As mentioned by Xilla in the Supreme Topic. Thought it would be best to split it out. For the Sonic The Hedgeblog, I've made a bunch of comparison GIFs, but I'll post them all here now. Sonic using a death animation when hit, and more rings popping out of him, bouncing around. Sky High showing as "Sky Hi" Very different tileset Bouncing up comparison Question Mark Box Unused Boulder "enemy" Gliding Down Very different end panel Very different Aqua Lake Zone Different Background Similar spot, very different tiles A bridge that doesn't appear in the final.
Excellent work! A couple of wiki questions: Would this want to go on the Sonic 2 (8-bit) Development page, or the Comparisons page (with a link on the Development page)? The video itself still needs uploading to SegaRetro. https://segaretro.org/Sega_Shinsaku_Soft_Video_Vol._23 Do we have a preferred YouTube video downloader website/program, or will any do?
Looks like placeholder tiles were used in both Sky High and Aqua Lake until the proper art could be developed. Though those Sky High tiles were used in the auto-demo if I recall.
Unless we have a proto page for this specific build, put it on development. For a website, I usually use https://y2mate.is/ but it only goes up to 1080p for reference. But yes, it needs downloading and being uploaded to RetroCDN.
The one thing I'd recommend with youtube video grabbers is making sure its giving you the actual source from youtube (both audio and video) and not doing any funky reprocessing. Not sure if y2mate ticks those boxes or not. I like to use youtube-dl, but the tradeoff there is that its a command line utility, so its a bit more work to use.
It’s extraordinary rare that we find new prototype footage these days. Thanks so much for this awesome comparison.
I think there's a rotating palette on Sky High's bridge, spring and rings - it's purple. Also the timer doesn't stop when Sonic hits the signpost. And both an extra life and power sneakers monitor award a (broken?) invincibility.
The prototype bonus panel looks like it's based on American Robotnik art. The eyes are "angry" instead of round glasses, they're jet black instead of the typical blue and his moustache is curvier.
jDownloader2 allows you to download specific versions of the files uploaded, so you can choose the best option.
There is a graphical UI, I can't recall its name, but I'm using it sometimes on my PC. Edit: YouTube-dlg if I recall correctly
This is fascinating stuff - as well as the obvious things like Aqua Lake Zone's completely different look and a better look at the older Green Hill-esque Sky High Zone, I love how you can clearly see the game's struggling to keep up with displaying the level correctly when Sonic bounces off a spring at high speed in the Under Ground Zone portion. Also, fascinating to see that enemies seemed to explode when Sonic touched them regardless of whether he's spinning or not, though in the latter case they still damage him as expected. Having seen the Sonic Chaos protos from a while back with all their various soundtrack changes, I'm surprised how finalised its predecessor's soundtrack apparently was at this early stage - I didn't hear any obvious differences from the final tracks for all three of the showcased Zones...!
