Is there a version of Sonic 1 SMS where Sonic doesn't die in the first GHZ1 demo?

I can say with absolute confidence that Sonic has always died to the Crabmeat in the Attract Mode after jumping, not moving, then running into it. At least in my NTSC Master System III.

(In fact I distinctly remember creating an entire headcanon about it when I was like 5 or 6 -- I thought they had recorded a child around my age playing it for the first time as they instructed them on how to play. Which would explain someone jumping but not pressing right, but then pressing right and dying)

EDIT: This video confirms it. Maybe it was different in the Game Gear?



EDIT3: And here's a video of the same thing happening on a PAL SMS1!



EDIT2: And there you go: In the Game Gear Attract Mode, Sonic doesn't die in GHZ, but does die in Jungle. This video is from the PAL version, too.

 

Now I’m curious what changes code or layout wise were made that caused this difference…

 

Look at the start position. I'm not an expert on these games, but he's definitely not starting in the same place between the two. The demo was recorded for the GG version. Nobody realized it didn't play the same on SMS, and/or nobody cared enough to change it.

 

Unlike Sonic 2 8-bit, Sonic 1 8-bit did have a decent few alterations to account for the screen crunch.

 

Sonic also flies off the ramp into the air on the Mega Drive version, so you could also be remembering that.

 

Er, there is no pal game gear, the game gear has it's own screen. There are small differences in the outside shell of the game gear, like a white boarder around the game gear logo in eu, but they're all the same inside (depending on revision, of course). Outside of region specific carts, all game gear games should play the same on all other game gears regardless of their region. Internally, the game gear uses RGB video at roughly 60 hz.

 

The ring monitor wasn't there originally. If you remove it Sonic successfully kills the crabmeat and goes toward the ramp but the demo starts reading garbage data soon after since an auto fadeout routine wasn't implemented in the SMS version.

 

So I'm thinking the Jungle Zone problem is the demo is recorded for the SMS version, there's a super slight difference between the platform he runs on just before the waterfall with the 1-up icon. In the SMS version, it doesn't dip down as far and thus is shorter. If you notice sonic runs down the vine, gets to the top, then slides back down because he's not holding right again. That's the difference, he would have run far enough to fall off the vine in the SMS version. He jumps right after in the GG version, intended to be the jump over the crabmeat, but it's what gets him over the vine in the GG version.

If this is the case, then he still would have died, though, because he would have run off the platform into the water. Perhaps the demo once ended earlier?

 

So, IIRC Yuzo Koshiro said once that the GG version of Sonic 1 was the lead, and the SMS version was a port, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the GG version was worked on longer than the SMS version. We know Arc Systems was the contract labor that they hired for the Game Gear version specifically, and another team did the SMS version. I wonder if this was similar to the way they supposedly divvied out labor between the MD and 8-Bit version of Sonic in general: where the SMS team would get small updates from the GG team to port from, but weren't in constant communication. If all that is the case, I wonder then if the layouts we see in the SMS version are the original level layouts that were in an earlier proto build of the GG version.

 

IIRC, Sonic’s jump velocity is slightly lower in GG versus SMS. So even if you ported over the exact same layout, demos would still inevitably desync.