There's also a french car collercor who had ordered the entire lot to be destroyed upon his death, I cannot find it now though.
I remember (I think) during the Cult days there was someone bragging about a proto but never dumped it so he was mocked to the point of taking his ball and going home. I think. Maybe I'm making it up. I'm getting old.
Mind-blowing that after nearly 20 years it just happens to show up on a random £30 ebay lot. I do wonder about the timing though, why now, anyway? Sonic 1 prototype cartridges are not exactly something that gets forgotten and sold for scraps very frequently. I can't help but wonder whether a pandemic that hits seniors the most helped expedit things, but maybe I'm getting too grim. Anyway, don't be mad that Buckaroo made a killing profit out of sheer dumb luck. The more important angle of this whole story is that everyone got the best possible outcome AND it sets an important precedent for future collectors, namely that you might want to get your stuff dumped and verified by a reputable source like hiddenpalace.org if you want to get a good price for it. Because let's be honest, not many people would have taken a cartridge like that, randomly showing up on eBay, seriously, even if it claimed to be a prototype. This idea that undumped cartridges are more valuable may well be outdated in an age where fake youtube prototype footage fools even Yuji Naka himself.
Are you saying the disk was never found again, or it was never dumped? Because it was definitely dumped: https://hiddenpalace.org/Super_Mario_64_(Nintendo_64DD)_(Prototype) Other examples of undumped games that private collectors have are Marble Man (the Marble Madness sequel) and the Arcade version of Beavis & Butthead.
wait, how I could forget? The SegaSonic Bros arcade game that we basically only had screens of forever because the collector was leery about publicly dumping it.
The collector is still being that much of an arsehole, he said that he wouldn't sell any more machines if the ROM were published. The wormhole was that the people who bought and dumped the machine altered the ROM, so as it's not a 1:1 copy they could publish that. If you ask me, I cannot find any reasoning for that thinking... what do you win, as collector, on doing so? If you already sold the machine, your income or anything will be altered in any possible way if the roms get published. That's just being an arse to me.
Between this community and Pokémon's, I've been having field days the last few years. Videogame development investigation is something I enjoy reading and watching about. Check stuff that got left in the cutting room floor or recycled later on is always intriguing.
Sorry if this was bought up but I was playing the megaplay version of sonic 1 because its fun and in that version they added a total score leaderboard for when you game over or beat eggman, but it occured to me they use a darkened green hill zone background for it. I have yet to compare but is it possible it's that dark ghz palette from the beta reused? or they just made their own new dark version.
I can add to this. Our prototype contains an unused Font that looks similar to the Mega Play version as well. Spoiler: The unused Font Here's the Mega Play Font: (I don't have a rip of the font with the actual real order of the letters and numbers, so I'll have to use this as an example.) Here's the prototype unused Font: While not exactly the same, it does share some similarities. Spoiler: The GHZ palette Both palettes look identical (except for the waterfalls in the bottom picture, which are different because this picture was using GHZ's brighter waterfall colors, overwritting the original colors, the mountains in the back, [which for some reason are pink], water and sky. Interestingly, the water in GHZ's mega play is completely dark.) My theory is that they were working on the Mega Play version beforehand, and maybe that's why the Sonic 1 Mega Play version is so different from, say, the Sonic 2 Mega Play version, which doesn't have as many changes if I recall correctly.
Those two palettes seem too different to me... in addition, I highly doubt the Mega Play version of Sonic 1 would have been in the works from the very beginning of game development.
Paging the arcade experts. The internet has Sega's Mega Play hardware down as a 1991 release, but all the PCBs I've seen are dated 1992 and the "BIOS" says 1993. One of these dates is correct. All I suspect are dated well after Sonic 1. It was Mega-Tech that was around earlier.
So in this prototype spikes can kill you even with invincibility power-up. Very frustrating. At least they changed this in the final release. Also I never liked the spike behavior in Sonic 1. They wanted to make the game harder but it only led to cheap deaths. Fall on the spikes, lose the control and die after two bounce.
For as long as I can remember, people have been debating whether Sonic 1's spike behaviour was intentional or not. If anything, I think this prototype having spikes that can kill you even when you're invincible indicates that it wasn't, but I suppose we really can't know for certain.
Can someone who knows about the code of the game tell me whether it's probable the spike bug was really a bug or not? I hear conflicting reports about it and it would be nice to hear from an expert on the game.
The main point of contention as to whether it was intended or not centers on the fact that spikes call for a different routine to hurt Sonic, separate from the general hurt routine. Since it uses a unique routine, some have assumed it must've been intended. However, DigitalDuck explained earlier that the coding in this prototype makes it seem more likely that the spike bug is indeed a bug and not intended behavior.
Didn't they fix the spike bug in one of the later Japanese exclusive revision? This would indicate that it was never an indented feature I think.
Yes, it was fixed in multiple revisions, as well as in Sonic 2. I think the fact it's almost always fixed in rereleases adds more credence to the notion that it wasn't intended.
I think it's more likely to keep it consistent with the rest of series. All the re-releases also add in the Spindash.
Uh... if by "Japanese-exclusive revision" you mean REV01, then no I'm pretty sure it wasn't fixed there. Also it wasn't exclusive to Japan: I own a PAL copy of it. To my knowledge, the spike bug was first fixed in a hidden version of Sonic 1 in Sonic Mega Collection, dubbed "REVXB" (which appears to be a hex-edited version of REV01 rather than a new ROM entirely).
