Would you stop playing with that radio, lord? I’m trying to get to sleep!
It’s easily possible to not be familiar with Hidden Palace; they take efforts to preserve the development materials for games, which are often (and quite easily) lost in the shuffle. Their Project Deluge seeks to preserve prototype builds of games for defunct platforms specifically. And recently, they had a massive update; nearly 500 Xbox and Dreamcast prototypes were added to the collection.
Per the project’s overall page:
Project Deluge is an ongoing project to archive and assess all of the items featured in a lot of video game development material that has been gathered over the course of many years. This has been made possible through the dedication of only one extremely kind individual, who has taken on the herculean task of dumping every single thing in the lot by themselves.
Each item in the lot was assessed by a team of dedicated individuals for playability and integrity on both software (via emulation) and hardware when necessary. Each item was then lightly documented and given a general overview of some of the main interesting facts about the item in question.
The project, which started back in March this year, already had a number of prototypes, from the PlayStation 2, PlayStation, Sega CD, and Phillips CDi. So the addition of 135 games from the Dreamcast and 349 from the original Xbox were welcome additions.
This is particularly notable in the case of the Dreamcast archive, despite it being little over a third the size of the Xbox archive. While the Dreamcast’s security was… debatable, it did use a multi-layered form of security that makes preservation a bit more tricky. That security started with the GD-R, a specially made gigabyte disc which wasn’t usable in normal disc drives; most importantly, they’re prone to degradation over time. As that section of the project page explains:
The majority of the items featured in this lot are mastered on recordable media such as GD-Rs that are prone to deterioration with time. Every item in this part of the lot was dumped using an actual Dreamcast with a System Disc 2 utilizing Dreamcast SD rip 1.1.
As for the archives, they contain a number of recognizable titles; Crazy Taxi, Bloodrayne, Dynasty Warriors, Jet Grind Radio (Go follow the Funky Uncle), Soul Calibur, Marvel Vs, Capcom 2, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and more. One that notably made the rounds this weekend was a build of Sega GT (not currently on the site, to my knowledge) which featured Luigi.
While the Dreamcast games were harder to preserve, the Xbox games weren’t all that much easier. while the discs used were more conventional, they weren’t consistently the same type of disc from prototype to prototype. They could be on either dual layered DVD-ROMs, or simply CD-ROMs. Which makes the game of “spot-the-difference” between prototypes and retail builds a bit more difficult than it ought to be.
It’s important to note that there are, in fact, a number of unreleased games on these lists, as well, in various states of completion. Test Drive Cycles is the sole completely unreleased Dreamcast game, with a number of titles for the Xbox, including Pac-Man World Rally, Hail to the Chimp, Made Man, The Red Star, He-Man: Defender of Greyskull, and notably The Vatz, being the games that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day on the console, with some never being released at all.
While it’s nice to see the fruits of their efforts, it’s a job that’s never done. So if you happen to have development build disc of games, they’d probably appreciate it greatly if you helped them preserve it. Moreover, while the games are dumped by a single person, they always need more volunteers to evaluate any differences from the retail releases of these games.
Source: Kotaku
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