Sometimes prototypes never really even develop to the point of being a fully playable game but get stuck at the ‘tech demo’ stage where art assets etc. are still being created.
NeoTurfMasta ended up uncovering the board for a Neo-Geo game in this state and posted his findings on neo-geo.com.
We have no idea what the game was destined to be had the project continued, but whatever it is it gives an early glimpse into what could have been. Unfortunately due to the use of SRAM cards for the ‘S1’ ‘M1’ and ‘V1’ ROM data the entire text layer (energy bars etc.) and sound is missing, those things were only meant for short term storage and the batteries had clearly been dead for many many years. Luckily the C rom data and program roms did not use that type of card, so their data survived.
Here’s a video of it running in MAME
Can see why it never made it. It wasn’t looking good.
Amazing! And there aren’t any clues about the origin visible when opened in a hex editor?
Looking at the video one can finally see how games are developed, characters are silhouettes until the gameplay is complete, the final characterization is added only at the end. Sometimes the game developing is much more interesting than the game itself.
seems there are more infos about this prototype in this link : http://www.usgamer.net/articles/a-mysterious-neo-geo-prototype-hits-the-web
This is a nice find though it is very very unfortunate that the sound and text layers will forever be lost.
sorry to be a jerk but the bilinear filtering in the posted video looks awful. You should turn it off in the future. It looks more accurate without it ;-)
Greets
Roland
In the Neo-Geo.com thread, the game title was found to be “Dragon’s Heaven”, developed by Face in 1997.