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Sara

Programmer at XSEED
Verified
Oct 30, 2017
21
Buffalo, NY
It perhaps doesn't help that finding an unused stage in an old Mario game simply isn't that exciting due to the way Mario stages are themed rather than completely distinct. The stuff that could be out there to find simply isn't likely to be as interesting as a Wood Zone or a Hidden Palace Zone, unless we were to find scrapped levels in a prototype of a more modern Mario title. Unused content is always interesting in its own way, but it's the big mysteries surrounding Sonic unused content that really made me invest myself in the Sonic scene back then, and I'm sure that's true for a lot of people.
 
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Deleted member 12790

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It perhaps doesn't help that finding an unused stage in an old Mario game simply isn't that exciting due to the way Mario stages are themed rather than completely distinct. The stuff that could be out there to find simply isn't likely to be as interesting as a Wood Zone or a Hidden Palace Zone, unless we were to find scrapped levels in a prototype of a more modern Mario title. Unused content is always interesting in its own way, but it's the big mysteries surrounding Sonic unused content that really made me invest myself in the Sonic scene back then, and I'm sure that's true for a lot of people.

Early mario world screenshots show a pretty big change in appearance of the game, so it'd be incredibly interesting for that to pop up. But if Mario World did change drastically during development, Nintendo didn't publish pictures showing it. Part of what drives the Sonic community is that Sega had to blast Sonic from all corners constantly during their rise. That meant they put out screenshots and leant prototypes to places pretty constantly, so there has been a mountain of screenshots with numerous changes in them going to the very beginning. That's actually how the entire scene got started -- it was originally a group of people online coming together to form websites dedicated to documenting all the weird sonic screenshots that had beta stuff in them. Stuff like this:

krcYsHE.jpg


Before any prototypes were unearthed, we all knew what we were looking for. I remember when the Simon Wai prototype showed up, I had already been a member of the scene for several years. It was nuts because all of the sudden, some dude had a cart with all the levels and screenshots we had been documenting, and emulation was basically brand new, having really only taken off in late 1997. Then, like a couple of weeks after that dude showed his cart online, boom, it was dumped. I didn't even know you could dump carts back then, that was all so... new. Like, it was seriously underground stuff at the time. So when the Simon Wai prototype showed up, everyone was out of their minds nuts because we already knew what we were searching for. It was more like "holy shit, THAT is where this screenshot comes from!" kinds of moments.

Although, to be sure, the Simon Wai prototype also was amazing because of all the stuff we didn't have pictures of, like the Green Hill Zone port, or Wood Zone. The tentpole releases of this scene always seem to hinge on that factor -- if they can show the public something they've never seen before. Sonic development just feels outright mysterious, like a treasure chest of unseen things. I feel like Sonic Crackers was the epitome of that. There has been quite literally enough lost content that has been found over the years to fill out an entire game's worth of stuff. I say literally, because people have been doing that, making new fan games out of lost content, for years now.
 

Sapiens

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
1,044
Popped this into my megaSD - really cheesy early 90s stuff. Always wanted to know what that demo was all about and if it was running on an MD or not. Now I know.

Honest question - were people relatively impressed by this back then or not?
 
Oct 29, 2017
4,721
Yeah the early builds for SMW are likely lost to time. The Sonic scene got very lucky with the way Sega did things back then. And I'm super appreciative because I love Sonic too :)

Worth noting that Nintendo are the best archivists in the entire industry. They've kept literally everything (barring a few things that were accidentally lost, like the original Link's Awakening source code - evidenced by how LADX shows signs of having been reverse engineered from a retail ROM of the original B&W LA), they even kept all of their original paper-based level design documentation and design documents! (They actually do make these public on occasion, as was the case when they released Starfox 2 on the SNES mini). They were the only major Japanese developer/publisher that really kept complete archives, dating all the way back to when they first starting making electronic games (hell, they actually just released a previously un-released English version of Sky Skipper, a game from 1981 that was apparantly lost to time until it got a surprise release on Switch last year!)

Hell, they even keep a full and complete archive of not only their own games, but also the games of all third party developers who have ever submitted builds to Nintendo for testing and manufacturing! (Case in point? Trials of Mana's English localisation could only happen thanks to Nintendo providing the code for all the different in-development versions of the original Seiken Densetsu 3 - That's why Collection of Mana remained exclusive to Switch, the code was Nintendo's property - fun fact, the actual retail Collection of Mana also contains various beta and debug versions of Trials of Mana hidden within its code!)

Nintendo no doubt have literally everything archived; so none of the early builds of SMW have actually been lost (hell, some of the unused SMW content actually ended up in the GBA version's code too). It's all just kept locked up in Nintendo's vaults.
 
