Revision as of 14:59, 21 October 2012

Simon Wai's Sonic 2 Beta, or commonly referred to as Sonic 2 Beta, is a mid production/prototype and promotional build of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that was released on the internet in December of 1998 by Simon Wai. The ROM contains many unfinished and unused concepts, objects, and levels that were later removed from the final game or perfected down the road. Unfortunately, due to the state of the ROM, many of the levels are incomplete or otherwise impossible to play without the use of Debug mode. Originally, this game was thought to be the earliest prototype in existence, but this was later proven false in November 2006.

History

In 1992, Yuji Naka had been invited to the annual New York Toy Fair. Sometime during the week long event, he showed off a promotional copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to a large crowd of people. Later on during that same week, that same promotional copy was stolen by unknown persons. What happened to the game after is unknown, but what is known is that it was later pirated in China and other South American countries and passed off as the real deal. In 1998, a Canadian Sonic fan by the name Simon Wai was going about on the internet looking for this said prototype in hopes of playing it. When he finally realized that he played this beta in Hong Kong back in 1992, he decided to look on Chinese ROM sites. Sure enough, it was right there in front of him. Within days of his discovery,he released it on the internet. From then forth it has been taken apart, studied, researched, and used as an example of how Sega produced games.

Technical Description

After many years of information from various sources and personal study of both games, there are many technical differences between this game and the Final. In fact, there is quite a number of technical differences between this prototype and the next released prototype, Sonic 2 Beta 4. Because of the way the coding structure is written, it is easier to find similarities in Sonic the Hedgehog than it's final counterpart. Though it is quite well known that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is based on a heavily edited Sonic 1, the differences from the two games are enough that back porting many features into Sonic 1 require heavy rewriting of it's core engine. Sonic 2 Beta's engine is a mixture of both worlds giving it the ideal engine to use if you feel the need to port various features from Sonic 2 into the game, or feel that porting things from Sonic 1 is necessary, though lots of the features exist in game.

This list is just a description of the differences of the programming, not level, object, character, or art design. Those will be addressed in separate pages.

- The way V-blank and H-blank are loaded and used in the game is exactly the same as Sonic the Hedgehog. In Sonic 2