Man, this is awesome... This release is specially emotional for me, as I can finally play it again after nearly 30 years (the first times I've rented Sonic 1 back then was the prototype version)... Thanks for all involved.
Wow, talk about momentous. I almost thought the article on the front page of Sonic Retro was fake and I was going to open a rick roll. Congrats to everyone involved in making this a reality
I find it funny where the Skull is loaded compared to the final Left is Final, Right is proto (before being corrupted by the background tilemap)
Very, very cool. Thanks to all involved for getting this out. On a sidenote, I went over the wiki just now and came across a shot from an old advert that reminded me of the spring in Rika's post, though it may be unrelated. Edit: Come to think of it, this particular shot has "RINGS" in it, which would imply that it's from a later build than what we got. So it's possible that the spring graphics were indeed intended for this, but it hasn't been implemented yet.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/8vbydgj3avevcg9/Sonic+1+Beta+SFX.zip/file I ripped all the sound effects and shoved them into a Sonic 1 disassembly. While sound effects only go up to $D0 in the final Sonic 1, in the prototype, they go up to $D3. I haven't seen $D0 to $D3 reported on, and they can't be accessed in the base ROM because the sound test only goes up to $CF. $D0 is the waterfall sound effect like in the final. $D1 is continuous noise, similar to the waterfall sound effect but louder and unending $D2 is a continuous rhythmic pounding $D3 starts as a standard firey noise sound effect, but then oscillates continuously $A1 is broken when ported to the final sound driver, cutting in and out and staying at a consistent pitch In this disassembly, I extended the sound effect table and increased max value of the sound test to $D3 so you can hear these sound effects for yourself.
As fun as the Sparkling Zone background is, I can kinda see why they changed it. From a design/gameplay standpoint, it's very distracting and a little tacky, though I do like what they were going for.
My thoughts: I always thought the labyrinth beta background was weird crystal things in the background, but now I can see that they are small holes of light peaking through the ceiling. Do we now know what the Japanese signs in the background of "sparkling zone" say? The most different song in the beta is the credits by far, with the intro coming in second. One small thing is that The Misfits Pack, a Mania mod, used a recreation of the beta background as the background of Labyrinth act 2, so they may want to upgrade to the bona-fide beta background. If someone can split disassemble this and make it editable on SONED2, I'd love to make hacks that restore this to playable status! Good Luck on looking through this beta and if you run into frustrations, just try to cope.
Yeah there's not a huge amount of interesting things happening on the surface, probably because the differences have been known about for 20+ years. Really the only surprising thing for me was the state of Star Light Zone and I guess a couple of things in Marble. The rest pretty much lines up with what we guessed, which was not the case with the Sonic 3 build last year. It's just neat to be able to take real screenshots rather than rely on magazine scans. I'd bet the real surprises are buried deeper. One thing I did expect to see, but haven't yet, is water: This screenshot must have been from an earlier build. I had assumed there's be some half-baked code that turned the background blue in an attempt to simulate underwater bits, but apparently not! p.s. don't forget to support the home team. Like, seriously.
This is massive. Never thought I'd ever see a Sonic 1 proto. This proto also confirms that the spike bug is indeed a bug - the spikes in this proto act identically to the spikes in Sonic 3's Ice Cap, with both being "patched" to not hurt Sonic while invincible instead of using the general hurt routine (which is why both can hurt the player while invulnerable). Either that, or it confirms that the spikes in Ice Cap are supposed to be broken...
I dunno. Splats and Ballhog and the ball itself all with implementations really threw me for a loop. Oh and how the act ending fistpump, which no one was quite sure how it was implemented before.
Its interesting that Labyrinth and Scrap Brain both have a full palette line that is blacked out. I wonder if they were going to use a different method for water at one point and were making sure all of the levels art would fit on one line?
Said this last night, though just as "holy shit" but oh my god. Yall are the best!! I never thought I'd see these in an actual ROM instead of perpetually guessing at it or as winks in games like Mania!