Hidden Palace - News / Saturn + Megadrive

Hidden Palace
"The video game prototype and development museum"

May 07 2010: Saturn + Megadrive

drx

A lot of things to release today. First up are almost all of my Saturn prototypes¹.

The prototypes are:

Crypt Killer (Prototype - Jan 8, 1997)
Duke Nukem (Prototype - Sep 18, 1997)
Fighters Megamix (Prototype - Apr 08, 1997)
Fighting Vipers (Prototype - Sep 06, 1996)
Loaded (Prototype - Sep 3, 1996)
Primal Rage (Prototype - Feb 12, 1996)
Sega Rally Championship (Prototype - Oct 31, 1995)
Slam N' Jam 96 (Prototype - Feb 1, 1996)
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (Prototype - Feb 07, 1996)
Virtua Racing (Prototype - Oct 30, 1995)
Winning Post (Prototype - Dec 27, 1995)

Edit: the dates on Loaded and Virtua Racing are wrong: Loaded should be June and Virtua Racing should be August. Sorry for the mix up, can't turn the torrent back now.

I realize some of them are identical or close to final, but I've put them up for completeness' sake. At least two are interesting -- the Primal Rage is an alpha, and UMK3 seems to be four months early (though I couldn't test it as I don't have a Saturn any more). Thanks to linlhutz for donating for these.

The torrent.

Also, as a bonus, I've got around to dumping some Megadrive carts Lyall Williams sent me a long time ago. Here are they. All but one are dumps of pirate games (some hilarious one like Iraq War, Lion King 3). Some of them are already around and some of them don't work (due to bad carts). One of them is a prototype of a soccer game, so big thanks to Lyall for donating these dumps!

Also, in spite of my neglect, the forums seem to have some good activity, among which are Glisp's Saturn and Sega CD dumps, and many community releases by Sega Saturno, including the upcoming Saturn pack. I have a weird appreciation of things that spring to live themselves (like our IRC channel, #protos).

As usual, enjoy.

¹⁾ - The one Saturn proto I have left is a prototype of Nights (not the one I released a while ago).

Rika (May 08 2010)
Wasn't the Saturn Primal Rage released in '95?

Anyway, the thing here the tickles my personal interest the most is those megadrive pirates. Thanks to both drx and Lyall! :)

Josh (email) (May 09 2010)
These dumps look very interesting! Always love seeing new protos on the saturn, as well as md pirates!

ps. I'm excited that you have another NiGHTS beta :D

discworld (May 11 2010)
thank you very much linlhutz and drx !! nice work again.

Turbo (May 11 2010)
You may need to redump these. A few of the discs come out with many errors.

I don't make a fuss about this normally (since CDMage can repair anything, and some of the errors are because of incorrect cuesheets), but these are one-of-a-kind discs. So it would be nice to have proper bin/cue rips from the original media, instead of manually repairing.

Turbo (May 11 2010)
On another note, you may want to change the INPUT and TEXTAREA background-colors to "transparent" instead of "inherit", so it shows up correctly in ie8.

Glisp (May 11 2010)
Primal Rage? FUCK YEAH! Probably the most interesting non Sonic dump I've been interested in ever. Too bad its not the Arcade version. Unfortunately, Saturn Bios are hard to come by so that leaves me to burn it to a disk and I don't have a working Saturn right now. Just my luck :(

If there was any Redbook that came with it please let me know.

drx (329) (May 12 2010)
Turbo: I got your PM but didn't have time to reply.

Yeah, it seems that way. I think it's because I chose not to follow one step of that redump.org guide, which was to remove the last ~150 sectors of the first track. It made the resulting disc shift audio sectors to the left by ~150 sectors, so I opted for having useless data instead of wrong sector alignment.

Speaking of which, if anyone knows how to fix this, I'm curious.

Also, someone should really write a decent cd dumper, all the ones out there suck horribly.

Turbo (May 13 2010)
drx: it's not a concurrent problem on all discs, so the lack of removal is probably not the root of the problem. The redump guide tends to create a ton of issues, and the only "revolutionary" thing it does is allowing to rip multiple, different pressings, to same track crc (even ones with factory offset shifts). It doesn't rip any plus data that any other ripping app couldn't do. In fact, it even omits some.

Which is not the case here, so there's no point in not doing the standard way of ripping - doing a CDRWin rip multiple times to the same crc.

A few images have errors beyond the extra 150 sectors too, as well. Also, the Slam and Jam disc has a few unreadable files in your rip (beyond cdmage errors). They are RUSS.BIN and REPLYG1- to REPLYG6.BIN.

I really feel that the redump guide did more harm than good in this case. Seriously, that whole project is the biggest trolling in the history of cd dumping.
If you haven't sold the discs yet, I think it would be wise to dump them again, properly.