No idea why you're calling me silly when I stated that I am extremely sceptical that this would ever be the Needlemouse proto.
.. aaaand I'm going to cut in here again before things do start getting out of hand; they haven't yet, but I can see the beginnings of things. Right people, we've all heard what the guy has said, and now it's time to wait for that first downloadable video. Until then we will not know which, if any different from final, build of Sonic 1 this is. We can speculate, hypothesise, and wish as much as we want but until the video is posted we will not actually know. Until that time let's keep conflicting views to a minimum, please. There is no point in calling each other silly, or anything stronger, when all we have a picture of a cartridge with a plain-typeface sticker on it. Let's all just sit back, relax, and wait and see. If this can't happen, then I shall be locking the topic until said video is released. Let's see if you people can actually be mature about this.
It's very difficult, but I guess it's best to just be slow and wait. It's kinda weird that a pirate would choose 40 lives to start off from but I guess they had to choose any good solid number. I could believe it that the pirate was a rip of a pre-release copy. Giving that many lives to a review copy (if the reviewer was absolutely awful at the game) and then having the same edited version copied for stores to show off seems possible at a stretch. IIRC a preview copy of some NES game (I think it was Mario Bros 3) gave unlimited lives or a large amount of them for reviewers back in the day, so I can't dismiss this fact. That label definitely looks retro and pirates often go to great lengths to cover up that the game is a fake by putting some sort of image on the cart. Anyway, I'm waiting anxiously for this additional information. It's only been very recently that the Sonic scene has interested me and we've had sod all about games to look forward to for quite a while.
It could be that telegames had the cart and had to send it back to sega, who then sent it to the store to show off to customers. Perhaps sega sent off alot of these carts to stores and pirates got one from a store, removed sega logos, and that wound up on Overlords multicart.
Thing whole thing with 40+ lives and logo removal is a general pirating thing, but usually on the "Super 8 in 1", "Mega 50 in 1" etc. multicarts. I have both a 55 in 1 and a 128 in 1 for ye old Game Boy with a good number of games like this. It's not hard to do these things, really, within a very little space of time. It is a lot more unusual for it to be alone on a single cart, however. That said, we don't know that this is just a pirate, just that it looks like the supposed pirate cart that nobody bought to find out (with good reason from the description, obviously). Let's wait and see.
This certainly has caught my interest. I also would hope one day for a Green Hill Zone that has the "Welcome" sign like in one of the early screenshots. Didn't Yuji Naka say that he doesn't have access to that early version of Sonic either (or maybe I'm confusing this with the Sonic 2 Beta being stolen). Since the game only has slight differences this is highly unlikely, and the fact that there are 40 lives does raise concern for the legitimacy of this cartridge. Most likely it will turn out to be a pirate but I am hoping that it turns out to be a pre-release version. I'm glad to see that the owner is wanting to film the game for the public to see as I'm sure I'm not the only one whose seen owners of protos ask for money before anything is shown.
So don't you think its time for a topic title change since we basically confirmed that this is a pirate and not a pre-release?
It's not just unlikely, there's literally 0% chance of it being the early alpha stage prototype with the "Welcome!" sign. The clear tape is the most unsetling thing for me - it makes me think that either the pirate rom, or just a hack has been burned onto EPROM and put inside this cart. I'm not calling BS, I really want it to be a prerelease version, just saying what thoughts occur at this stage.
Disappointing that this doesn't look like it will turn out to be a prototype, or even a pre-release copy. But a first-gen pirate copy from that long ago will certainly be cool to check out.
In the unlikely event that this is some sort of prerelease, the ROM may contain further unused data. Even the final ROM contained Splats graphics and other rubbish.
"The truth is that I have not played this yet. Its still at my office waiting for me"... it sounds like this is probably the pirate. Still, let's give him a chance.
Just saying since it does look like it leading into that its a modifed pirate version then a pre-release of any sorts. I'll still be hopeful that its something thats worth 4+ pages of discussion.
While it looks like it's becoming more likely it's a pirate than a prerelease, there is still the possibility of it being different from final in other ways. I'm still interested in finding out what those are, and if/when there's a ROM release what the actual differences are down to the byte. It would also be interesting to see, if it is a pirate or something along the lines of a non-stock finished cartridge, if there's anything in any remaining space on there.
The Marble Zone UFO's seem to have been removed later on in development so maybe we'll luck out and their graphics will still be in there.
Damn you're hairy... Where did you get the cartridges? If they're second-hand, it's not impossible that someone could have switched the backs of the cartridges with Acclaim games.
