Norbert wrote: ↑May 12th, 2018, 6:28 pm
Hm, it took me about half a minute to figure out what image/text linked to the file (Prince_of_Persia.7z). It's the text "Prince of Persia" next to "US title". I eventually found it by using Ctrl+f on the page source. First I was thinking maybe Adblock Plus or Tracking Protection were causing the link to be hidden.
Sorry about that. I am so used to the site that I forgot to explain this...
Norbert wrote: ↑May 12th, 2018, 6:28 pm
Anyway... Beta 1 is interesting. It must have leaked? It doesn't have the sword or guards, and a chomper (with the prince death in front of it) in the starting room, among other things. Enter restarts its only level.
It doesn't have the menus or the intro either. It directly starts with the first level.
There are no sounds either.
David wrote: ↑May 12th, 2018, 1:03 pm
(*) And screen-switch fading, that supposedly isn't there with the "Genesis PoP beta 1" rom.
It took me about half an hour to find the code that handles palettes and fading. (But I have been writing this post for like one hour...)
Here is how to disable fading between different rooms:
In the USA version: At offset 0x00000C32 write: 4E 71 4E 71 4E 71.
In the Europe version the offset is 0x00000BFC.
This hack doesn't affect the fade-in/out when starting or restarting the level.
Also, this hack has a small bug: when you meet the first guard, he will fade in from black.
Some details:
This hack actually disables the fade to black.
Due to the way fades are implemented, the following fade in will take no time, since the displayed palette already matches the level palette.
Fading to black is done using an all-black (all-zeroes) palette at offset 0x000045C0 (USA) / 0x00004B0C (Europe).
After that there are various single-color palettes for flashes. (all-red, all-blue, etc.)
Looks like they didn't bother to write code that makes such a palette from the color value.
This is not really surprising considering the way they solved integer-to-string conversion:
viewtopic.php?p=19994#p19994