Saturday, January 12, 2013

Unused Prototype Coconut Beach Track

Whilst working on the track select for time trial mode, I uncovered an unused OutRun track layout.

It appears to be an early prototype of Coconut Beach; and is found in all versions of the game. It is significantly different from both the Japanese and World versions of this level. It's tougher, with sharper bends although the final chicane is missing.  You'll notice there are a few scenery changes, as well as small amounts of ground debris. There are also scenery errors with directional signs pointing the wrong way.

Here is a video I recorded in MAME:


The level can be enabled only by using the MAME debugger. You will need to set the following breakpoint on the master CPU (Revision B romset):

focus 0
bpset e4ea,1,{b@260010 = 3A; g}

This breakpoint will swap out the final Coconut Beach track for the prototype.

UPDATE: This track is now playable in Cannonball.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Interesting...

It looks more like a test track to me. Notice where they tried out all the different types of warning signs ect....

yt said...

Yes. My thoughts too. I suspect this was what they used to develop the engine and test the outrun concept before the final tracks were built.

gadesx said...

is normal that if he car change of direction the symbol of ferrari make a reverse too?

yt said...

Yep, the sprites are horizontally mirrored/flipped when the car changes direction. That's normal.

Unknown said...

That's something that would be a good candidate to be "fixed" imho.

If sprite replacement ever happens we could go ahead and make individual sprites for left and right as we aren't limited to the space requirements of the original hardware anymore.

Unknown said...

That's something that would be a good candidate to be "fixed" imho.

If sprite replacement ever happens we could go ahead and make individual sprites for left and right as we aren't limited to the space requirements of the original hardware anymore.