That new prototype footage of Sonic 1 going around...

I ripped all my family's VHS home video collections for christmas last year, have an entire setup for it, with a couple of VCRs, and multiple capture cards. One of my VCRs outputs S-Video and the highest quality capture card I have has S-Video in.

If someone wants to put together a fund to try and secure that tape, I'd be willing to donate what little I can.

 

Not so much the footage itself, but the narration: To preface I know VERY little Japanese, but I can pick out a few words. The one word that struck me as odd? Robotnik. I wouldn't have thought they would even mention Eggman's western name. Did any manual pre-Adventure refer to Robotnik as his legal name, or did they just ignore it until 1998?

Also, having seen the Marble Zone UFOs in motion and just how plain they are, I'm glad they removed them. They just stick out too much.

 

They don't say "Robotnik," they say "Roboto ni kaeru," meaning, (very roughtly) in that context, "to arrive in a robot." They call him Dr Eggman.

 

Thanks for the explanation I was wondering why I was hearing 'Robotnicca' on that part heh.

 

More videos:







Lots of good stuff here. The Jewel Master footage has lots and lots of small differences, but the star of the show is the footage of the never-released Genesis version of Ninja Gaiden (arcade port). The beta floating around is much, much earlier than the footage shown.

 

Amazing finds here. It would be nice if we could track down some of the other volumes that aren't archived. No doubt there is more prototype footage to be seen.

 

So, probably worth pointing out for people who might not get the connection, but Riot City, a Sega arcade game by Westone released prior to Bare Knuckle in Japan, has a character named Hawk that always looked very, very much like Axel:

 

Volume 11:

 

My apologies.

 

Someone pointed out Vol 13 on some weird website, went ahead and bought it:



Says Sonic the Hedgehog is just a tentative title ha.

I'll rip it to my best ability, unless someone has a better method out there.

No worries

 

Please, whatever you do, deinterlace it to 60fps and upload it at something other than 480p.

 

We had hacks that guessed the Sonic victory pose was something that was just activated whenever you jump after passing a stage, right? Surprised they got it right all those years ago. My guess was always that Sonic automatically does that jump before going off screen and you couldn't bring him back. Either that or he does the jump only to remain static in the air like the ending credits scene of an 80's sitcom.

That's not entirely correct, what the video is saying is "Robotto ni kaerareta shima no doubutsu wo tasuke nagara, Sonic ha susumimasu"" meaning "Sonic moves ahead while saving the island's animals who have been turned into robots".

Vol. 13 looks like it's the Game Gear game. I'm glad to see these getting preserved, thanks for the efforts

 

GHZ definitly had some background tweaks after this build.

I'm also convinced this had a better background. I cannot find the error in the background in this video (Could be due to quality?).

Also. I have a hunch that the Spring Yard zone foreground wasn't updated from Sparkling Zone yet. They changed the background but didn't update anything else in the foreground to match. Which is why the lights look like Sparkling Zones and also the pillars seem to match Sparkling Zones.

 

Yeah, my japanese is incredibly rusty, been nearly 13 years since my last course in college haha. I had originally written "become a robot" but I doubted my translation at first, lol.

 

I'd be happy to consult with people on best deinterlacing options, or if someone has much better equipment (someone mentioned a method for outright digitizing the tape??) I could send it their way. I usually just use comb deinterlacing but it has poor results.

Aren't tapes usually 24 fps? Wouldn't that cause jitter during the 3:2 pull down at 60 fps? If so, I'd prefer just rip at the actual framerate of the tape to avoid introducing new artifacts.

 

Japanese NTSC tapes would run at 60 fields per second. 24fps is purely a physical film thing.

 

Seeing that victory pose in action struck to me so much I did a short video about it.

I can take it up! I have experience and credentials for this doing this kind of stuff!

 

When it arrives, I'll give you heads up and we can arrange to get it over to you, thanks for the help!

 

It's the other way around. A tape in Japanese will be NTSC at 525/30, but it's interlaced footage, so that'll be 525i. So you'll wanna import it at 60 interlaced fields, and deinterlace it afterwards to 30fps.

3:2 pulldowns (or 2:3 pulldowns depending on the technique utilized) only relate to footage *shot* at 24fps, in relation to Hollywood films. A 3:2 pulldown is used to turn 24fps footage into 30fps, which introduces the artefacts on American DVDs. This is also the exact same reason that in PAL regions, films run faster but are much higher quality. In PAL regions, such as the UK, rather than doing a pulldown on it, they just sped up the footage, meaning films ran faster by about 4.17%, but no artefacts were introduced.

That being said, if we're uploading it to somewhere like YouTube (and not an archival site) first, I recommend also using nearest neighbour upscaling (so not your general scaling inside of editing software, as that's usually billinear) to at least 1080p before uploading (preferably an integer scale). This is because most sites will compress your footage to look like garbage. The higher the resolution, they usually give higher bitrates too. So although 525p footage might look fine, you'll find that once it's been re-compressed with that low bitrate, it looks like garbage. Lemme know whether there's anything I can do to help, if needed.

 

So that's the unreleased Ninja Gaiden on Mega drive in there. Seems very close to the proto that's out there?