The game preservation community Hidden Palace has released a batch of sample games for Sega Dreamcast and Microsoft Xbox. It’s about early builds and games that were never released. 349 titles for Xbox and 135 titles for Dreamcast.

Xbox titles include games like Hail to the Chimp, He-Man: Defender of Grayskull, and Pac-Man World Rally, as well as Sega games that haven’t seen the light of day on that platform, like Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller, ToeJam & Earl III and Jet Set Future Radio. Hidden Palace finds it remarkable that a lot of the games on the Xbox slate have never been released. speculate That’s because the first-generation Xbox hardware was so new that people weren’t sure the platform was worth the investment. At the same time, its competitor, the PlayStation 2, was doing very well in the market at the time.

On the Dreamcast side, it includes games like Ready 2 Rumble Boxing Round 2, San Francisco Rush 2049, Shadow Man, Test Drive Cycles, Vigilante 8: Second Offense, WWF Attitude, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Many of these games have just entered the market; The difference with release versions is that these are releases that are not yet fully finalized. They may have a different address, the videos are not yet post production Or enable debug options.

Casting ROMs is often not a simple process

Hidden Palace also gives a detailed account of how the ROM dumping and testing process works. With Xbox games, the challenge has been that data is always stored in turns. The medium converts from CD to DVD and dual layer DVD. In addition, partition systems often differed, which made playing games a mutable process. One of the games worked fine on one emulator while the other required a genuine Xbox.

Dreamcast dumps were hard to come by. All of these required original hardware because Sega worked with its own “gd-rom” disk format. This slight discrepancy left the team with no choice but to use an original katana Dreamcast devkit, or from the so-called System Disc 2, which allows reading prototypes on a regular Dreamcast. System Disk 2 cannot be burned, according to Hidden Palace.

Hidden Palace contains the complete lists of X-Box employment flower dreamgaming stand. The individual pages of the games also contain extensive notes on development status, copy protection, whether the game can be played with an emulator, and more. Several screenshots are also shown.

Hosting for these addresses is provided by Archive.org. Hidden Palace doesn’t talk much about the origin of the prototypes: “All this was made possible thanks to the dedication of a very sympathetic person, who took on the task of eliminating everything from this collection on his own.”

Prototypes fall under the so-called flood project From the hidden palace. Under this title, they previously released PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Sega Saturn and Philips CD-i models.

Prototypes from Jet Grind Radio (DC) and Psychonauts (Xbox), 2 games from a 484-piece total set