Mega Man 64 Prototype to be leaked in a few weeks.

[wintermute]

So, some pretty good news has struck me today as somebody who loves removed, unfinished, prototypical, and changed content in vidya. Thanks to somebody on AssemblerGames and a few Mega Man fans, we have retrieved a prototype Mega Man 64 cart. A ROM will be released in a few weeks. Some links.


An interesting part of the Mega Man 64 prototype is Mega Man's angrier face expressions that have been removed from the game (as far as I know). Maybe Mega Man 64 was to make changes to make it different from Mega Man Legends on the PS1. Or this prototype is based on an earlier build of Mega Man Legends.

[satoh]

I'm going to guess it was modified for two reasons:
1) Like the PSX (EN) versions, the frowns on the kobun were turned into smiles, because western audiences like smiles (or whatever silly reason it was...) So we may see frowny kobun in the prototype.

2) Nintendo really likes everything to be small child friendly in their games and on their consoles, and with very few exceptions, they have enforced this on developers. One example would be Mortal Kombat for SNES, which had the violent red blood effects recolored into sweat or milk or some other white fluid which really seems like it shouldn't be flying out of the human body anyway in such amounts. Further still Ninty has refused to license other games for ports on their consoles throughout the years. As MML is not really intended to be that mature, I'm imagining Ninty probably had some things altered for the N64.

In the prototype, we may or may not see differences from the EN versions of the game, and/or PSX version. It depends on whether the 64 version was built on the original MML engine game (which considering the seeming lack of direct gameplay differences between the 64 and PSX versions, I'm assuming the game was built in its own environment and then compiled for the systems afterward with some minor changes to controller layouts and whatnot, rather than built from scratch for both like some games)

Now, if they weren't developed at the same time or from the same basic level engine, then we'll likely see similarities to the PSX version, which was probably the primary version under development.

The last option I foresee, is very little difference. Maybe some unrefined textures on scenery or something. This would be the case if the game was basically complete before it was ported. This is more common than not. A company finishes a game and decides to move it to another console, so they take the existing game, rewrite as little code as they can get away with, and call it a new product. (in some cases they just write an emulator to run the old version of the game on the new system, this is how the PSP versions of the games work.)

Still, it should be interesting to find out.

[pixelbutts]

My apologies for the bump.

This was dumped with the aid of a friend that had the cart. It took a while due to a lot of unforseen issues and we released it but it looks like it didn't find its way here for analysis.

The rom is here (highlight and copy. sorry, not sure how proboards handle Mega links quite yet): mega.nz/#!C4IzDaBA!mWkvyETOmw4Z7vqv5CCE4iEAQW_muieE0_O17jilJGU

There's also currently a wiki page for it here: tcrf.net/Proto:Mega_Man_64

Sorry for only now posting this here myself, I dont come here too often.

[RyanLEO]

Thanks for showing ;] hope you come back again.

I downloaded an N64 emulator just to try this out, it's pretty neat.
It's also strange, the speech and some of the text are in japanese, but other text is in english. Really wish I knew japanese right now :/

Anyway, I'm definitely gonna play around with the stage, area, and scenario settings. Already managed to lock myself in the key room for one of the underground cities. Also showed up in a blank void with nothing but a strange ruin entrance which is pretty neat. I'll play around with it more an put screenshots here.

[pixelbutts]

There's a couple dummy rooms as well. There's a couple strange levels to get into but nothing stands out that much aside from PS1 leftovers and the music/visuals.

On occasion the audio will just cut out entirely but I'm not sure if it's just the emulator.

[RyanLEO]

Do you have the stage/area/scenario settings for some of those dummy rooms? I love to look at these, I'll post them here too