The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

Wouldn't that be pretty useless until someone wrote actual code to implement the newly-available functionality? @.@

 

How long did it take for somebody to make a game for the SNES CD? A month?

 

Isn't that what the Sega Virtua Processor is?

 

Don't know if this is of any value, but came across some Sonic footage taken by an EGM cameraman from a gaming event in March of 1991 (Tokyo Toy Show? No idea).

http://youtu.be/7jcmx3trH0g

Footage of Sonic starts at 13:23. We get a good look at the "His Name is Sonic" hand-drawn emblem, but unfortunately we only get a severe off-camera angled shot of Marble Zone.

Another video released by this guy also has the only known footage of the scrapped Sphynx miniboss from MegaMan 4, so if anyone's interested, there's probably plenty of beta footage available for other early 90's titles hidden in his archives.

EDIT: I don't remember a spiked chandelier directly after the moving platforms that come in and out of the walls anywhere in Marble Zone. Beta layout?

DOUBLE EDIT: Yep, I just took a look and this is definitely beta layout footage. It seems to be MZ Act 1 in the area right before you get out of the underground portion. They just haven't added the chained anchor (or whatever it's called) that you can jump on, and in its place is a spike chandelier. Not a huge change, but one that definitely made MZ slightly less frustrating than it still is.

 

Sorry for the double-post but the second video also includes some Sonic footage: Scrap Brain auto-demo and a costumed dancing Sonic. Starts at 5:28.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWrAG5wdrE

EDIT: SBZ's layout is identical to the final version as far as I can see.

 

This is exactly how I expected "classic" EGM to be. A bunch of confused middle-aged men completely out of their depth.

I am relatively confident this is after March 1991. At one point you can see a bit the April 1991 edition of EGM on camera, which means we're talking April/May at the earliest. You could probably work out if any of those photos actually made it into the magazine if you were so inclined.



There's nothing in that second video to suggest it isn't the final version's demo on a loop. It's actually the Japanese revision with the scrolling Green Hill Zone clouds, so we may even be talking post-release here.


Always interesting though. Good to see EGM had their priorities straight by recording people taking photos, rather than... idk... games or something.

 

Some kind of garbled scrolling or background animation in Lava Reef zone. This is from Sonic 3 alone, and it interestingly, does not match the final background at all. It only changes when you move around which probably means it is scrolling. Sorry about poor GIF quality.

 

Another sales update bit. There's a site called The Magic Box that has a Platinum Videogame Chart for the US, listing games that sold over one million since 1995 (it was last updated in 2007). It has a handful of Sonic games listed there.

Sonic 3 (GEN) - 1.02M
Sonic & Knuckles (GEN) - 1.24M
Sonic Adventure (DC) - 1.27M
Sonic Advance (GBA) - 1.21M
Sonic Adventure 2 Battle (GC) - 1.44M
Sonic Mega Collection (GC) - 1.38M
Sonic Mega Collection (PS2) - 1.44M
Sonic Heroes (PS2) - 1.08M

If we line these figures up with the existing sales data we do have...

Sonic 3 + Sonic & Knuckles:
1.02M in the US for S3 + 1.24M in the US for S&K = 2.26M in the US for S3 + S&K
4M total - 2.26M in the US = 1.74M (Europe/Japan)

Sonic Adventure:
2.5M total - 1.27M in the US = 1.23M (Europe/Japan)

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle's 1.44M sales data seems to be the only available concrete sales data we have for Adventure 2's sales as a whole, regardless the DC original or the GC port.

Sonic Mega Collection's 1.38M sales (on the GC) is also the only the sales data we have specifically for the original GC-exclusive release. The Sega IR reports sales numbers all specifically refer to or add in sales of the Plus multiplatform release for the PS2 and Xbox. When added to the cumulative Sega IR sales we have for Mega Collection (Plus)'s sales across all platforms (3,080,300), this actually puts Mega Collection at a whopping 4,468,300 (and virtually all of the sales were within the US alone!).

Planning on adding these to the wiki over the next few days, but if you have any doubts / concerns about the sources, feel free to voice them.

 

Hey, it looks like another Sonic game may be heading towards MAME:

 

How?

I've legit never seen an LCD game emulated.

 

Go download MAME then?

 

So is the Sonic game above just being remade for MAME then (i.e. not emulated)?

I was just feeling that if it was emulated we would have had LCD dumps during the first McDonald's wave when Heroes wad new.

 

Nope, they're emulated, because that's what MAME is all about!

[quote ]I was just feeling that if it was emulated we would have had LCD dumps during the first McDonald's wave when Heroes wad new.[/quote]If you send them to the MAME team they'll scan them, dump them and get them playable. Same with any LCD game or, well, any video game.

 

So over on Sega Retro, I've been generating lists:

http://segaretro.org/Category:Lists_of_games

as well as helping to identify missing things, as a side effect it shows patterns. One thing I've noticed is Nintendo's product code scheme - unlike Sega which used numbers to identify publishers and games, Nintendo's are more... "readable"

http://segaretro.org/List_of_Nintendo_GameCube_games_in_the_United_States

as an example, Super Monkey Ball (US) on the GameCube:

DOL-P-GMBE

DOL - is short for the GameCube's internal code name, "Dolphin" (yes Wii uses "RVL" for "Revolution")
P - is... something
G - is... also something
MB - is a two character identifier for the game. In this case MB = Monkey Ball.
E - I think is region. US games usually get E.


it's clever because in many cases you can almost work out the game from the product code alone. Examples:

DOL-P-GCTE - Crazy Taxi
DOL-P-GFZE - F-Zero GX
DOL-P-GEAE - Skies of Arcadia Legends, known as Eternal Arcadia Legends in Japan


this doesn't always work - for later games in particular they seem to opt for almost random letters presumably as other codes were taken, but you can't help but wonder

DOL-P-GXEE

Sonic Riders here was called "Sonic Extreme" in a former life - a clue??


Unfortunately the only Sonic prototype name I can think that circulated in recent years is Sonic Wildfire, later known as Sonic and the Secret Rings. Sadly the product code is "RVL-P-RSRE".



Still, I thought this was neat.

 

Old CNN report of pre-launch US Dreamcast:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SqocFElidKI
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SqocFElidKI

 

The Cutting Room Floor has found some unknown sprites for Tails from Sonic Crackers... Inside a proto of Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyou Toitsusen.



More in their site: https://tcrf.net/Proto:Yuu_Yuu_Hakusho:_Makyou_Toitsusen

 

Oh man I wish we could have a better quality to see some of that Sonic art shown at 1:06.

 

When did they find this? does it only contain sprite data for Tails? damn I want to know more.

This is why I don't like this topic sometimes, valuable and worthy of discussion stuff like new Crackers data of all things gets shoved off into a dark corner of this site and never really gets talked about or even known about because nobody wants to check a 332+ page topic!

If I had any say I'd close this thread, let the wiki people add all the information so far, and start a new thread.