I dumped & preserved an UNRELEASED Nintendo GameCube game
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- čas přidán 17. 09. 2023
- I dumped and preserved an unreleased Nintendo GameCube game! @cakehoarder sent over a development / prototype NR disc of Pickles, a would-be title by Santa Cruz studios.
Check out @cakehoarder
• This Lost Game Situati...
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#GameCube #prototype #nintendo #gaming #retrogaming - Hry
Pressing Z kills everything except the reflection layer- the underside of the boat is just what renders for the water :)
Ohhh! Makes sense!!! Thank you. 😅
Came to say the same thing but you beat me to it!
@@hard4gameshello
@@Imjusthitachi2k10hello
@@hard4games well i want see new footage from spaceworld 2001
imagine a world where pickles was released. cancer cured. world peace. free pizza
The only bad thing would be free pizza. a perfect world would have pizza banned instead.
you have a very different idea of a perfect world and i dont like it @@JMGO
@@Chris-tn9bfyeah!
At least we can kinda play Pickles!
@@JMGO In a perfect world pizza would be free and also not bad for you
Dolphin accesses files differently than a Gamecube and NR Reader and file references can crash if a memory array is different than what the game expects. It may also not know how to read small files. It may work with a Swiss setup.
me two but i just hop there spaceworld 2001 footage i curious there more gamecube gameplay we all want to see right guy
Those "points of articulation" are vertex normals.
They are there to signify which direction each vertex is facing. If it has a single normal, the lighting will go across it smoothly.
If it has one normal per edge connecting to the vertex, it will be sharp.
It also shows you whether the face is facing inwards or outwards, which is useful for debugging weird lighting glitches.
I thought face normals maybe?
@@MaximumPower64
Either or, I didn't check what they were popping out of.
Face normals would define which side of the face is the front, while the vertex normals define the way shading passes over a surface.
(Face normals are usually what you use to tell a room, for instance, that its faces are inwards, so that you, from outside the room, see inside, without being obstructed by said faces.)
looking at where they were being drawn it seems more vertex normals than face normals, but we'll probably only find that out when someone looks at the wireframe
ah yes, those oily colored textures that u see in game files :)
Thanks again for the help man! Pickles forever...
Thanks for the opportunity to preserve it! 😁
🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🍰🍰🍰🍰🍰
@@hard4games Well, you are the premier dumpers out there.
Pickles forever indeed 😢
Very awesome stuff.
I'm not saying this would have been a masterpiece, but it clearly had potential to be fun and seems brimming with original ideas. I think if this was released today it would have stood a better chance of finding a publisher and audience.
I could definitely see it being a cult classic, sort of like Billy Hatcher is.
@@CommanderWiggins agreed
It reminds me of super monkey ball type game
3:55 those are the water reflections, it's probably to debug the buffer they render to
I noticed that in world 2 level 3 and 4, the debug print for memory usage says the game ran out of memory. I thought increasing the RAM would fix these levels, so I modified the disc header's bi2 to change the simulated MEM1 size to automatic and cranked up Dolphin's Emulated Memory Size Override to 64MiB. The game did recognize the change, now saying "48 Meg Mode" while acknowledging the full 64MiB in the used / free stats. However, the levels *still* managed to use up all of the available RAM. The levels are also *extremely* laggy on Dolphin. Just before the lag hits, OSReport prints "SHIT!" 12 times before OSCheakHeap fails.
I wasn't able to find debugging symbols anywhere on the disc, so investigating exactly what's happening is a little more than I'm willing to partake in.
Sounds like a massive memory leakage occurring that might be caused by one of the assets being loaded in-game, maybe you can formulate a trend based on the level design of the ones which it happens to?
I did attempt swapping files from other worlds in, and the source of the issue is caused by something in the identical World2/level_03.ma4 and World2/level_04.ma4 files.
I'm poring over the disc still. Spent the last few hours (successfully) writing an image decoder for one of the two image formats found on the disc.
@@Minty_Meeodo any of the /old levels work?
Haven't tried any of those yet. I can tell you that World1/temp.ma4 works great. It's World1/level_01.ma4 with all different textures.
Super cool. Glad that we got this preserved. Keep it up!
The reason Cakehoarder got levels 1 and 2 to work reliably and you didn't have as much luck could quite possibly be down to differences in disc drive hardware and how it has aged between their NR Reader and yours. You can see this with retail cubes too. Consoles that function and read games can still have inconsistent and varying degrees of difficulty reading scratched discs because of how the hardware in the drives and lasers has degraded over time. These are 20+ year old consoles after all.
