Today, I'm releasing 14 Pico protos, 3 Saturn-related dumps and 3 Megadrive prototypes.

The Pico crap is available here.

The Saturn stuff is: an unreleased Saturn BIOS version, some weird Test Menu and a CD emulator chip, all available here.

The most interesting prototypes, however, are the Megadrive ones:





Early prototypes of Nightmare Circus (a very rare game, ask any collector!), X-perts, and Ecco II.

All of these, except Ecco, were generously donated by Kevtris (thanks man), in the form of EPROM dumps. I had lots of fun matching unlabelled EPROMs together.

But, the most interesting is the Ecco one. It comes from the QA archives released a month ago. The reason for the delay was so that the biggest Ecco fan on the planet, Epicenter, could work on finding all the crazy differences in ROMs.

Indeed, you can find full, thorough documentation of the (many!) differences between this one, and the final version on his website -- Dark Sea. A lot of effort was put into dissecting the prototypes, so make sure you pay a visit! You can jump directly to Ecco 2 X11 documentation here.

Of course, this is not all Ecco goodness that we have up our sleeves -- there's lots of Ecco goodness to be released in the coming weeks. And many non-Ecco protos too, so stay tuned.

Veteran site visitors probably noticed that I somewhat redesigned Hidden Palace. I reactivated the forums (hopefully they will have more activity this time). I also introduced a new feature to the site, as I couldn't have possibly done it all myself: screenshot uploads. If you're bored, and you want to contribute, feel free to upload as many screenshots as you like.

See you next release =)

I present to you, an unreleased Tiburon game:



It was supplied to me by a generous donator, who wished to remain anonymous. Thanks!

PS. I still need to add the recent huge release to the website, and I've got lots more coming, so stay tuned!

Remember when I said I would never beat a certain release? Well I was wrong. Behold, over 1000 prototypes for various Sega consoles.



Quick numbers: 155 Sega 32x prototypes, 300 Game Gear prototypes, 464 Mega Drive prototypes, 94 Pico prototypes, 6 Gamecube prototypes -- 1024 prototype overall (what a nice round number!), making this the biggest prototype release in history (and probably ever to come). Just multiply this by $100 (which is the average price of these things, and many of them are MUCH more valuable) and you'll see how lucky you are to get them free of charge.

There is lots of stuff here -- Sonic, Ristar, Tempo, and many other high-profile, hard-to-find game prototypes which many of us played years back and miss. Many with different features, levels, hidden data.

Two of these games are unreleased, namely Baby Boom (crazy Megadrive game) and David Robinson Basketball for Game Gear. Many of the games have various builds in various stages of completion - from early alphas (there's even a plain engine build of Taz 2 I believe, with no content at all) to late betas and finals. Yes, finals -- I included a number (around 30, I believe) of finals in the release because I've got very accurate build dates for most of the protos, and that is a great thing to know :)

I've worked on getting this lot built and packed for the past seven days -- it was a hefty task. Many of these came in weird formats, many were passworded/encrypted, and it was a lot of manual work.

Most of the protos come from one lot, snagged from Sega of America Q&A archives, from around 1994-1995. It was very hard to get it, and it wasn't cheap either. The disc protos (Gamecube, Dreamcast, Saturn) come from an earlier lot that I saved up until now.

We have an irc channel up for the discussion of these protos. Server is irc.drx.pl, channel is #sonicprotos. Additionally, I feel I have to recommend a few links to forums that will likely dissect these prototypes to little pieces. For Sonic prototypes, I recommend Sonic Retro. For all the non-Sonic protos, hop to X-Cult and Lost Levels.

I'm not gonna lie -- these things cost me an arm and a leg. If you want to help me, you can donate (read this or just e-mail me at thedrx@gmail.com). Also, if you have any information about any prototypes, please don't hesitate to contact me as well =) It will help get more prototypes in the future, and will make you warm that you did a good thing.

This release is not all I have. I will be releasing more over the next hours, days and weeks - Dreamcast Sonic protos, Ecco protos, more Sega CD protos, so stay tuned!

