Hidden Palace publishes other prototypes of unreleased games -apkrig
We have repeatedly written about the Hidden Palace initiative and their Deluge project in the Vortex. Thanks to the work of these gaming conservationists In the past, players could play unpublished titles or work-in-progress prototypes, such as the unfinished Tom and Jerry for the SNES, the newly discovered game about the Lady of Čachtice, or the canceled Star Wars for Mega Drive. To these and many other games are now joined by less than five hundred others, originating from the original Xbox and Dreamcast. Specifically, there are 349 titles for Xbox and 135 for Segu Dreamcast, through which you can not only go back to the game’s past, but also look under the hands of developers and see for yourself what some of the released games looked like during development, or start playing titles that they never saw the light of day.
Due to the fact that this is a proper package, the people from Hidden Palace have a problem pinching out the most interesting things. In a long post on their own website, they only list a handful of games, which definitely serve as an attraction for further research. In the case of games for Dreamcast, you have the opportunity to play, for example, the prototype 4 Wheel Thunder – then called Offroad Thunder – compiled less than half a year before the game went on sale. There are also prototypes of Deep Fighter, Illbleed and Jet Grind Radio, as well as the more famous Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and especially Test Drive Cycles. The last-named game from the famous racing series introduced motorcycles instead of cars, but in 2000 it was released only in Game Boy Color. And even though the content of the Dreamcast version is known from YouTube videos, you now have the opportunity to try the game in the emulator yourself.
People from Hidden Palace also devote a large part of their blog to describing how they were able to obtain from optical discs the data needed to run specific titles in emulators, and it must be admitted that it was not an easy process.
When it comes to Xbox games, the offer here is even more generous, and the people at Hidden Palace are, of course, bragging about it. “We have a great collection of game prototypes for the original Xbox. From unreleased games, through early prototypes and technology demos, to debug builds and some almost completed games, ”say game archivists. Even here, they mention only a part of the total offer and talk about games like American Idol, Hail to the Chimp – which eventually came out on the Xbox 360, He-Man: Defender of Grayskull or Pac-Man World Rally. But there are also other interesting things in the game package, such as several titles from Sega, unreleased pieces such as The Red Star, Us Open 2003 or The Vatz, and we must not forget the prototype of the first part of the Psychonauts series, which is now receiving more attention .
People from Hidden Palace also devote a large part of their blog to describing how they were able to obtain from optical disks the data needed to run specific titles in emulators, and it must be admitted that it was not an easy process. While Dreamcast games had to use real devkits, or the game disc was constantly being replaced with a read-only system disc, while Xbox archives had to deal with inconsistencies in the design of individual builds. They simply attribute it to the fact that the Xbox was only in its infancy and there were no uniform rules that had to be dealt with retrospectively, even with regard to the effort to make games playable in software emulators. According to Hidden Palace, not all of them succeeded one hundred percent – about 80 titles for Xbox may not work quite correctly – depending on the material, but no one seems to mind much and expects the problems in advance. At the end, of course, the people from Hidden Palace also reveal where they got to the games from and refer here to collectors, but also to the editors of game magazines, where discs with unfinished titles went relatively twenty years ago. normally.
