- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
If Sega couldn't find it for inclusion in Sonic Mega Collection 20+ years ago it's probably gone.One piece of sonic media that I hope comes up one day is the 1990 TGS proto of sonic 1. That still to this day has not been found.
Saying that though, people at Retro found something interesting a couple of months ago:
SpikyStars said:Not quite sure where to put this, so I'll put it in this thread:
At offset 0x40C0 in Revision 0 of Sonic 1 (In Revision 1 I believe it'd be offset 0x40C2, and in the prototype we currently have, offset 0x311C), there's a set of demo input data that appears to be unreferenced. I used BizHawk to set a breakpoint at this address and ran through the title screen and credit demos, without the breakpoint being hit. I also don't see anywhere in the code that references it.
A recording of the demo data from the prototype can be seen here, courtesy of MDTravis:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=S8_IAfQbUu0(I've also uploaded one using Revision 0 as a base instead -- the demo data is the exact same, but if you're curious, it's below)
The demo inputs seem to consist of a series of walking to the right and stopping periodically, with a single jump partway through, and then it ends with Sonic running at full speed to the right.
I'm wary of jumping to conclusions or making unfounded guesses, so apologies if I've jumped the gun on this. If this data has a perfectly normal use somewhere in the game, I'd be happy to know and will gladly redact this post.
But if it is truly unused, what's very interesting about the data is that it seems to line up with what is known about the Tokyo Toy Show demo.
Most of the screenshots of the demo feature Sonic walking (moving at a slower speed than would trigger the running animation), with Sonic only seen running in the screenshots near the presumed end of the demo.
We know that Sonic stopped before an airborne/mid-jump enemy, and then ran underneath it.
We also know that Sonic also jumped, dodging another enemy that was on the ground.
If it is that old of a leftover... hopefully this is useful information to further our understanding of that demo.
I wouldn't completely rule out that it was used for a different purpose and only superficially resembles the TTS demo though. It's hard to say.
Responses:
Can someone wire the famous TTS recreation with demo functionality to see how well this would fit? This has me Georging my Curiousity right now
Conceptually it's interesting and I want to agree with your theory. since we know very little of TTS's assets as none appear in any build my first instinct is to be skeptical but this does really seem to fit.
Someone with know-how really needs to throw that input set into a TTS recreation and record it
As a side note, if that is TTS against all odds, wow that demo is way shorter than I thought it was
I'm willing to believe it is in fact the TTS data. This isn't the first time TTS leftovers were just staring us in the face this whole time. And it comes after the demo pointers, rather than bunched with the actual final demo data. Which would make sense at time when they were only referencing a single demo.
Only question is if Sonic in TTS was slower because that might fuck up the demo. Otherwise yup dibs on TTS leftover