The Secret Code That Helped Me Defeat SEGA's Quality Control
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ส.ค. 2024
- In this latest episode of Coding Secrets I reveal code I added to Puggsy in 1992 to improve our chances of getting through SEGA's Genesis (Mega Drive) approval processes.
Punching Sonic Video - • Why does PUNCHING Soni...
Puggsy Intro Music by Matt Furniss. CD arrangement by Blythe Joustra.
Is That You or Are You You by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommon...)
Source: chriszabriskie....
Artist: chriszabriskie....
Still throws me off to hear "*I* did". Makes this far more real when you can be so personal about the work.
Yeah, hearing him talk about Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R saying *I* all the time is crazy! This man made my childhood!
Why does it "throw you off"?
It's not that big a deal. How does it make it "far more real"? Dummie.
@@theloanranger2632 It makes it more personal and credible. Being as first hand accounts are much more credible than second or third hand accounts, it's blatantly obvious why hearing the creator speak in the first person would lend an extra dimension of credibility and "real-ness."
This dude was one of the top guys at Traveler's Tales back in the day.
Just a casual reference to "Oh yeah I put the cheat menu in sonic"
Dude you are an absolute legend its amazing to hear all these stories first hand.
You didn't know? He made a whole video about it. It shocked me too. I remember my sister "discovered" it and I tried an eternity to try to replicate how to do it, only to find out that it was just a bug decades later.
@@CrossoverGameReviews I'm sure I've seen his video on it before, but it caught me by surprise how casually he said it like it isn't a big deal.
@@gorillazfan85 He's like, "Oh that? Yeah...that was me." :D
Sadly, people who worked for him don't seem to view him as a legend. Lots of bullying and abuse accusations.
@Ra Ra 90% of those are Diverse people jockeying to use their institutional power to climb the ladder.
The other 10% get covered up by the same.
In an alternate universe, the logo treatment was rejected, and years later The Cutting Room Floor wiki had a section on how changing the version number changed the logo.
I'll add that section right now :D
@@juanmv94 In the alternative universe you come from, did Mega Man Legends 3 come out? Did it not suck?
@@HYDEinallcaps In the alternative universe I come from, Flappy Adventure X was considered the best PS1 game ever made, selling millions of copies, and making other companies to cancel their projects like Spyro, Crash, Final Fantasy VII,... Due to people only wanting to play FADVX
@@juanmv94 cool
@@juanmv94 that is hilariously unrealistic. Nice try clout chaser you "almost" had me there. Ha ha.
Wasn't expecting the montage of different modes - very cool to see!
Hah I came to the comments to say I "absolutely did not need to see every permutation" but fair enough!
Need a video on that spaceship and how there's so many frames
YES! I second this!
Agreed
YES
Yeah, I remember the Sonic FMV thing but I've never seen this animation before
Probably because it isn't FMV, just some sprites and BG tiles moving around?
This seems like a case of doing a little extra work up front to save yourself a lot of extra work later on. Makes sense to me. I think I'll go try this.
Yeah, excellent little life hack that helps everyone, isn't it!
lol knowing how businesses run, I could easily see Sega being all “no *you* change it and resubmit, that’s not our responsibility”
That was quite funny. I might not have ever made a Genesis game, but I'm actually quite surprised that I'd never thought about rules Sega might've had for how the Sega logo is displayed. I wonder if any game actually got rejected at first because they did something with the logo that Sega didn't like?
I do remember reading an interview with a dev that they had their main character attack the logo and blood spurted from it and that got rejected. Can't remember what game that was tho, might have been Splatterhouse.
@@alex.thedeadite I'd say it sounds more like something Eternal Champions would have done. If I remember correctly, Namco games tend to not even display a Sega logo in the first place, at least their Japanese releases.
@@popfan95b Which would be funny as one of the possible intros of that game is Blade attacking the Sega logo causing it to explode - which would mean they're fine with a character trashing their company logo as long as there's no blood, lol.
@@yellowblanka6058 Sega did Eternal Champions themselves, so it might have also been a "We can do it, but you can't" sort of thing.
