disassemblies・digital archaeology・data preservation
Every now and then I strike gold: not another tile viewer or a meaningless data viewer, but something that is really interesting and unique. Riot City was such a gold mine: an English localization for a game that supposedly was onlty released in Japan, and an alternate, spicy ending! Oh, and I guess there’s some data viewers in there too…
The game responsible for bringing Mighty and Ray into the world also has a bunch of debugging tools, a ton of cut content, and an interesting development history tucked away.
Aurail is a half top-down, half quasi-3D mech based shooting game developed by Westone and published by Sega. It’s fun but a bit difficult to play (or more likely I just suck at it), and there’s a debug/cheat lurking just beneath the surface of the code…
In which we take a look at the House of the Dead cheats and how they can be used to load model data from unused characters.
Aside from disassembling games, I also occasionally enjoy assembling them. While I don’t have a lick of talent when it comes to the creative side of game creation, I love to work on the code and technical minutiae. In particular, I enjoy the Sega 16-bit era hardware, and while we have a great library for easy Megadrive development in the form of SGDK, the Mega CD is still a bit difficult to approach. I’d like to change that eventually…
Looks like I can finally cross “discovered a previously unknown debug code in a Sonic game” off my bucket list.
In the beginning, there was Virtua Fighter 2. And Suzuki Yu looked upon the game and saw that it was good. Thus were Fighting Vipers and Sonic the Fighters developed upon its game engine. And, lo, there dwelt within the code of each a bounty of debug tools!
So it looks like after the Waku Waku Patrol Car and the Popcorn Machine dumps, we may have another rare Sonic arcade game on our hands. This one was unreleased though, never making it past the location test stage.
News was posted today of the finding and dumping of an unreleased vertical shooter by Sega and Santos for the System 18 arcade hardware, called Hammer Away.