As much as I hate to be a big party-pooper, I'm putting a lock on this thread for now. All it is turning into is "I look forward to this" or "let's speculate"-esque posts, with very little substance. HyperGHZ, when you get a chance to play the cart or want to post something more in here please PM me, another admin or a mod to unlock this topic. EDIT: Aaaand unlocked.
I have finally had a chance to play the game and take video. I am disappointed to say that it is not an early prototype. It has the sega sound & logos clipped out of the title screen & starts you out with 40 lives. This version seems different then any of the pirates because it is impossible to put in the level select without interrupting the demo first. Up down left right does nothing... Only after you interrupt the demo and see the "sonic team presents" for the 1st time can you input the code. I have the other pirate versions on emulator and they all let me put in the code straight away. There are also other graphical glitches that I have taken video of by playing through the entire game and collecting all emeralds. When you are finally able to get the level select and play the special stage & collect the emerald, it will start you off with 3 lives in the 1st level instead of 40. Here are a couple of glitches I was able to produce while playing through... The video of gameplay:
Genuinely surprised it was that pirate version... that raises a bunch of questions regarding Telegames. Probably worth dumping regardless, just so we can get confirmation that it is a pirated final Sonic 1, as opposed to some odd almost-final build or something strange like that. I almost wonder if its worth checking out that email/address and seeing if any answers can be found that way.
Disappointing, but still interesting. I hadn't heard about the 40 lives pirate until this thing surfaced, so it's interesting to see. Is the bottom half of the 'Sonic' banner on title screen usually missing on other instances of the 40 lives pirate?
Actually, I just bought this! Sega chopped out but ribbons still there Starts with 3 lives not 40 Pirate Cart
Well, this was a bit of a disappointment. On the other hand, it's cool to see that the 40 lives pirated cartridge is an actual thing. Maybe we'll get something different once HyperGHZ dumps the rom and we start decrypting the shit out of it.
Despite the fact that it isn't a pre-release copy it is still an interesting pirate. The strangeness of having a pirated Sonic 1 on a cart with Telegames contact information is very intriguing. As others have mentioned, the inclusion of an email address makes it likely that this wasn't made in 91. My guess is that Telegames was possibly experimenting with making a cheat device for the Genesis in the mid 90s, but it's just an idea. With Game Genie already being released and getting backing from Sega I don't see why a company would try and compete anyways.
Here is some more info I received from the seller... "Tele games uk limited closed about 2003 and they had lots of cool retro games some of which I bought but most were shipped back to japan telegames was always highly priced and when ebay became popular it finished them although I see now their website has recently started up and running again. With no stock? Anyway it came with a box of stuff other games and pc boards. I will show u some pictures later. As I only collected jap import games which are new with manuals etc. I was never really bothered with the unboxed stuff but they did give me their shop video in which sonic and other games were used. This was the contents of the box."
So Telegames is just a retro game store that gets their stock from another Japanese store. From this, we can guess that this loose and probably case-less pirate cartridge had its innards labeled at the Japanese store, and was later sent to the UK, where it got a new descriptive outside label (and a new case, since it's now an official one). It was then offered as a rental, so they wrote that "Please return to" message in the label, but they had to sell it along with all their other stuff when they were going out of business. Case closed?
Telegames is known as consoleclearance on ebay. I got a PAL TurboGrafx from them a few years ago. They've not sold much lately though, looking at their feedback.
Ummm.... Even though this is not an early prototype as I hoped, - The code is defiantly different from any of the dumped pirates - that all let you enter the codes from 1st boot. I'm trying to dump this but my parallel port on my computer & Genesis are not communicating & I've messed with my bios... Anyway, Y so eager to trash this just yet? If the story of this cart has taught us anything it's "expect the unexpected"...
Have you tried a Retrode? Perhaps there's somebody here with one that doesn't live too far away from you.
I was going to buy a Retrode but I was reading that it had problems dumping some strange pirates because of mapper issues? & thought that using the real hardware would be more accurate. I'm going to try to find my old computer with a parallel port that I used to run my zip drive on. I remember when 100mb disks were so cool!
Assuming you two haven't done so yet, you and egel should have a word with each other. egel seems to be having trouble dumping his pirated Sonic 2 Beta carts at the moment. Presumably, egel believes it's the Sega CD Transfer Cable he bought that's causing the issue. Seeing as you two are trying to dump pirated carts, might be worth exchanging info on how you two are trying to solve the dumping issue.