Last edited:
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Popped this into my megaSD - really cheesy early 90s stuff. Always wanted to know what that demo was all about and if it was running on an MD or not. Now I know.

Honest question - were people relatively impressed by this back then or not?

Yes, seeing full motion video on a console back then was very impressive. CD-Roms in general were impressive. Hearing that kind of music coming out of a video game console was pretty insane. I remember when I got my Sega CD, obviously I got Sonic CD with it, but it also came packed with Sewer Shark. While I played Sonic CD non-stop of course, Sewer Shark was actually the show stopper. My parents threw a big christmas party with all the extended family (like 20 aunts and uncles and their kids) and they all would come into my bedroom to see sewer shark, and flip their shit. And this was christmas 1993, apparently 2 years after this demo was made.

Not only is the FMV impressive for the time, the scaling effects were impressive hardware. The Sega CD's ASIC works like a hardware blitter on an area of memory that the Sega CD and Genesis share, 128kb each. By flipping between the two, you can use it like a framebuffer. The Sega CD can take art from its vram and stamp it onto the frame buffer like a direct color framebuffer. Not only that, it can scale, skew, rotate, etc each stamp.

For that time period, being able to do all that was insanely impressive, and is why the Sega CD could do stuff like this:







But to answer your question, yes, absolutely, seeing a CD rom attachment doing FMV with CDDA dated december 1991 like that demo is would have blown people's minds.
 
Oct 29, 2017
4,721
Popped this into my megaSD - really cheesy early 90s stuff. Always wanted to know what that demo was all about and if it was running on an MD or not. Now I know.

Honest question - were people relatively impressed by this back then or not?

Yes, it was very impressive tech for the time. Keep in mind that the SNES couldn't actually do sprite scaling and rotation, only background scaling/rotation. And it was the first console that could actually render FMV. So this was all stuff that the SNES, or any other contemporary hardware couldn't do.
 

Sapiens

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
1,044
The mega cd being capable of scaling background layers and the sprite layer - how did the sprite scaling mesh with things like sprite limitations (80 total and 20 per scan line)? As a sprite was enlarged, did you have to use more sprites to build that larger sprite from the "frame-buffered" tile sets? I imagine there was a lot of sprite management techniques going on and probably why a lot of devs never bothered.

Also, if you used larger sprites on the MD, did that limit the total number of sprites available? Like, could I use 80 8x8 sprites or 80 32x32 sprites, or were there tradeoffs? Like, if I had a small sprite I wanted to scale up, could I start with the 8x8 shrunken sprite built by the megaCD ASICs and then use larger sprites as I got scaled up tile sets without limiting my sprite numbers? I know the ASIC was still limited by the VDP but I was always curious about these technicalities.
 

Meatwad

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
3,653
USA
Worth noting that Nintendo are the best archivists in the entire industry. They've kept literally everything (barring a few things that were accidentally lost, like the original Link's Awakening source code - evidenced by how LADX shows signs of having been reverse engineered from a retail ROM of the original B&W LA), they even original paper-based level design documentation and design documents! (They actually do make these public on occasion, as was the case when they released Starfox 2 on the SNES mini). They were the only major Japanese developer/publisher that really kept complete archives, dating all the way back to when they first starting making electronic games (hell, they actually just released a previously un-released English version of Sky Skipper, a game from 1981 that was apparantly lost to time until it got a surprise release on Switch last year!)

Hell, they even keep a full and complete archive of not only their own games, but also the games of all third party developers who have ever submitted builds to Nintendo for testing and manufacturing! (Case in point? Trials of Mana's English localisation could only happen thanks to Nintendo providing the code for all the different in-development versions of the original Seiken Densetsu 3 - That's why Collection of Mana remained exclusive to Switch, the code was Nintendo's property - fun fact, the actual retail Collection of Mana also contains various beta and debug versions of Trials of Mana hidden within its code!)

Nintendo no doubt have literally everything archived; so none of the early builds of SMW have actually been lost (hell, some of the unused SMW content actually ended up in the GBA version's code too). It's all just kept locked up in Nintendo's vaults.

Hmmm This is actually good to know. There must be so much amazing stuff locked up in those vaults
 

Meatwad

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
3,653
USA
Yes, it was very impressive tech for the time. Keep in mind that the SNES couldn't actually do sprite scaling and rotation, only background scaling/rotation. And it was the first console that could actually render FMV. So this was all stuff that the SNES, or any other contemporary hardware couldn't do.

