pdf&page=12 Annoyingly it refers to EGM #13, which doesn't appear to exist on the internet. We have 12 and 14, but not 13.
Did we have this pose before? It's from the picture Black Squrriel posted yesterday. It looks like an alternative standing pose to me.
Yeah, it's already known - there's a lower quality version of that image which is on the wiki, from quite a few years ago: It's very nice to see a higher quality version now, though
Just wanted to chime in - lovely to see a higher-quality version of this image. Even though the viewable area is a little cropped compared to the other version we have, it's leagues clearer. Finally a clear look at that oddly-posed standing sprite! We've come a long, long way since the blurry, overly-filtered, MEGACOSM-watermarked version we had access to back in ye olden days of the internet. = )
Heh, never noticed the similarity there. But you can see why they changed it in S1 - it looked stupid. In fact, it still looked pretty bad in SA1.
Oh yeah, it's ridiculous, I just really loved it when I realised the connection. Refuse to believe it's a coincidence :v:
