The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

Fans of Gemerl should be excited to know he is now to obtainable in the current Sonic Speed Simulator event. I believe this is the first time he has had a 3D model. Vanilla and Chocola also appear as NPCs, and I think this is Vanilla's first 3D model too? I would love for someone to extract these models.

Spoiler: 3D Render

 

Chocola is a "Fast Friend", not an NPC, basically the highest tier of Pets in this game that you'll mainly be using since they all have the highest stats possible, unless a regular friend you also have simply has a better stat. I wouldn't be surprised if Vanilla doesn't also become a skin next week.

I'm a fan of Gemerl, but I'm far from excited.
These are the missions you have to do to unlock him: basically a tutorial for the effects Pets and Trails have.


They're all extremely basic. Basically, just spend enough Rings until you get a pet with a specific effect in a specific world. Vanilla is even standing by the vending machine with the required Chao. My problem?

I can't USE the vending machines. if I try to buy a pet or trail, it tells me I need to delete some or buy more space. Something I can't do, because...

I've got 366 too many Pets and Trails. This happened because I've been playing since basically Day 1 and have a collection to match, but since the "Rebirth" update that changed how you level up / fuse pets/trails (used to be individual pet levels that progressed with your own level + fusing only required having multiples of one pet and could be done at any time, now both require going to a machine and using Red Star Rings which are pretty damn rare), it's been IMPOSSIBLE to actually achieve that realistically for a collection my size - and I didn't know they would change how that was done otherwise I would have panicked and just evolved everything before that update.

Basically, if I wanted Gemerl, then I would just have to pay up. Which I'm not going to do because everyone insists I should delete my whole inventory, meaning nothing in this game actually has value, so why would I pay?

I'm not clear on if the "Chao School" event (and thus Gemerl) is staying permanently and eventually getting moved after the debut or not but unless they take litterally any of my feedback into account and give me an out (which I don't expect them to) I still won't be able to unlock him. And if it's not permanent then I'd have to pay anyways.

and two last points: There's a thread for Speed Simulator, and I think while technically this isn't the first "official" 3d model for Vanilla, we've never had one physically in game, because there's one in Sonic Rush's dialogue portraits.

 

Heh

 

I saw that and my jaw dropped at how elaborate it was, lol.

 

Alright... I found a fan website about Sonic stuff (It's called SonicScene, sonicscene.net)

And they have some scans of old magazine pages there and for some reason there's this scan of an old poster saying "Supersonic" and it's just the American version of Classic Sonic with a green background and right under Sonic it says "Hedgehog with attitude"

According to the website the poster is from a magazine called "Mean Machine SEGA" and it's from the 3rd issue of the magazine

From what I found, it seems it was British video-game magazine from the early 90's

Apparently internet Archive has scans of some of the magazines (I don't know if it has all the issues), one of them is Mean Machine SEGA issue 3 (https://archive.org/details/mean-ma...A - Issue 003/page/n195/mode/2up?view=theater) and I think the poster is legit/official, it's on page 186, I guess

It's not a huge deal, the poster is kinda boring in my opinion, but it's cool to see there's a poster not a lot of people and even fans have seen it before (Or at least I never saw it before)

 

Link to page 185/186:

https://archive.org/details/mean-ma...A - Issue 003/page/n185/mode/2up?view=theater

 

I love how his right hand is so big it hides his arm

 

psst
http://info.sonicretro.org
http://segaretro.org


Anyway this issue of Gamest came through overnight. It seems to be where Western mags took their early Sonic the Fighters screenshots from.

So here's some proof, if it were needed, that the original mockups weren't done in-engine. There's far too many pixels here for the Model 2.

 

I came across this video on my feed. It goes into the chao mechanics that not well documented, and expands research in ways I was not expecting; including the GBA tiny chao garden.

 

Mega Force issue 20 (pages 34-37) feature a build of Sonic CD that looks like it was built between 0.51 and 712. I know there's been a couple mentions of this issue on here, though they are very old and the links on those posts are as good as dead, so here's a repost.



The main thing about this is that it shows a signpost sprite that hasn't been seen in any of the dumped prototypes.

 

I wonder why he's frowning in that sign post?

That would've been a cool feature to have, maybe as a unique sign that appears when you beat the bad future version of a stage.

 

I feel like they were trying to make him look serious/determined or something, like how the American Kirby box art makes him look more angry in an attempt to portray the same feeling. Also them long ears lmao.

Additional fun fact: there's a sprite in the Backup RAM manager that looks an awful lot like that.



And as an aside, another additional fun fact is that the 1995 PC port has a different layout for this screen, and while the sprite is reused, it was scaled down.

 

Green Hill Zone Podcast have of late been posting a ton of Sonic-related arcade things that ultimately went unreleased, but were still patented by Sega.

Some choice highlights of these include several carnival games that were likely destined for Joypolis, a gamified whack-a-Eggman machine that was supposed to have some sort of VMU support, and my personal favourite of the bunch, a prize game in which a Sonic plush toy was going to be projectile launched out of the machine to winners by a cannon.

I once went down the rabbit hole of these on another patent database website, which sadly seems to have closed down a couple years ago. It's sometimes dizzying just how many things have been designed by Sega, but presumably either never passed testing or were cancelled due to budget cuts - GHZ are rightly bringing some of these to wider attention now.

 

https://retrocdn.net/File:MegaForce_FR_20.pdf

2015.

Nice find though. We do need more people looking through this stuff.

 

(reposted from Discord)


So... this thing. It exists. It sure is a thing. Absolutely. If only we could just have more looks at it.

Right next to my on-and-off research on Bit the Cupid, any media that involves Galaxy Force has been my white whale. And I'm not talking about the one you've played, I'm talking about the original. The original.

I've been sitting on this for a while, and I even contemplated making a thread about it and other title screens we've never seen at all (Charon is a very good example). For the past 8 months, I've been on-and-off looking at Galaxy Force to see if any trace of its title screen could be found, but it appears the original Galaxy Force is quite literally the Sega PCB community's version of a unicorn. Up until last week I couldn't even find a single image of a board, or even the title screen.

When I say rare, I mean rare. Out of all the videos you can find online, even the obscure 100 view ones, nearly ALL of them are of Galaxy Force II. Not a single example of Galaxy Force seems to have survived... or so I thought. It wasn't until I came across Sega Taikan Special (a Laserdisc longplay, pictured above) with a variant of its title screen and a very buried MAMEWorld thread from over 10 years ago showcasing the only surviving example of a board did I make any leeway: for a simple patch of a game that only existed for three months, it's shockingly buried.



You're looking at a technological thylacine, folks. One of the rarest images I might've seen.

The details on this one is also muddy, too. From what I've been able to gleam, apparently this board never got dumped despite the caper that ensued when trying to locate it, so we currently don't have the title screen's graphics in its raw form still. It should be easy to recreate using existing graphics, but I'm instead impressed by how elusive this single logo is to any eyes, even Sega's.

The documented differences are sparse, but IIRC the only real differences is just like After Burner, where there were bug fixes and additional graphics. I'm just impressed that this game got driven to near extinction in particular. Out of all the games people have dumped, Galaxy Force is one of those rare cases where we have nearly nothing on the damn thing. On Sega Retro it went for years without a screenshot of the title screen. I've since rectified that a few hours ago, although I'm not sure if the CRT screenshot would suffice.

 

I am losing my mind, I swear I've seen a similar pose in a signpost somewhere but I can't place it. Definitely not mania, not sonic 3 or its protos, and the sonic 2 protos have a mirrored one (ostensibly to save RAM space or something).

oh. I am a dummy. the final Sonic CD has the same pose but redrawn. lmao delet this pls

 

I mean you aren't wrong. Sonic CD's signpost has had three total changes so far

 

I saw the whole thing. It got a bit confusing at times, especially when it comes to the Tiny Chao Garden, because in the Loose Ends part it seems to call those results into question.

More importantly, though, what about the original Sonic Adventure 2 for Dreamcast?!

 

Chao Garden for the Dreamcast games are entirely different, they're basically different games.

 

You don't really need a powerful graphic workstation to render the kind of polygon shapes used in Sonic 1. The advantage of such a workstation would be the real time vertex editing tools, but the kind of polygon models used in Sonic 1 (trees, special stage background objects, green hill geometry) contain such simple hull meshes that you could plot the vertices by hand very easily, As far as rendering goes, basically any computer can, over time, plot pixels to an external file to render the output, even stuff which can't even display the render like a zx spectrum.