Early Jak 2 demo. Bound to have lots of differences. Feel free to move this to it's own topic if it seems promising.
Grab it here.
The demo's executable was compiled on March 15 2003. The first retail release was compiled August 26 2003. Apparently there exists an even EARLIER demo that was released in Europe with a compile date of July 17 2002, but I can't find it anywhere.
I'm not a big fan of Jak 2, but I have played it through and noticed some differences. The HUD is completely different for one (excuse the image quality, PCSX2 has some rendering issues but otherwise the game runs and plays fine):

...and the title screen runs at 30 fps, where I believe the final actually made it run at 60. The demo contains two levels, the Pumping Station with Sig and the Strip Mine hoverboard level. A cutscene plays and then instructions on how to play the game are displayed while the game loads.

The skies look a little different, I think. There's also the lack of the forest region in the distance in this shot:

The game was programmed in a custom language based on Lisp called GOAL. The main executable acts as nothing more than a loader for the Kernel/Game engine written in GOAL (these files are stored in the CGO folder) and the Sony modules (or "DRIVERS"). Because of this, the main executable can be compiled at a much earlier date and still be packaged in various revisions while the separate files written in GOAL can be compiled and updated individually. Luckily all the files seem to be dated around March, so everything is still relatively early.
The files I believe are compressed, since you can see the function/variable names of objects and routines in the files a lot more clearly if you dump the memory while the game is running in PCSX2 (create a savestate then unpack the savestate file in 7zip). I believe map data is stored in the DGO folder. The voice acting I believe is kept in the VAG folder (lol). There are references to a 'debug-menu' that seem to be present. Modules for the keyboard and mouse libraries are here, possibly for the debugger. It'd be awesome if we can somehow get it to load. The main executable itself still contains the symbols for all the functions, which I believe is something the final doesn't have which could be really useful.
There are definitely more files included in the demo than there should be, so it'd be nice to see if we can get those to load.
But again, I'm not too interested in Jak 2. I am interested in the original Jak and Daxter demos, though, since the game's development history is pretty interesting. The demo distributed for a promotion with Cingular Wireless was compiled 2001-05-15, while the final US version was compiled on 2001-10-30. I've heard that this demo in particular was dumped and distributed in some Redump sets, but I can't find them anywhere. I would LOVE to take a peek at the Cingular Wireless demo, so if anyone has access to or can upload a copy of it please feel free. |