Author Topic: Windmills and Sheep in the Prerelease ROM  (Read 1451 times)

Reld

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Windmills and Sheep in the Prerelease ROM
« on: April 07, 2024, 11:41:59 am »
I don't know if this is a "known" thing or not, but I haven't seen it mentioned either here or on The Cutting Room Floor page, so here it is.

I was poking around in the English ROM, specifically looking at the "Overworld Data" at $06FD10. Each overworld has a 23 byte entry, the first 8 bytes of which determine which background tile graphics to load. In the final release, the 8th slot is always unused. It's set to $80 for all overworlds, which causes the game to just skip that loading routine. If you set it to a valid number instead it will decompress the tiles to RAM at $7EB800, where they will just sit and do nothing. This reminded me of how animated background tiles are handled for locations, so I figured this might be part of a scrapped background animation feature for overworlds.

I decided to check the Prerelease ROM to see if it was any different. Instead of all being set to $80/unused, in the Prerelease slot 8 is mostly set to either $24 or $25. So I fired up the game and checked what was decompressed to $7EB800 and saw this:



It might not be totally clear what that is, so here it is with the tiles rearranged and a couple of special palettes made:



These are leftover animated background tiles from the old V-Fes 94 "flat" overworld.

Unfortunately, graphics packs $24 and $25 in the Prerelease appear to be identical, so there weren't any other new old tiles to find. The compressed packets are at $059DD4 and $05A183.

EleMesmo

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Re: Windmills and Sheep in the Prerelease ROM
« Reply #1 on: June 23, 2024, 06:37:09 pm »
The leftover animated background tiles definitely suggest there was more planned for the overworld environments.  Do you think these tiles might have been scrapped due to technical limitations, or maybe they just didn't fit the final artistic direction?

TheMage

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Re: Windmills and Sheep in the Prerelease ROM
« Reply #2 on: July 04, 2024, 04:52:27 pm »
 :o :shock: Oh this is juicy!!! I knew the pre-release had some minor graphical differences, but I don't think we had this documented! I wonder if there is more scrapped content to find?