Damn cool find. Any unreleased game is an amazing discovery and this is quite the quirky little game.
I wonder if you can resurface the disk and do another dump of it, and compare the checksums of the scratched version and fixed one.
It has crc checks like any other optical media. Without it, the drive wouldn't know when it needs to retry a sector.
I’m convinced that H4G is the most under appreciated channel on CZcams
I think they're getting appreciated. About to hit 100k subs
Regarding the glitched stages, upon loading them you get the debuggar saying it has -1 bytes of free RAM, which cant be right. Maybe thats why tehy appear like this.
you should buff the disc and re-dump it, and checksum both of the dumps to see if theyre different
Interestingly Level 1-1 and 1-2 that didn't load for you in Dolphin loaded just fine for me. Not sure what might be the cause but at least that means there is no need to mess with the game files to get those working in Dolphin. (is it the Dolphin version? I use 5.0-18498)
For the dataminers among us, the game's files contain some neat things, including 6 pieces of music that I don't think you get to hear ingame and an intro video. There are also old versions of the World 1 levels in a folder titled old (possibly less optimized? Less finished? Or maybe different? I wonder if they would even boot)
Thanks for archiving and preserving this unfinished game.
Sure we can't much of it but it's part of gaming history which despite all the technology we have is brutally hard to keep intact.
Since you didn't mention it, I was wondering if you just dumped it the one time or if you did it multiple times?
If it was me and I was backing up something without a real error detection mechanism (that was mentioned at least), then I'd dump it at least 3 times then check if there are differences between the dumps. (Also you might be able to make a "rebuilt" dump by taking the dumps sector by sector and generating a new dump based on the most common values)
Also about the scratches, you didn't mention how deep they might've been but if they aren't super deep, then you could always find someone with a disc resurfacing machine and attempt to remove the scratches then redump.
Is there a way to disable 24 Meg Mode? Notice that the levels with glitched garbage on screen are running out of RAM.
I assume the NR Reader has extra RAM (compared to a retail GCN's 24 MB), and Dolphin also offers an option to simulate this. The game just has to tap into it somehow.
The view you are looking at from underneath is the draw buffer for the planar reflections, probably a debug tool
Might want to dump it multiple times
Don't worry, I did. Dumped it a few times at slow read speeds. 0 errors each time. Same result.
The disc should be resurfaced, But before read and copy what you can because the resurfacing could in theory be botched.
This has to be one of my favorite GameCube prototype I have played! I can’t believe it’s preserved and put on the notice board on the LMW
How did you play this? It does look fun. Im into emulation but a copy is not even available no?
@Durbeshpatel3047 The ISO is in the description. The website is called The Hidden Palace.
You can get to the lighthouse by jumping on the ropes nearby - it shows this by putting gems on the ropes. It was hard to figure out, but when I made it over a man came out of the lighthouse, did something, and then went back inside very quickly. The crates on the fish factory have canned fish in one of 3 - you missed the fish can on the left side. Once broken, the cans go down the conveyor belt and break the machine. The animation for breaking the machine is primitive and is just kind of a red blob.
I love how far this channel has come. Doin a real ass service for video gaming
An ass service?
I got an NR Reader in a thrift store in Ireland and it had a disc with it but I've never been able to get the disc to run :(
Send it over!
@@hard4games I will!
can’t wait
You should have that disc resurfaced. It may fix many issues
Cakehoarder
At least he’s not a prototype hoarder
I love how he's cake "hoarder" despite not hoarding a prototype
Well yeah, he hoards cakes, not video game prototypes.
probably doesn't hoard cake, it's just a handle
Well yeah, if this were a cake he would have hoarded It
@@videostash413naw he does dude trust me. Whether it's your birthday or his you ain't getting a slice
Pickles for GameCube -- BCA, PFI, DMI dumping.
For educational reasons and for the reasons of (as complete as possible) preservation, please dump everything from the prototype discs (including BCA, PFI and DMI If possible) -
Please also dump BCA, DMI and PFI of your current GameCube Prototype discs.
In CleanRIP for GamCube (or for NR Reader) you can dump the main disc data area.
But in Swiss for GameCube you can also dump BCA (Burst Cutting Area), DMI (Disc Manufacturing Information) and PFI (Physical Format Information).
Swiss for GameCube --> Device Selection --> System --> [dvd_disk_bca.bin, dvd_disk_dmi.bin, dvd_disk_pfi.bin]
Please dump everything if possible (to hiddenpalace, tcrf and web archive).
all the GOATs out here, finding lost media and preserving them for the good of the hobby 🔥🔥
Great find. Curious what the story/goal would be cause this looks like a real fever dream
Incomplete in a really weird way. Most of the game/gameplay barely exists but certain things are weirdly very polished/complete. Like some animations and interactable objects/items.
