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May 2, 2016

Back from the dead!

For a long while now, I have felt that we need a wiki for all the stuff that happens in our little community. The world of prototype hunting is fragmented, as each site/forum caters to their own sub-niche. There is nothing wrong with that, but it becomes difficult (for me at least) to keep up with what was released where and when, by whom and why. To remedy this me, and my small team have been working on turning my old site into a wiki to make all this easier.

Hidden Palace turns 10 today (where did the time go?), which I thought was a great occasion to come back from the dead and get back to work. This year I will be going through both my released and unreleased material and putting it all on the wiki. The plan is to have a weekly cadence of releases, because there is a lot to get to.

Ultimately my hope is that Hidden Palace becomes a useful catalog for prototypes, releases, and other development material that has been gathered not just by me, but others as well.

For your convenience, we’re now on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter so you can keep up with the latest contributions to Hidden Palace. Please follow us and spread the word!

If you would like to volunteer, we are currently looking for people to actively contribute and help with the wiki, so if you’re interested please feel free to contact us on the forums, IRC or email. We are currently working on importing the rest of the old site onto the new wiki, so please excuse any broken links or the like for the next few days.

Anyway, this announcement wouldn’t be complete without something to release. Today I present to you a few goodies that I’ve been meaning to release for a long time.

Today’s release is part of what came as a surprise to me. Upon reviewing the source CDs from that 2008 QA release I did, I found something interesting. Three CDs that I had assumed were just final ROMs contained, in fact, a bunch of non-final builds. The CDs come from a Final ROM archive that was put together at Sega in April of 1994, most likely for SEGA Channel. These non-final ROMs range from builds that are legitimate misplaced prototypes, localization prototypes, prototypes of revisions, and strange altered ROMs that contain very minor changes for SEGA Channel.

I and Evilhamwizard have gone through these CDs thoroughly and put together a big table with the original file names, file dates, etc. Check it out here.

Read the rest of the article here!