1:43 oh man, those issues with TM and R balls on logos are still a pain in the butt today in producing digital/broadcast content. Finding out you have to add one after the fact is always fun! That was a clever and efficient way of packing all of those logo versions in there for dealing with, what could be, a tedious problem.
I loved the look of the pre-rendered space ship in the opening of the game. I am curious as to how you were able to fit that into a 16 bit console.
I would assume a bunch of sprites and palette swaps. And then for the chain horizontal interrupts to switch the offset as it scans down the screen.
I think the spaceship is small enough that it could just be animated the way character sprites are with no issues.
I think he did a video about that before.
@@Pr0jectFM Yeah, he said in another video that it has "hundreds of colours" so efforts were probably focused on that rather than compression.
@@bangerbangerbro I don't remember that. Which one?
I can't remember code I wrote five years ago. Im blown away at how well you know what you did heading on 30 years.
I bet after all that hard work of customisation Sega didn’t give a toss how it looked
Or rather Sega quite enjoyed the creative treatment.
Great trick to have a essentially a quick fix on the fly.
Literally just told my friend about this channel and what a genius you are. And here we are blessed with another look behind the veil.
Thank you for your videos. So informative.
I had to do a double take when I saw the intro and noticed the FMV ship, that was a cool effect!
Glad I'm not the only one, that thing looked legit for '92.
This wasn't in the final game. I don't know why they'd have put it in this video
@@sirkastic It IS in the game, Jon showed the intro sequence for the Genesis Mega Drive version EXACTLY as it appears in the final game, look up various videos containing the opening sequence for the Genesis Mega Drive version and see for yourself, if you're still unconvinced download a Genesis/Mega Drive emulator and the Rom for Puggsy and see for yourself that way (NTSC version or PAL it makes no difference).
@@superrayman3 Not sure your suggestions of breaking the law are quite appropriate. Comment reported
@@sirkastic Unfortunately unless you're willing to buy it there's literally no other way of trying or experiencing Puggsy for oneself (I don't like promoting piracy as much as the next person at all), if Puggsy had any form of rerelease in the almost 30 years it's been out I would've happily suggested that instead, furthermore I only said that to help illustrate my point that what you said about the FMV ship not being present in the final game is completely inaccurate.
The effort just to make the logo animated! What a legend
Behind the scenes looks! Using headers for unintended purposes too. Awesome stuff
When you went over the VER and what it did, I was expecting you to have set it to 0001 for certification, then sneakily see it to 0112 for the release.
Same here. I figured the plan would be to pretend that they’d added some kind of fixes at the last minute when it was really just changing that number. Of course, SEGA might not have been too happy about that.
@@AROAH I'm pretty sure that there was no quick fixes, whatever gets approved is what's put on a cartridge. This is a time long before hotfixes and post launch updates.
@@MudakTheMultiplier There were definitely cartridge revisions. It’s just that no one said anything about them. That’s why you have ROMs labeled as “v1.01.” It was common for Japanese games to receive fixes over the course of localization, too. So the NA version of many games will often be missing bugs or even rarely have new content.
@@AROAH but that's almost always for a proper new release of the game. A new localization involves a lot of code being rewritten if only to fit in the words in the existing space. And while you're mucking with that you might as well fix some other stuff. You can't just swap a language file and be done. Even just adjusting for ntsc or pal isn't trivial. And since everything is a big change, it always has to go through verification again.
And if you accidentally press a demo disc that formats the gamers' memory cards without warning... Whoopsie poopsie!
Puggsy does not appear to have been released on the Mega Drive on Japan, but if it was, it looks like you could have at least omitted the TM symbol as they were not used there.
I miss the Psygnosis logo. It was just so damn cool. Roger Dean ftw.
It's so cool to see this kinda stuff all these years later. I'm a developer now, I'm working on games in my free time and is kinda my final goal. The Sega Genesis was my first console and my introduction to video games. I've played may of the games you worked on and loved them. (Still have my sonic3D somewhere) Thank you for inspiring me all those years ago, and thank you for continuing to do so 25 years later. You're a stud.
Super cool to hear stories like this from someone who was there in the moment
Okay, now I feel a mighty need to know how the animation was done for the ship flying through space on the Puggsy intro.
As a programmer I do something similar to this - if requirements are a bit fuzzy or you expect someone to change their mind about something and it's easy enough to implement, add some configurable bits in that are easy to change later and you can look like the hero when the change is needed and there's no time left in the project.
one of, if not THE, best youtube channels ever existed, you are a legend. I appreciae everything you explain in your videos...
You cheeky git! Love the ingenuity
Still love the music!
that spaceship at the beginning is crazy, is that really from the original release and not the mega-CD?
Yes, the original.
Yeah the MCD version has a much longer FMV.
Would love to know more about these old days. It's surprising that clear guidance on what Sega wanted was not issued with dev kits!
Exactly what I was thinking. Particular about its usage, requires submission and approval, doesn't provide guidance...? Whut?
Or is this one of those cases of "we didn't have a dev-kit, we just RE'd other ROMs and wrote our own, then submitted it blind."
Nobody did at those times and it's still iffy today. It wasn't a case of Sega being neglectful or anything, that's just how it was.
Follow-up questions:
1) were workarounds like this ever actually *used* in a QC workaround? It's not clear that this version flag was ever twiddled with by Sega in this case.
2) the version in QC was "the most likely version to pass"; does that mean the version used in the production version was not the same?
From what he says in the video, the logo with everything enabled ("the most likely version to pass") was what they submitted, and SEGA approved it, so in the end the flag system was not needed. If it had been rejected, though, they could've just simply told SEGA "ok, change these flags and if that looks fine we'll change it on our side when we send it for manufacturing."
The amount I've learned about segas past consoles just for your videos is amazing
I can't believe how hard it was to get a reply from SEGA, but it was acceptable to ask them to use an hex editor, patch the ROM to their liking, and re-burn the ROM ICs to redo all the certification in case of failure .... ahh the crazy 90s
That's crazy specific with how the logo is displayed! You'd think they'd give you that kind of information up front!
Psygnosis and Traveller's Tales. Masters in the art of game crafting.
Dude. This has been BY FAR my favorite random find. I LOVE your channel, friend. You're brilliant.
I will always remember the Sonic cheat code. Up, down, left, right, A, B, Start. The them song kind of gave it away if you pay attention. I didn't know this is where it started.
I had the Amiga-, and later MegaCD-versions and I don't recall the latter having this awesome logo screen sadly. :(
It, however, did have an unlicensed cameo of the space ship from Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors in the intro FMV, so it had that going for it. ;)
I love Puggsy, and so it's really cool to hear about some of the 'Behind the Scenes' content from its development.
Coding Secrets: *uploads*
Everybody: A blessing from the Lord!
Well Gamehut but yeah.
like farming
Wow, that's really slick! You guys sure pioneered a lot of game dev back in the day. Kinda makes me wanna go beat Leander again (for a total of 2 times)
Classic game. LTUS was the code for the final level if I remember rightly?
@@entity8019 It was either the final level or the debug cheat, as I recall.
Now I'm going to be suspicious of oddball game version numbers for the rest of my life
Remind me of a Chakan, where the SEGA Logo was red. I asked the creator on Twitter about it and he said that they weren’t allowed to change the standard Sega logo. He did it anyway and Sega didn’t care.
The idea of replacing the crash handler with a level select still seems so wonderfully elegant to me.
The only frustrating part is that it still essentially reset the game, taking all your continues and emeralds. Not that the emeralds did much in 3D Blast, but still.
3:19 base model
4:10 deluxe package
It's a Puggsy video! Thank you for making this game!
For the Nintendo Game Boy, if you try to power it on when there is no cartridge in the slot, you get a black bar; if you put in a cartridge, there is a Nintendo logo. The Gameboy hardware was programmed not to boot a game unless the Nintendo logo is provided from the memory on the cartridge. That way, if someone wanted to make unlicensed games for the Gameboy, they had to make the Nintendo logo show up to get it to boot, and then Nintendo would take legal action due to trademark infringement by using their logo.
I actually quite enjoyed the one you guys used on Toy Story
It skipped to the next level, allowing my pitiful child skills to see the whole game, which frankly, I would never appreciate as much for the rest of my life.
working on games made you apart of every person's (and AI's) life. for that you (or at least the thought of your code) will forever be remembered. Nice to hear commentary on self doubt and building redundancy against failure, or at least preparing for a uncertain outcome of what shall we say 'weather'. I applied your foresight. Respect.
Programmers back in the 80s and 90s: "We have to have a full understanding of the hardware we are programming on to take full advantage it and be efficient as possible"
Programmers today: "My hello world program in Java takes up 1 gig of ram and I have no idea what an accumulator is."
These are amazing secrets that I never even knew existed in some of these games. It's so cool to hear what you added to all of these old SEGA games!
Puggsy remains as one of my favorite games on the Genesis/Mega Drive, both in terms of the in-game mechanics and the coding that went into it behind-the-scenes, and remains one of my favorite games to look at from a technical standpoint.
ill use this next time i make a game for sega in the 1990s
Same here.
ah puggsy rented this many times. the music in this game is fantastic can just sit and listen to splinter town and starfall lake, badger mill, fire heart for ages.
Such fascinating insights and problem solving. So amazed how little info you had to go on for approvals with Sega. Thanks for sharing!
Great to see the different versions of the logo. These videos are always interesting.
That's actually super interesting, having something that simple as a failsafe... It really goes to show that even the simplest of things can lead to some really advanced results
I think the Creative Commons attribution is required to appear inside the video, not only in the description. Fortunately, this won't raise any flags and the attribution is effectively present.
Great video by the way! Love these hack solutions!
I love your work. Keep it going
Me and a close friend of mine speedrun puggsy on the sega genesis. On one of the levels "Badger Mill" we figured a way to open the gate with only using one coin. The only thing we would like to know or have help figure out is does the flour mouse that kicks the eye ball around to open the gate on the other side is on some kind of timer or activates when the level loads so we can figure a good time to throw the eye ball with audio cue without getting absolutely destroyed by rng
Oh man, the stories from devs 'back in the day' are nuts. No/badly translated documentation on new hardware, opaque rules on what could/could not be included. This was all before the industry became the capital heavy behemoth it is today. For all its current flaws, I doubt many would go back =D
i would probably go back for the knowledge. i absolutely would not change games development as it is currently, but it would be nice to go back and gain the experience :)
I really don't doubt many would go back. Of all the things that people day used to be better, the video he's industry is one that really was.
@@TheInfamousLegend27 But all the knowledge for that stuff is obsolete now?
@@bangerbangerbro so? it would be interesting to have a lot more direct information about techniques, programming tricks and stuff like that. I think the history of games development, as I'm guessing you do by watching Jon's vids, is really interesting. like I said, I wouldn't change games dev as it is today, I'm saying it would be interesting to go back and gain experience of what programmers used to do to circumvent issues and bottlenecks in systems. I'm aware it's all obsolete lmao
@@TheInfamousLegend27 Totally. I guess one thing that looking back at that era (rather than being in it) is we get the 'Reader's Digest' version. I imagine some of these situations, right before solutions were found, were pretty intense O_O
Cool to see the idea of feature switches implemented this early.
I find it weird that sega would make people guess their requirements for a logo. You'd think they'd just tell you how they wanted it formatted.
In any case this was very clever. Me personally? I would have just looked at a whole bunch of sega game intros to see the patern and go from there.
OMG... i came across this by random chance, but PUGSY WAS ONE OF MY ALL TIME FAVORITE GAMES!!! DUDE!! THANK YOU FOR THIS GAME!!!!
Puggsy was SO good. I loved that game as a kid. Thanks for making it.
TBH I only first heard of it because of this channel. Haven't played it that much in the few years I have had it but I like the physics that remind me of little big planet.
@@bangerbangerbro Funny you mention that because according to Tim "CoLD SToRAGE" Wright the composer for the original Puggs In Space Amiga demo (and the one responsible for arranging Matt Furniss' tunes for the Amiga version of Puggsy), where the Puggsy character and name came from, the original idea for the game by the team that made the demo Dionysus was to create a game that played in a similar style to what we saw in LBP (I believe this happened 2-3 years before Jon and Traveller's Tales were commissioned by Psygnosis who bought all rights to the character from Dionysus to make a game based on the character resulting in the gem we have today).