The animal stacking reminds me of that one noah's ark game for the NES. :D
Those differences between console and dolphin might be some interesting examples for dolphin development, but the random chance crashing on the original hardware makes it seem like a mess of race conditions.
I was thinking that, the design of the shark is complete but it has no hit collision when trying to bite. Whoever was doing the art must've been going crazy fast
awesome! i didnt know that there were other options for dumping nr disks. i have a frii/rawdump compatible drive and have ripped many retail games with it but scratchs can be a problem
Thank you for your contribution to preserving history.
I saw cake's video the other day and was super excited when he said he was sending the game to you! So happy it showed up ok. 😊
1:21 i was today years old when i realized the blocks at the end of the gamecube boot up form a G
Did you consider using a machine to shave off the top layer to clear those scratches? I would dump before and then shave it and try again.
4:00 The effect that happens when you press the Z button is it disables all objects, showing the reflection layer from the water below the level.
This would be amazin like Donkey Kong.
Cool! I have Launchbox set up with mostly exclusives from all consoles, but also with protos and interesting hacks and mods and stuff, this will fit in perfectly.
Did not know about hiddenpalace, so thanks for that!
CAKE NATION RISE UP!!!
Ew no he sucks
true@@MaxH0ward
So interesting! Thank you and Cakehoarder so much for getting this dumped! 💚
That Gamecube color is great… looks even cooler than the orange one imo… sweet 🆙
My main controller was that colour. Imported from Japan.
hello. you can access the remaining levels except for 1 or 2 of them that crash, by using emulation and increasing the emulated memory of the system. hope this helps!
You can often get a scratched disc to read if you spray Pledge furniture polish and gently wipe off the excess. Thanks for the video!
hmm... better to preserve before trying any shenanigans like that, you can always preserve again after
@@videostash413 True. But the wax is harmless and washes off. If you have it, try it on one of your discs you don't care about.
@@SprocketGames You can just get the disc rebuffed using professional equipment. Your recommendation is not good enough.
Optical disc games use a read buffer to access data. When errors are encountered, there is usually some logic involved, to try to mitigate the read errors. Games that stream data, like Grand Theft Auto, would not work at all if the code could not handle a read error. This game does not seem to handle read errors, so if it does encounter one (likely, since your disc is scratched) it will simply crash.
The ROM dumper flies through the errors because it just reads all bytes sequentially, and any minor read error is silently corrected by various means like reading the same spot several times until the read is successful. Same as the later generation CD or DVD players
Obviously, if the dump is good, then the game won't have read errors when run in an emulator, explaining why it does not crash in an emulator.
If a gamecube game has 2gb disk and the game takes 850mb cant the same data be burned twice if it cant read the first burn it can read the second burn of the data.
@@Maxmartin12355 are you talking about burning two copies of the game, back-to-back, on the same disc? I don't think this would achieve anything. I think that the console tries to find a header at a fixed location at the start of the disc. This header includes metadata on the file system such as the size of the data. Whatever is left at the end is like a bonus track on a music CD, but the console is just never going to read from there.
In some scenarios, it is possible to include redundant copies of data on a disc, to protect against physical damage, but we would not be talking about video games here.
If you have a ROM loader running on the console, then you could fit two copies of a ROM on the same disc and you could play from either. If one failed to load, a bad burn, defects in the physical medium or the optical drive would take the blame. I can imagine a bad drive that works fine across the range of the disc except for one spot.
@@sleblanc make alot of sense because alot of gamecube movie games would be filled with pictures and videos other video game trailers as bonus because they had space left on the disk. They also had seens from the acutal movie.
0:14 When you said Optical, the sound that P made was very satisfying, lol
This feels like an idea someone had earlier in the 90s and didn't get funding for it until later. Like I can imagine the pitch started with, "Dude, I got an idea that's da bomb, okay hear me out... monkeys on unicycles."
I get the same vibe! Feels like something that started pre-production during the N64 era before moving on to actually developing on next gen hardware
Said after playing Midway's Kick 🤡🦶
It was the development team's in-house project that failed to get any tangible funding so it could be produced as a full-pledged title as they named it after a stray cat they found that would visit the headquarters, instead they were exiled into making licensed shovelware games for systems of the decade. You were a little close, though that's definitely how I could see them pitching their game to publishers
Thank you for releasing this!
i think i saw this passing by on reddit in the gamecube subreddit or something, nice video!
there are .wav files in the contents of the iso that are readable
Santa Cruz would make a goofy nautical game.