Also, if you ever dreamt of getting a prototype of any kind and you have the funds -- contact me, I have the ability to make things happen, so who knows ;)

There is so much more I wanted to write here, but I didn't manage to do it on time. I didn't have time to do many things I wanted to do - update the site, for one. So many things are outdated.

Let me thank everybody who helped me with this release (sorry if I forgot anyone!) - man_traic (big kudos to this guy), Aurochs, Nemesis, Execbyte, Biggestsonicfan, rika_chou, Puto, Sazpaimon, Tweaker, Mad Echidna, QJimbo, Kat, Dot50Cal, Darcagn, Mustapha, LocalH, Scarred Sun, Jonna Lybrand, Heran Bago, Nineko, Xkeeper, Keiji, Epicenter, Witeoutking, Tweeterman, Irvin Trigueros, Richard Foltz, Sonic AD, Robin Whitehead, Andrew Neilson, Matthew Gundel, Grant Short, GerbilSoft, #sonicprotos, and everybody else!

Special thanks to Kazia, who had to endure me working late on these!

And here are the links. I will try to give HTTP linkage, but for now, have these torrents (they are probably the best way to distribute these, as this server will probably go down as the protos get dugg):

Mega Drive, 32x, Pico, Game Gear, Saturn, Mega CD, Master System
Gamecube

See you next release! :)

James Connolly aka man_traic of Welcome to the rash has supplied a Road Rash 3 alpha cart. Enjoy!

Kudos to QJimbo for dumping it, as well.

I have some new stuff coming for Hidden Palace in the coming months, so stay tuned.

I've got something really nice today.

It's the GEMS development kit. What is GEMS you ask? It was a sound driver used in a lot of Megadrive games (full list here). Enjoy, it's the full development kit with all the source code needed to program your own music on the Megadrive.

Along with the GEMS source code, I got the source code to a little game/demo called Ship. Compiling and linking it was real fun, I had to do most of it manually (in hex!) because of the scarcity of the tools needed to do it and because I was using a very outdated set. But after a lot of hours of manual work, I managed to do it.

I hope you have fun with these.

I was away for a while, hope you missed me.

I noticed that some spambots were running rampage on my poor website, so I built a nice little anti spam thingy. That should weed out 99,99% of the spam.

It was insane, I had my databases filled with 60MB of links encouraging people to buy mexican passports and pills. 25000 comments.

In other news, I might be getting some nice stuff soon. Stay tuned.

We got ahold of a nice E3 beta of Sonic Rush (DS).

Enjoy our first DS release =)

Thanks to Lightning (who dumped the cart, and also happy birthday to him!) and Techokami.

Six new dumps today!

Dashin' Desperadoes	Barkley Shut Up and Jam! 2
Shanghai 2 - Dragon's Eye	Aero the Acrobat
Bubble & Squeak

And a not-prototype: Pro Action Replay 2 (Mar 1st)

Merry christmas to everybody =)

PS. I don't usually do this, but please consider donating. Releasing expensive roms prooves to be a tough job, and there are a lot of new games to dump! Help us in our mission! :)

Ok, this absolutely beats anything I've ever dumped and what I'm possibly ever going to dump.



Behold, the Sonic 2 early proto

For more screenshots and differences listed, see the topic on the forums.

Enjoy!

Thanks to all the donators - Execbyte, Kat, Aurochs, LocalH, Orangefox, Erik JS, CheeseBacon, ScarredSun and Cyberdude. Wow, that's a long list. Thanks guys.

PS. The level select code is Up, Down, Down, Down, Down, Up, A+Start

Edit: there are lots of discussions about the game going on everywhere, on a lot of forums, but I think the best topic is Sonic 2 early prototype on the Sonic 2 Beta forums. Check it out for lots of differences detailed and explained.

So I bought this beta (bargain, $700, lol). Ladies and ladies:



Sonic 3D Beta

Thanks to Aurochs (!), CheeseBacon, Techokami, WiteoutKing, Heran Bago.

Feel free to tell your friends.

PS. More stuff coming soon, I bought some other Megadrive protos but they are shitty (sports games) and I don't feel like dumping them now.