Hidden Palace releases (updated May 27)

Hidden Palace is back from the dead!

For a long while now, I have felt that we need a wiki for all the stuff that happens in our little community. The world of prototype hunting is fragmented, as each site/forum caters to their own sub-niche. There is nothing wrong with that, but it becomes difficult (for me at least) to keep up with what was released where and when, by whom and why. To remedy this me, and my small team have been working on turning my old site into a wiki to make all this easier.

Hidden Palace turns 10 today (where did the time go?), which I thought was a great occasion to come back from the dead and get back to work. This year I will be going through both my released and unreleased material and putting it all on the wiki. The plan is to have a weekly cadence of releases, because there is a lot to get to.

Ultimately my hope is that Hidden Palace will become a useful catalog for prototypes, releases, and other development material that has been gathered not just by me, but others as well.

But anyway, to the goodies:

• Jesse “THE BODY” Ventura Wrestling Superstars (Mar 2, 1992, unreleased game!)
  
• Curse Unreleased Localization Prototype (Jun 26, 1990)
• Mondu's Fight Palace (Slaughter Sport prototype) (Jul 3, 1990)
• F1 Circus MD Unreleased Localization Prototype (Dec 28, 1991)
• Klax Prototype (Jun 21, 1990)
• Earnest Evans Prototype (Apr 19, 1994)
• The Revenge of Shinobi Prototype (Aug 21, 1989)
• The Revenge of Shinobi REV02 Prototype (Feb 1, 1990)
• Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi Prototype (Oct 2, 1990)
• Battle Mania Prototype (May 28, 1991)
• Trouble Shooter Localization Prototype (Sep 12, 1991)
• Phantasy Star II Localization Prototype (Jul 28, 1989)
• Battle Squadron Revision Prototype (Jan 18, 1991)
• Kid Chameleon Revision Prototype (Dec 19, 1991)
• Super Hydlide Localization Prototype (Oct 16, 1989)
• Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master Revision Prototype (Jun 29, 1993)
• Ghostbusters Revision Prototype (May 1, 1990)
• Aladdin Revision Prototype (Jul 31, 1993)
• Devilish Localization Prototype (Jan 16, 1992)
• Golden Axe REV01 Prototype (Nov 22, 1989)
• Sega ROM Archive table
  
  

Check it all out here

 

The "Wikipedia" design is great for such archive website (in my opinion). Some website already do this kind of thing, but a new one is always welcomed !

But is that only a Sega related website ?

 

Well, the site has always been Sega-heavy. I've always had a bunch of stuff for different systems, but I guess the QA release in 2008 skewed things. But I'm hoping the wiki will grow to a general focus. We'll see how it goes.

 

@drx I've waited a long time for this. Massive massive thank you for reviving one of the sites that got me to this one and into prototypes.

 

Do I spot a Phantasy Star in this list? Great stuff like always! And I love to see it's just part 1

 

x

 

I wonder how some people store their CDR discs. I have discs from the early 90s that still work perfectly fine. Some of them aren't even branded media. I've no idea how the were burnt though as home CD writers in the very early 90s were stupidly expensive. I have a few home burned discs from 1995 onwards on Trackdata discs which are also fine.

 

drx you are a credit to the community this must be a real labour of love.

It's a fantastic resource, I'll have a proper explore later. I'm also pretty sure some of those protos used to be mine

Keep up the good work, oh and drop me a PM when you get a chance I may just be able to contribute something!

 

Great seeing Hidden Palace returning in a new form. @drx you're a legend keep up the great work!

 

Welcome back to the fantasy zone, get ready!

 

Awesome stuff, drx. Thanks for all that you do. This is exciting news.

 

Assembler already has a wiki for this sort of thing right? Is promotion of a competing website allowed?

 

Seriously? Why wouldn't it be? AG is not a warez website, and we're more focused on rare hardware/protos information than on releases per se.

 

Competing? We're on the quest to archive rare and unreleased game information, not selling new or used Chryslers. Redundancy is good in this case.

 

They're pretty quality CD-R's, most of them are Taiyo-Yuden which I hear is a very decent brand. I used to use their DVD's to backup some of my stuff before moving to something else (as a redundancy). I also try to keep them in separate cases, in tightly closed dark boxes, so that there's no sunlight, water or mold getting in (or spreading from disc to disc). I also had a backup in case they stopped being readable.

An interesting bit of trivia by the way, some of these were burned on Sony CDW-900E, which was used for mastering CD's and cost thousands of dollars.

This isn't a competition. Plus, I didn't think Assembler's wiki wants to concern itself with that stuff, and if they have a problem with it I'm sure they can tell me themselves and don't need you to backseat admin for them.

For what it's worth, Moo/MathUser/hiro1112 was banned from my site (and many others) for trolling and harassing people. Probably the only person I ever banned.

Some of them did use to be yours! I bought this lot from you back in 2006 and dumped it.

 

Hey drx,

I know you primarily deal with classic games (outside of a few specific franchises, lol) but I was just wondering, have you ever come across any prototype Guitar Hero or Rock Band stuff (except for the two known PS2 GH2 demos, I have them)? Specifically, I'm interested in anything GH1 (especially the builds with ROYGB colored frets, or earlier), as well as the GH2 E3 build or the GH80s review build that contained I Want Candy.

 

drx is one of the people who have contributed the most in preserving (Sega, mostly ) history. It's not a competition. All we care about is preserving the Rare and the Obscure, we all have our methods.

 

I'm pretty sure I have a RB1 build, likely review/near-final though.

Oh wait you were talking to drx, please don't ban me for being competition!

 

You're good, Frank. I'm always interested in looking through different builds of Harmonix GH and RB games. Especially those not meant for public consumption, more likely to have hidden little nuggets in the ARK files. I know from seeing a file listing for the GH2 E3 build that there are some of the test songs present that are referenced in the retail game's song database, but not actually present or used (in all publically extant GH1/GH2 builds, the data for those songs are contained within "#ifndef _SHIP" clauses, sot he game basically ignores its presence).

Fun fact: Rock Band 1 for PS2 actually shipped with the source DTA files (with PS2-specific modifications done by either HMX themselves, or Pi Studios) for all of the DTB files that the game actually parses.

 

I'm pretty sure I do, but not any of the main GH games. I think one of the GBA/DS spinoffs. I think I also have some unreleased songs for one of the games. It's been a while since I checked so don't quote me on this, but in any case, they're coming.