Silly beach town is silly.
for me everything works on the pause menu except for controls. there's at least 40, sfx in there!
⭐ This is exciting 😊 Is there any finds of Racing Games for any systems? As for this game you should send the full game to people who already do game updates once you get them all working. I love the Mario Kart 64 Amped Up games for example. For all of you with unreleased games.. please do the right thing by getting them dumped ASAP before it's destroyed or lost forever. They all need to be put out for everyone to enjoy. Thank you 😊🎮
The right thing would for you to pitch in financially to help cover their costs of acquiring the unreleased/prerelease game in the first place. Please consider actually contributing and not just begging, thank you! 😊😊
I think the Z button is turning off everything except the water reflections? Maybe for testing reflection graphics?
You know what? A scanning electron microscope and a lot of time, and some algorithmic software, you could probably much more effectively dump and preserve the binary digital data on these old disks.
Same with old tape and scanning high precision magnetic analogue read head.
Z was looking only at the reflective rendering pass, to see in action how the rendering is handling reflective surfaces.
Well, I guess now we’ll see if any talented modder takes it upon themselves to finish this game.
That is an extremely rare thing to ever occur, and when it does, it's with already hugely popular IP's, not this garbage.
You are doing the work of video game god.
3:52 that seems to be the water reflection of that level
Nice a new video about a Gamecube game ! i'm so happy Tony FTW!
Another banger video, Pickles shall live forever! :DDD
You should try resurfacing the disc just in case the integrity of the data isn't being reported correctly.
in an alternate universe, mario was never released. theres only pickles.
* shudder*
The moment you fell from the dock I was scared
I got a sever warning and it said it was a Trojan in Windows I assume it's a false positive, got it from the link in the description. I ran it and works as intended just curious to why that was triggered.
Graphically, looks awesome for an unfinished game
Ooh, more gamecube game prototypes! Bout time we got some more games.
Very nice. I loved all the wonky games on GC :)
I've had good luck cleaning up scratches that bad with Plastx polish, just sharing.
Looking at all those monkeys stacked, wonder if you could stack Goombas the same way lol.
Holy shit... this is literally an archeological find!
very cool seems like the dev got a long way through before whatever happened
This is rad. I hope to get an NR reader one day.
I posted that when I played it and I credited to you and cake who have dumped and released the game
Why is this channel still so small. It should grow nice and big.
Paper Toad Cake
Sad it never released sounds and looks fun
this game goes crazy hard
Neat! Thank you
Can the iso boot on a regular Gamecube or Wii using a homebrew iso launcher?
You’re doing Miyamoto’s work
All this pickles stuff and yet not one post has made the comparison. Catastrophe Crow. A old game that ive never heard of.. nor ever released. Just being found one day...
I live for pickles
Dope man!
I definitely would have at the very least, rented this game. looks fun
Do you have anymore content concerning the Zelda 64 beta being restored? Loved those videos.
That NR disc needs resurfacing.
download the game, but i only get 1 level where i cant move. plz help i use dolphin emulator
I love the GameCube’s color it looks very unique
seems like a cute idea for a game, I'll give it that.
Z appears to be the reflection
I love how everyone is talking about this monke game lol, cool to see a canceled gamecube game surface for all to play
I think that you need an NR Reader emulator for using the roms
i hop we gets new footage from spaceworld 2001
Looks like kinda sequel to N64's Rocket Robot On Wheels.
A brand new old game!
Hmm... I think the reason why the level geometry glitched out on levels 2-3 & 2-4 is because you dumped the ROM from the disc in a scratched state. I could be wrong though.
I have an NR disc that I don’t know if it is blank or not. Is there a way to see if anything is on my NR disc?? I’ve tried Swiss on my GameCube and it doesn’t read it. I do not have an NR reader.
Would I have to purchase an NR reader/writer like you use in the video?
Yes you would have to purchase a reader. Normally you can look at the back and see the point which it's burned to, if it was. If it seems like it has data, I'd be happy to dump it.
@@hard4gamescould I send you a picture of the back? The back does have a good amount of scratches. I really don’t know what I’m looking at lol I’d be happy to mail it to you to dump if it is not blank.
Hi would that happen if i try the rom in
Dolphin because idk if it would
I have one piece of criticism with how you released the demo game into the public: maybe it would've been good if you somehow converted the .iso file into a bunch of torrent files so that it could be read more easily. Still, I'm glad it has been archived and that it's out there.