IDK if it was intentional or a twist of fate but the fact that Pugsy's gameplay reminds some people who play it of LBP means that (at least to some degree) Jon was able to retain some of the original spirit for what Dionysus wanted to do, even if the finished product was completely different overall from what was originally envisioned (I honestly wonder what Lee Carus and Alan McCarthy the other 2 people behind Dionysus think about Jon's game).
It's so cool to hear these stories dude!
More Puggsy! Such an odd game especially for the time.
That's quite a lot of bureaucracy
It's also very clever putting it in the header, because the Checksum starts from hex location 200. So any data that does get modified in the header, the checksum value won't be affected.
Loved old era Psygnosis for original Wipeout series, Lemmings, early PS1 titles.
I found their charm wore thin when they renamed the studio and released the later Wipeout titles (PSP etc).
Were you a dev on their team? Any insights on what made the team stand out, internal culture etc?
I don't think jon was involved but i would love to be wrong on that. wipeout 2097 is my favourite game on ps1... except ff7.
My uncle is Mr. Sega and I'm telling him what you did!
But seriously, though, that's a pretty amazing use of the logo.
Very smart to have all the possible combinations.
Also, I'm sure they loved the animation, it looks great!
Incredible work as always Jon!
I swear, if Jon still worked a TT, LEGO Star Wars: Skywalker Saga would have released 2 years ago. Man is a genius.
So sense you were a part of puggsys development, do you know anything about the games infamous anti piracy screen and who on the team had that idea?
My favorite channel in the universe.
In the end they agreed on the badass animated logo!
Time traveller: "OK got it. Thanks bro"
man I love these vids, keep em up!
Sega should have published developer brand guidelines, Surprised so much was overlooked back then, it really was the wild west.
i remember me as a child short circuiting the AC adapter of my genesis (generating even little sparks) only to trigger the level select menu in 3D Blast! And I got it every time! xD
0112 all the homebrew!
That might explain why most games just showed a static SEGA logo
Wouldn't be surprised if some just ripped it from other games to be safe.
I would like to have a teardown, on how that flying in 3D-spaceship in the beginning was created. It's so smooth and the scaling looks perfect, while the Genesis doesn't really offer sprite scaling. It might be boring from developer's view though......
Is this a full version of the pugsy stage clear theme at 3:19?
So cool!! The only other game I've ever seen that played with the Sega logo other than Vectorman
? Loads of them play with the Sega logo. Though I suppose you mean not having the same logo in a fixed positio
@@bangerbangerbro actually remembered sonic spinball does it too
@@khaotix64 Yes but that has static sega logo like most of them. If we include those the we have Jurassic Park with the t rex that roars "sega", the sonic 3D intro, both earthworm Jim games, all the sonic games, cool spot, well too many to count, which is why I assumed you meant being a non first party game without the normal sega logo on a black background. G-LOC:air battle has the Sega logo on a different background too.
Seriously cool stuff.
A wonderful insight into coding and approval processes.
What an elegant solution! And trivial for Sega to modify the EEPROM you sent them by making it all into a few bytes of the ROM. If you'd gotten it "wrong", it would certainly have been worth it!
Now that is some lateral thinking. I love it. Preemptive to stop all that annoying back and forth.
I don't remember if it was covered in a previous video or not, but would love to hear about the making of the intro sequence in whole as you did that fmv style intro with the flying ship
Damn! 30 years too late😂😂
Great video once again!
I'd love to see you analyze more interesting features of games you haven't worked on.
Putting variables in something that the QA team can change is an ingenious but a frightening idea.
Awesome!
Wow you made Pugsley? That game was pretty cool.
What I found curious is that Sega was not squarely against patching a few bytes in the submitted ROM image.
At least your assumption was that they wouldn't mind having to do a couple of pokes.
Brilliant!
Loved Puggsy...
I had this for Sega CD. Many fond memories.
I HAD THIS GAME AS A KID AND WAS LOOKING FOR WHAT IT WAS CALLED FOR YEARS. PUGGSY
And that level of forethought reminds me of mentally preparing an answer to whatever complaints dad randomly throws out when he's in a bad mood, jfc