oh shit yeah, I think it was klik n play. I forgot it had a name before the games factory. And holy shit yeah, it was actually insane how close it was to the real deal. Does anyone still have that demo?
I think Rlan has a shitload of those old games and was actually going through them one by one a while back.
Whether he played this or not, I have no idea. But he was definitely around during that time period. The following thread came to mind, where he created a game genie code to access it in the final game: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.fan.sonic-hedgehog/AegxPKqKuXM/_9OVYMBHzxoJ I initially thought that he found this before the beta was posted, but it looks to be 2 months afterward. As an added bonus, here's a thread where you can see his famous temper in action: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.fan.sonic-hedgehog/EPMyG2ZyHQM/Ae2qjWUgwIUJ Fun to read it now. (For reference, Rocket = Saxman)
That's interesting, because from what I recall, SSNTails made that demo by painstakingly stitching together emulator screenshots of HPZ as it appears in the final game (which is mostly just the rings and the monitors) and then matching them up with the magazine scans that were available at the time. So was there another way to access the level before the Game Genie code? (Stealth's wording there seems to imply that the "scrambled HPZ" itself is nothing new.)
Yup, via savestate hacking. And prior to that, a code for accessing Hidden Palace had been officially released by Action Replay.
This is actually pretty funny because i was visiting tom's (nineko?) archived site yesterday and at the top of his homepage, he claims he found the method of accessing hpz. Did stealth figure it out, or tom? Also, i was referencing this email from stealth regarding music: http://sost.emulationzone.org/oldsosth/oldsosth/theories/theory_005.txt Edit - regarding the wording about "least scrambled" hpz, he is likely talking the old oil palace zone trick to use an oil ocean state to "repair" hpz, i believe. Edit dos - actually, iirc, the action replay code was the very first way of finding hpz. It was actually printed in a magazine. It took a long time (or at least felt like a long time to me as a game genie owner lol) before a game genie code was developed from it.
See above. Tom figured out how to access it on emulators via savestate hacking, based on the Action Replay code. Stealth produced the GG code later.
I remember Ed "Pinky" Lomas being the one to discover it when he worked for Sega Power magazine. A few readers had wrote in asking what BGM10 was and Ed, who seemed to be their go-to guy when it came to Action Replay codes, supplied the goods. Actually missed out on a very cheap job lot of 1993 Sega Power mags a few months ago. Would have scanned that for posterity had I got them.
Even after that, I believe it had been reprinted in a gamepro or swatpro magazine, under the headline "Classic codes" or something like that.
SonicBlur and I have been talking online tonight and he brought up this website which blew my mind into all sorts of pieces, this was definitely one of the earliest Sonic sites I visited regularly back in the day: http://web.archive.org/web/20000116195024/http://www.ellensburg.com/~katharin/conspiracy/sonic.html I definitely remember how "conspiracy" made it sound so... underground. Combined with "Area 51" I felt like I was in some super secret underground club. Anybody else remember going to the Sonic Conspiracy site? And just checking -- Tom in the links section is Nineko, right?
Whoa, I think I may have come across that page once or twice. In fact, the other day I was reminiscing about that time I first saw the "Dust Hill" pic on some page with a simple layout and no background circa '99. I couldn't read it since I was poor at English back then, but I recall being completely baffled by the pic. How did you find that, sonicblur? Did you have the URL written somewhere?
I was going through old threads from AFSH (The sonic usenet newsgroup, alt.fan.sonic-hedgehog) from 1998, looking for information to help Cooljerk with his research on this topic. The site predated Jan's Area 51, and people linked to it when the topic of Hidden Palace came up. I was finding a bunch of good posts to piece together history a bit better, like the Sonic Crackers ROM had already been floating around for a while at that point. And some people thought Genocide City was level cut from Sonic 1 prior to Andre Dirk showing up to talk about his friend's Sonic 2 beta cart. It looks like I joined AFSH in September of that year. Most of the people that I still know how to get in touch with were there around 2000, 2001. Don't really know of anyone from the 1998, 1999 time period who is still around, except Stealth, whose old posts are really funny to read because of how angry he got. My posts were just plain bad, because I was 12 at the time. Everyone hated Andre Dirk back then, and many people were telling him to go away. In December 1998 was when he decided to sell his friend's Sonic 2 beta cart, and by late December bids were up to $150 USD. He was pissed when Simon posted the ROM dump he found in early January 1999.
Nice, I've always found the Sonic Secrets community's early years fascinating. This recent surge in interest in them is probably the best thing to come out of Cult's demise. It makes me wonder, are people currently looking into archiving all these old scene-related pages and posts in a single place? The Retro servers or the wiki, perhaps? It would certainly be better than having them scattered all over the place. Going by Scarred Sun's posts, the staff is already working in archiving Cult at the very least.
