Lost and Found

[Thad]

Lost “Sega VR” game unearthed, made playable on modern VR headsets

Previously: You can now download the long-lost (and unfinished) SimCity NES port

[Brantly B.]

Knowing how Genesis add-ons tended to work I don't even want to think about what kind of cabling nightmare was involved in that even before you put the thing on and tumbled into the slideshow dimension.

[Thad]

[Friday]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[mharr]

Does that sort of setup actually run without hacking constitution buffs onto the circuits?

[Mongrel]

I bet that took a whole can of air just to get running.

[Brantly B.]

There's no way it's fully functional. The Sega CD and the 32x both require their own power supplies, and there are no A/V hookups anywhere. I don't know if the 32X can pass through a signal if it's not powered, but it definitely can't without a connector cable.

...which begs the question of why the modem is plugged in.

(Also, for full effect the top cartridge should be the Sega Channel adapter, but that would probably make the tower collapse.)

[Thad]

Yeah, I looked for a Tower of Power that also had the Master System adapter, but couldn't find any that had both that and the 32X. (So I'm guessing you probably couldn't plug the one into the other.)

[Mongrel]

Reminds me of the even older Intellivision modular add-ons.

[Thad]

Unreleased Simpsons game found on Dreamcast dev kit

As far as we can tell, the game appears to have been long forgotten until this point – and you can kind-of see why. A Simpsons game in which you play as a bug? It’s a strange concept, for sure, but would make for a perfectly cromulent game.

[beatbandito]

And they didn't even use the Simpsons-appropriate bug.

[Thad]

[Thad]

Developer completes and releases unfinished PS1 game Magic Castle

[Thad]

The Xbox 360 remaster of Goldeneye:



Ars Technica has some more analysis. The build is out there on the Interwebs.

[Thad]

Rare Dinosaur Planet for Nintendo 64 released unofficially

(That'd be the game that eventually became Star Fox Adventures on GameCube.)

Apparently it has some issues running in emulators, and while this is a late build it's not possible to complete. I expect we'll see some modifications to deal with those issues sooner rather than later.

[Thad]

Today we are introducing the first part of Project Deluge, an ongoing project to assess a gigantic lot of various video game prototypes, pre production assets, and archival material spanning multiple console generations. These aging items were miraculously rescued from being destroyed, thrown away, or sold through the herculean efforts of one person. This person not only took on the task of backing up everything in their possession single handedly, but was so overwhelmingly kind enough to let us look at and preserve each item in his collection with no strings attached. Yes that’s right, all of it. For nothing in return.

So far it's PS2-focused, but it sounds like there's a lot more to come.

[Thad]

Timesplitters 2's HD port unlocked thanks to long-lost debug code
Entirety of Goldeneye's spiritual successor can be found inside of 2016's Homefront.

[Thad]

Museum obtains rare demo of id Software’s Super Mario Bros. 3 PC port

[Thad]

Hidden Palace Shares Treasure Trove of Prototypes

In their ongoing quest to document video game prototypes, hardware revisions, source code, artwork, and all kinds of other development ephemera, the preservationists over at The Hidden Palace have released 178 prototype game builds—30 of which are from games that never saw a commercial release! These releases are mostly from older cart-based systems, ranging from the NES to the GBA, and run the gamut from completely broken to playable.

The site's currently got a "down for maintenance" message up, but sounds like it'll be worth a look once it's back up.

[Thad]

Duke Nukem Forever’s 2001 build appears online, may fully leak in June

Shortly after the video and its related screencaps made the rounds, former Duke Nukem Forever project lead George Broussard confirmed its apparent authenticity on Twitter, telling fans that "the leak looks real." He said that while it may be playable, it shouldn't be looked at as a game, "just a smattering of barely populated test levels."

[...]

Broussard made clear that he isn't invested in closely checking the latest leak's authenticity and pointed to an uneasy relationship with the game this many years later. "I’m not really interested in talking about it or retreading a painful past," he said. But while the build may have paled in comparison to other megaton shooters being promoted in 2001, including that year's Halo, this week's newly revealed sequence shows some of its content aging decently, particularly its implementation of sprite- and particle-based explosions and real-time lighting effects.