Originally posted by Aeonic Butterfly
I only remember this vaguely, but wasn't here also a proto that contained the beta of a shmup in the back of it?
The Sonic Spinball prototype, which was not a clean dump of the original cartridge when the Sonic scene got hold of it (although I think the only thing that was modified in the actual Spinball data was the start vector, other than that the modifications were just appended to the end). On the end of that ROM, there was also 112KB of a Sub-Terrania prototype in SMD format. The Sub-Terrania ROM had a Fairlight crack intro that was disabled, according to X-Cult. As well, the scene discovered that the Spinball proto had also been slightly re-modified to disable a crack intro that was appended to the game by Premiere, the group that released the ROM originally. It was fairly simple to re-enable that crack intro, it was literally just a hack of the start vector in the main ROM header.
I would be very, very surprised if this Sub-Terrania data was on the original cart that the Spinball proto was dumped from, given the presence of SMD-format data as well as two crack intros. I don't remember the file size of the Spinball proto after removing the 112KB of Sub-Terrania, but it's always possible I guess that the Spinball proto needed padding to work on the copiers of the time, and they may have taken a ROM already in SMD format to pad it so that it wouldn't be that obvious to the end users what the data was (as it would then be double-interleaved after putting the whole combined ROM into SMD format). That's just a hypothesis, though, the only way to be sure would be to track down people who were responsible for the ROM's original scene release and ask them.
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