The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

A few days ago I went to an arcade in Madrid, and they had Sonic Dash Extreme. I recorded some gameplay

 

Apologies if this was very old news, but here's something interesting: the data from ArtNem_S2Signpost in the current Sonic and Knuckles disassembly isn't just a copy of the Sonic 2 signpost graphics.... It has unique early art for Knuckles's signpost frame!



The unused sprite seems to have less shading on his eyes, and more of his spines covered the sign. His nose is bit thinner too. It looks to me like this was a fairly late leftover in development, dating around the late betas that were sent to the press and many SEGA magazines.

EDIT: Recorrected the palette. I was misled by a missing gray.

 

Holy balls! Actual proto S3 assets! And I won't be home for another ten hours!

EDIT: Wow, this is embarrassing. I mean, it was right there. S3A has it too. I think you must've had a palette bug of some sort, though; I checked myself and the grays are fine.

Doesn't seem like it has anything to do with Knuckles in S2, but rather is a leftover from when the sign was Nemesis compressed and loaded all into VRAM at the same time. Anyway, I went ahead and added this over at TCRF.

 

I was trying to match the colors in Tile Layer Pro; though loading the actual palette would have been much easier.

Just imagine the other stuff that is hidden away within both games that no one has looked over for years! And we still have five prototypes to look over!

 

Given that new sprites have only just been found in SegaSonic Arcade it goes to show that even 24 years later, hidden gems can still be found!

Of course I would do it but I have no idea how to. How do you guys do it?

 

Because the image resize function in IP.Board isn't functioning correctly, I'll just provide a URL link instead.

Don't mind me, just going through Sonic 3 Alone. Interestingly, it has layout leftovers for the Slots and Pachinko bonus stages! What happened to catch my eye is the layout for the Pachinko stage at 0x8BCE6; It was originally a chunk wider from the looks of it.

EDIT: Neo pointed out to me that this is the exact same layout as the one Sonic 3C 0408. Still interesting though.

 

Yeah, that layout might be a match for the one in the 0408 proto. It actually has art and block/chunk defs in there, so you might want to try using those instead, and indeed, it was wider originally.

I didn't know there were layouts left over in S3A, though! I am very interested in the slots one in particular, since it's different in all of 0408/0517/S&K.

 

Here you go!

The foreground doesn't exist as IIRC it is stored specially somewhere else. I'm not sure if the special data for that stage exists in S3A.

The background did have something though: with the S&K chunk/art defs, two chunks containing tiny spinning planets are placed along with the casino slot, and that seems to be it. It repeats once, oddly. In the real game, the VRAM seems to spew all over... Boring stuff.

 

Ah, right, just the chunk layout is a bit boring without and art and defs to go with it. I was hoping the actual special block layout was in there somewhere. One wonders if the unused object-based point cage was ever used in an early draft of the stage.

 

So... I'm navigating facebook and suddenly somebody in one of the groups I'm a member of posts this:

What am I looking at...? I don't recall ever seeing this anywhere.

 

Probably a custom cabinet with a pc running some emulator front end.

 

Likely one of those homemade "MAME cabinets" that run on nothing but a Raspberry Pi or some random old Pentium 4 board.

 

It's a custom cabinet.

 

I can't help but feel like I've seen this before. Not the cabinet but at least that menu. I can't for the life of me remember where though.

 

Game Center CX interviews Yuji Naka and, lo and behold:



He shows a background rotation demo he made for Sonic 1's Special Stage! =O

 

I think he meant specifically the location of the video file. Like you said, seeking is slow, and having a huge file between common files would only make times worse.

 

Aaaand there goes a new official art:



"Sonic Cafe Selection" is a special CD with the music that plays on Sonic's new cafe in Tokyo.

As it can be read on the cover, is not for sale. It's a raffle prize for Fire & Ice japanese buyers.

 

Quoting ICEKnight's post... Is the rotated image in question a picture of of Santa Claus with Japanese letters on top? Perhaps a digital greetings card?

If anything, the test ROM in question would have been dated around December 1990.

 

Any idea whats on it?