E3 2006 Metroid Prime 3 Demo NGC - Community Dump

Hi All,

I've stumbled across what appears to be a very early Metroid Prime 3 demo.

I believe it to be one of the demo versions mentioned here that was shown early 2006: http://www.unseen64.net/2009/06/22/metroid-prime-3-corruption-wii-beta/

It runs on obscure/unknown hardware though so I haven't been able to get to the actual in-game action on anything other than dolphin-emu (hacked version to allow 128MB of memory).

I have dumped it, it is in .GCM (Gamecube) format, the original source is a NPDP Cartridge.

I've attached some pictures, but they are the only pictures that I can provide for now, one is of the ISO opened in GC-Tool and the others are of it running in dolphin-emu.

I'm looking for about $250 for it - My Paypal is *snip* (Paypal as gift with the subject "e3-2006" and leave your username as well).

..and finally before anyone asks, this was pre-approved by ASSEMbler

edit: apologies, didn't realize unseen64 is down at the moment (for me at least).

edit2: It runs!!! in a special build of dolphin-emu which emulates 128MB of memory - I will upload a .patch / dolphin-emu build when this is released!

 

Donated 100$

Awesome stuff! Hope one get it running somehow!

 

woah that was fast, very much appreciated DarthCloud!

Already 40% there thanks to your generous donation

 

Very interesting. So if someone can get it running, it would probably be on GC hardware right, or just emulation?

 

If it's an hybrid pre-Wii system, this will probably require a Wii, or at least a GC dev kit with twice the RAM.

 

OK, so GC hardware. Since it looks as if it requires more RAM, I wonder if it is possible to run a GC game on a Wii and utilize more RAM.

 

Id say its likely meant for one of the development kits, might have trouble getting it running on retail hardware at all.

 

Borman, quite possible.. although I'm sure someone can figure out how to use/view the .pak file

Also, I just realized from reading other threads that I need a deadline. I'll make it 6 months from today (23/05/2012).

 

Very true, not discounting that heh. If I had any cash, Id still be donating, but as you can see from my own community dump, Im poor! It's still a rare disk at a good price Id wonder if there is a way to increase the RAM in Dolphin somehow, probably could look at the source to find out if someone knew what they were looking for.

 

I've asked someone, they're too busy with other stuff but they said it's possible with a bit of work (dolphin doesn't like MEM1 being > 32Mb)

 

Ah okay, I was hoping it'd be a bit easier than that. Still, good luck on the dump, you shouldnt have any issues at all.

 

Need some more donation on this

 

Only if it was the Tomb Raider Angel of darkness E3 demo LoL Anyhow, unseen64 is down?

 

Hmm, are you sure it's a memory related error? The error message says it was unable to connect to the "BBA", which I think would be the GameCube Broadband Adapter accessory. Might be some kind of anti-theft protection (requesting authorization or downloading game data over the network). But just a wild guess here.

 

Here are my limited findings from when I was tinkering with it in dolphin-emu:
The reason it tries to connect to the bba is because it tries to load audio/controller tweaks, it tries checking the local memcard for the same stuff.

You can move up/down on that screen shown in the attached screenshot in post 1 but you can't make it any other type other than "Single Player". Pressing A on the top entry will attempt to load it up by unpacking some textures to memory which appear to fill up memory (top right shows memory in use out of the total 90mb it expects). After a few textures are loaded, which is when used mem nears 18mb or so, it throws an on screen exception in CALLOC.c (the internal dol, not dolphin-emu). It makes sense that it throws it there as that is when the 24Mb emulated MEM1 would fill up (ArenaHi-Lo is about 18mb given the DOL is 6mb).

If it's just a custom loader, there are a few options as I've stated above to use Metroid Prime 2 with this particular .pak file, or perhaps to limit the amount of memory it thinks it has to play with, causing some cache to kick in?

 

Odd. Have you tried running it with some Swiss code that clears the memory every time that it gets close to full? Perhaps you could get past the mem crash and cause a 'failed to load resource' error.

Don't really know what I'm talking about, though. Hardware is more my thing. Software gets too complex.

 

unseen 64 appears to be back now.

 

Wow, the trailer for this is pretty awesome. I probably wont have the hardware to play this, but I'll donate when I get the chance.

 

So hope to see this one day.. Also wish I had the money to put into it.

 

I'm sort of curious as to how much they put this hybrid SDK to use.

Twilight Princess, Super Paper Mario, Donkey Kong Barrel Blast, Mario Revolution/Galaxy, and that canned Kirby game all started development on NGC and progressed from there. It's quite an extensive list of high-profile games and that's just between 1st and 2nd party devs.

I also wonder if this technology was put to use for developing 3rd party launch titles (many of which came out on GC at the same time they did on Wii with almost no noticeable differences). If it made it to 3rd party devs, there might be hope of finding more info on it.