It's stupid now but I actually wanted a Sega CD for the FMV games. The idea of "Playable" Movies made me excited for some reason
 
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Deleted member 12790

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To give a technical frame of reference, this was a significant step up in power from the Sega Genesis alone, which was also a significant step up in power from The Turbo Grafx CD. So the only other CD add-on on the market, this blew away.

A Sega Genesis with a Sega CD is actually a pretty beastly piece of hardware. You have dual 68000 processors, one at 7 mhz, the other at 14 mhz. This was 1993, either of those processors alone would have been impressive. It's just that not a lot of games really harnessed what the Sega CD could do. I mentioned in my Blast Processing video for Digital Foundry that you can turn the Genesis itself into a defacto dedicated graphics chip and run all your game logic on the Sega CD and do crazy things if you really really write some low level code.
 
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The mega cd being capable of scaling background layers and the sprite layer - how did the sprite scaling mesh with things like sprite limitations (80 total and 20 per scan line)? As a sprite was enlarged, did you have to use more sprites to build that larger sprite from the "frame-buffered" tile sets? I imagine there was a lot of sprite management techniques going on and probably why a lot of devs never bothered.

The Sega CD doesn't have sprites, nor does it have a graphics chip. It has an ASIC, a chip which manipulates memory. All the drawing is still being done by the Sega Genesis. The Sega CD itself is seen by the Sega Genesis as though it was a game cartridge inserted and addressed in RAM. The Sega CD has two 128kb memory buffers, and a switch. When the switch is in one way, the Sega Genesis sees one of the banks, as though it was a cartridge, and the Sega CD sees the other, as RAM. The Sega CD can freely write to that 128kb bank in any way it wants, independently of the Sega Genesis. The Sega CD has it's own 68000 processor and an ASIC to accomplish all this. The Sega CD also has it's own VRAM.

The Sega CD doesn't work with background layers or sprites or any of that. It has a buffer it can write to, in any way it wants. Think of it like opening a new file in paint. It can paste stuff around, stretch it, scale it, etc. It can do this over and over again, pasting new stuff on top of old stuff. How it arranges the frame is however it decides. It could make the frame buffer a sprite sheet, like this:

odwhdR8.png


Or it could draw a complete, complex scene on the frame buffer, like it's doing in Soul Star, where the entire screen is being rendered this way.

Once it's done with it's buffer, it can flip the switch, and the Genesis can see this as though it were a cart. The Genesis can then load the graphics in memory on the "cart" that is the Sega CD, as though it were loading graphics off of a cartridge, into VRAM. Once in VRAM, it can treat the art just like any other tiles. It can use them to build a sprite, or it can use them as background tiles one on of its planes. The Sega CD's memory can also provide nametables for the planes, so it can arrange the tiles back into a full screen image. This double buffering system lets the Sega CD stream data, albeit at a lower framerate. This is how it does things like Sonic CD's special stages.

In fact, however, because the Sega CD's memory was treated like a frame buffer, it wasn't limited to Mode 7 stuff like the SNES was. It could have honestly done things like Galaxy Force II, albeit at a much lower scale.
 

Sapiens

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
1,044
The Sega CD doesn't have sprites, nor does it have a graphics chip. It has an ASIC, a chip which manipulates memory. All the drawing is still being done by the Sega Genesis. The Sega CD itself is seen by the Sega Genesis as though it was a game cartridge inserted and addressed in RAM. The Sega CD has two 128kb memory buffers, and a switch. When the switch is in one way, the Sega Genesis sees one of the banks, as though it was a cartridge, and the Sega CD sees the other, as RAM. The Sega CD can freely write to that 128kb bank in any way it wants, independently of the Sega Genesis. The Sega CD has it's own 68000 processor and an ASIC to accomplish all this. The Sega CD also has it's own VRAM.

The Sega CD doesn't work with background layers or sprites or any of that. It has a buffer it can write to, in any way it wants. Think of it like opening a new file in paint. It can paste stuff around, stretch it, scale it, etc. It can do this over and over again, pasting new stuff on top of old stuff. How it arranges the frame is however it decides. It could make the frame buffer a sprite sheet, like this:

odwhdR8.png


Or it could draw a complete, complex scene on the frame buffer, like it's doing in Soul Star, where the entire screen is being rendered this way.

Once it's done with it's buffer, it can flip the switch, and the Genesis can see this as though it were a cart. The Genesis can then load the graphics in memory on the "cart" that is the Sega CD, as though it were loading graphics off of a cartridge, into VRAM. Once in VRAM, it can treat the art just like any other tiles. It can use them to build a sprite, or it can use them as background tiles one on of its planes. The Sega CD's memory can also provide nametables for the planes, so it can arrange the tiles back into a full screen image. This double buffering system lets the Sega CD stream data, albeit at a lower framerate. This is how it does things like Sonic CD's special stages.

In fact, however, because the Sega CD's memory was treated like a frame buffer, it wasn't limited to Mode 7 stuff like the SNES was. It could have honestly done things like Galaxy Force II, albeit at a much lower scale.

So, if I want to scale a sprite from a tiny dot to a full screen object on the MD using the CD as a buffer for the tile sets, how would you manage that on the MD VDP? What goes into that? Do I end up using all the VDP resources for sprites on the MD doing that one full screen sprite (which is now composed of multiple large sprites at this point, I assume)?
 
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So, if I want to scale a sprite from a tiny dot to a full screen object on the MD using the CD as a buffer for the tile sets, how would you manage that on the MD VDP? What goes into that? Do I end up using all the VDP resources for sprites on the MD doing that one full screen sprite (which is now composed of multiple large sprites at this point, I assume)?

Yeah, if you'd like to do full screen scaling, you're going to need to eat up your VRAM to do it. You actually don't have enough VRAM to draw an entire screen of unique pixels, but after a certain point you can use entire tiles as 8x8 solid color pixels, which would free up some VRAM. You would "paint" the sprite as a nametable on a plane. The nametable definition that would arrange the tiles would be built by the Sega CD's 68000 and placed into that 128kb buffer to be transfered over. The Sega Genesis would move the tiles into vram, then read the nametable from the 128kb buffer to draw it full screen.

This is why many games keep scaling and rotating elements to things like a floor or ceiling, as they inherently don't have to fill the entire screen. They can then split the remaining buffer up into areas to account for tiles to represent scaling sprites.

The bottle neck for the entire process is the transfer of tiles from VRAM to memory and back again. It's more of a limitation on the Sega Genesis than the Sega CD itself.
 

Sapiens

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
1,044
Yeah, if you'd like to do full screen scaling, you're going to need to eat up your VRAM to do it. You actually don't have enough VRAM to draw an entire screen of unique pixels, but after a certain point you can use entire tiles as 8x8 solid color pixels, which would free up some VRAM. You would "paint" the sprite as a nametable on a plane. The nametable definition that would arrange the tiles would be built by the Sega CD's 68000 and placed into that 128kb buffer to be transfered over. The Sega Genesis would move the tiles into vram, then read the nametable from the 128kb buffer to draw it full screen.

This is why many games keep scaling and rotating elements to things like a floor or ceiling, as they inherently don't have to fill the entire screen. They can then split the remaining buffer up into areas to account for tiles to represent scaling sprites.

The bottle neck for the entire process is the transfer of tiles from VRAM to memory and back again. It's more of a limitation on the Sega Genesis than the Sega CD itself.
It's interesting how much better something like SoulStar runs compared to NightStriker. The background layer scaling on SS is pretty smooth - it's too bad the game is a complete chore, but it really makes NS look completely amatuerish.
 

tommyv2

Member
Nov 6, 2017
1,425
Sonic 1 and Sonic CD are the only Sonic games I love, so this is such exciting news! I can't get enough of this stuff.
 
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It's interesting how much better something like SoulStar runs compared to NightStriker. The background layer scaling on SS is pretty smooth - it's too bad the game is a complete chore, but it really makes NS look completely amatuerish.

I don't think any of this stuff is amateurish, this is writing as low level as you go. This kind of hardware interaction is what the Sega CD was basically built for, if you did everything completely by hand and used virtually every part of both the Genesis and Sega CD at once, in sync. The reason so few devs did this, is because it really requires knowing every thing inside and out.

The number of calculations one does affects the framerate in this case. NightStriker is a port of an arcade game, who knows, perhaps it is running way more calculations for reasons that aren't obvious that slows it down. Like one thing you notice right away is that there's no parallax scrolling in Soul Star.

I'm not saying either is better than the other, I'm saying both are extremely impressive.
 

Saikyo

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,332
There's still more stuff out there, too. There is one major discovery left, the holy grail of the scene, and it's not totally out of the question that it'll surface.
You are telling me, they could find...
...sonic schoolhouse beta?
Nah, you mean that sonic 1 tech demo right?
 

Sapiens

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
1,044
I don't think any of this stuff is amateurish, this is writing as low level as you go. This kind of hardware interaction is what the Sega CD was basically built for, if you did everything completely by hand and used virtually every part of both the Genesis and Sega CD at once, in sync. The reason so few devs did this, is because it really requires knowing every thing inside and out.

The number of calculations one does affects the framerate in this case. NightStriker is a port of an arcade game, who knows, perhaps it is running way more calculations for reasons that aren't obvious that slows it down. Like one thing you notice right away is that there's no parallax scrolling in Soul Star.

