Martin from NES World sent me several SNES prototypes that he dumped. The first one that I made an article of is for Battle Blaze, a mediocre fighting game. The most interesting thing is that this game has a connection to F-Zero. http://www.snescentral.com/article.php?id=0994
Surely the presence of the F-Zero tiles just means that somewhere along the line someone used an EEPROM that had previously been used for F-Zero?
I ruled out something like this, because even in the production version there are still some graphics tiles from F-Zero that they missed. You wouldn't know unless you compared it with the prototype (or F-Zero).
Hmm, Check the final release of Battle Blaze if possible to see if that has any F-Zero stuff in it. Can't see it my self but you never know. As it stands at the moment I'd say it's just a bad re-write but then again I'm no master on EPROM writing. Yakumo
I can't remember examples off-hand but I'm sure I've heard that a number of Megadrive games have leftover tiles from other projects, so it's probably not that uncommon.
Stupidly this site is banned in the UAE, WTF!? - will check out when I get home and on a VPN! But on unused tiles/graphics wasnt there something left in DK64 from Banjo Kazooie? A key that the hackers at RWP thought meant DK64 was supposed to connect through the SNS thing?
My site is full of heretical commentary. I'll grant that it could be possible that they just burned the game on an EPROM that previously held F-Zero, but there are two problems: 1) some of the graphics are lined up perfectly with where they are located in the F-Zero ROM image 2) Some of them are not, in particular the graphics at the end. F-zero is a 512 kb game, while Battle Blaze is 1 Mb. Granted, this could be caused by some strange form of interleaving. Oh, btw, Banjo Kazooie got its start as a SNES RPG called Dream, so that might explain any references you see in the N64 game. http://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/04/project-dream-banjo-kazooie-proto-beta/
Still just sounds like junk data from random old EEPROMs to me. The alternative is that Nintendo gave a third party the full source code, assets and all, from one of their popular SNES franchises. That doesn't seem particularly plausible to me, though I'm open to being proven wrong.
Apparently some dev companies (like TOSE) were not so shameless as to buy a game, tear apart the code, and implement it in their own games. I was told by some of the ROM hacking crowd that you see chunks of Sonic 1 in Sonic 2 and 3, as an example.
Of course Sonic 2 and 3 have similarities to Sonic 1, they were developed from Sonic 1's source code by the same dev team at Sega. What you're suggesting with regards to TOSE/Sammy is that they took (compiled) code from a commercially available game and turned it to their own uses. This is technically plausible but definitely illegal and pretty risky given that they'd have to eventually hand the game over to Nintendo for evaluation as part of their licence agreement.
Seems to me that it's the same as the "Sonic Crackers" overdump, that contains data from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. Or the Sonic 2 beta that has some leftovers from a previous build, as when they were writing the EEPROM the padding was ignored and not written, so instead there were some leftovers.
I think I have resolved the issue. Both EPROMs on the board must have had F-Zero burned on them. It is the only way to explain the displacement of data.
I got a couple more prototype articles up. As before, thanks to Martin at NES World for releasing these. Zoop TKO Super Championship Boxing