I'm not saying either is better than the other, I'm saying both are extremely impressive.

Only saying it "looked" amateur in comparison. They really are night and day in terms of accomplishment, imo.

SS not being Core's first stab at using the MCD's ASIC probably had a lot to do with it - I believe all of the MCD output made great use of it, with Jaguar being the first.
 
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I seriously didn't mean anything in particular, I'm just saying you can never count out something huge popping up, there are still screenshots and stuff from builds we have never seen before. There are still lots of things with documented evidence that haven't been sourced yet.
 

Daysean

Member
Nov 15, 2017
7,383
I seriously didn't mean anything in particular, I'm just saying you can never count out something huge popping up, there are still screenshots and stuff from builds we have never seen before. There are still lots of things with documented evidence that haven't been sourced yet.
Ah i get it, known unknowns
 
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... How is there one major discovery left that's a "holy grail" but is "nothing in general?" lol

Because I'm not being coy and saying there is a bead on anything in specific. I'm saying there are lots of pictures of builds of games that we've documented for like 20 years now, which we still have no idea where they came from. Those could be from one specific build, they could be from many, who knows. If, one day, one of them shows up, they'd be heralded as a holy grail, but they might not even exist anymore. Who knows? The sonic scene keeps on trucking.
 

andymcc

Member
Oct 25, 2017
26,271
Columbus, OH
Because I'm not being coy and saying there is a bead on anything in specific. I'm saying there are lots of pictures of builds of games that we've documented for like 20 years now, which we still have no idea where they came from. Those could be from one specific build, they could be from many, who knows. If, one day, one of them shows up, they'd be heralded as a holy grail, but they might not even exist anymore. Who knows? The sonic scene keeps on trucking.

in your opinion, what WOULD be the biggest holy grail?

for me it is probably the Sonic 1 CES prototype or a Sonic 1 build with the weird UFO inhabited Marble Zone
 

Cian

One Winged Slayer
Member
Feb 17, 2018
576
Dare I get my hopes up for even just a whiff of the legendary R2? I know it's very likely it got scrapped during concept phases and didn't actually have that much dev time, but imagine if there's even a single tile in there.

6xQSuH9.png
 

andymcc

Member
Oct 25, 2017
26,271
Columbus, OH
Dare I get my hopes up for even just a whiff of the legendary R2? I know it's very likely it got scrapped during concept phases and didn't actually have that much dev time, but imagine if there's even a single tile in there.

6xQSuH9.png

this is my hope too.

i think the only thing seen from it, outside of the ending animation, is some very basic concept art, right?
 
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in your opinion, what WOULD be the biggest holy grail?

for me it is probably the Sonic 1 CES prototype or a Sonic 1 build with the weird UFO inhabited Marble Zone

Probably the Sonic build with Sparkling Zone, Clock Ork Zone, the cave background for labyrinth zone, the ufos, the rolling ball in green hill zone. We have lots of footage now of the CES prototype, it's just a multi-scrolling demo. Seems neat, but I think there would be more to compare and contrast with the build that has different artwork and level layouts for lots and lots of zones.

Barring all that, maybe one of the super early test builds with gameplay that eventually went on to become Ristar. Like something as early in development as Sonic Crackers is to Knuckles Chaotix.
 
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this is my hope too.

i think the only thing seen from it, outside of the ending animation, is some very basic concept art, right?

There's always the theory that parts of the Little Planet icon correspond to R2. I never believed it myself, though, and people used it as evidence of dust hill in Sonic CD lol.
 

SrirachaX

Member
Apr 12, 2019
236
This is so exciting. I remember as a kid wondering why the screenshot of the title screen in the Sonic 2 manual (loved reading game manuals back then) looked different from the one ingame, and then I discovered that that shot came from an earlier build on a fansite. Then later down the road I found Sonic Retro where I could take in all of these hidden Sonic gems
 

BaconHat

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,097
Where will be livestream reveal be shown? Can't find a link in the op to tab it in advance.

I would love if there was a book about the story of the sonic hacking community. It was one of the first communities I discovered on the Internet when I was a teenager and they never stops to amaze me
Yeah, this would really be a great read. There's so much stuff that seems to have happened in the sonic scene for so many games and so much technical data that would make it an really interesting book.
 

apathetic

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,722
Man, I love both the US and World soundtracks to Sonic CD:

I'm so glad to see more people with that opinion now. Got so tired of defending my enjoyment of the US soundtrack to people while also thinking the other one was also good and not just cursing it as a horibla change that the US dun fucked up.