International Superstar Soccer 98 PAL Prototype
There is a popular conception/belief that PAL prototypes are always final or close to final copies of the game. The logic seems to be that games are developed in NTSC, and then converted to PAL after the development on the NTSC game is completed. In my experience with many Nintendo 64 prototypes, this is somewhat of a false belief and limiting misconception.
Many development studios are/were based in Europe, and some games may have been developed in North American/Japanese studios for the international market. In these cases, it makes sense that the game could have been developed in the PAL format and converted over for the NTSC markets after initial development was completed.
The global release dates for a game can give us some clues as to what format the game may have been developed in, and therefore the format that might have more interesting and desirable prototypes than the other. While this logic doesn't always hold true, it just might hold true for International Superstar Soccer 98!
This prototype build is not wildly different than the final release, but it does have some noticeable differences.
Noticeable Differences
The audio clip of the announcer and "PRESS START" text both are missing from the start screen. There does not appear to be a demo mode, like in the retail game, either. If you don't press start to advance within a short period, the entire game startup sequence begins again, just as if you had reset your console.
From this point forward, every picture shows the retail game on the left and prototype on the right
The splash intro animation that plays when you power the game up has some subtle differences, such as the position/angle of some of the models that slide across the screen.
Um.. how many pages are needed to save your game, again? :)
The team stats (and maybe players?) are different. It also appears that they are working through some kind of character encoding or display issue- some of the stat numbers are backwards!
Checkout the temperature and humidity for the day- looks like some more text that they are displaying backwards.
You may not be able to see a "Replay", but at least you can always "Reply"? Prob some more typos like this around
What else is different? Well, to be honest, I haven't played much further than the screenshots that you see on this page.
Both the NTSC and PAL retail copies of the rom are only 12mb, but the prototype rom is a full 16mb. Looking at the rom with a hex editor, it does not appear that the additional data is an overdump from some previous build flashed on the dev cart- from what I can tell, all of the additional data is continuous and appears to be part of the actual game data for the prototype rom.
Can safely admit that my own technical knowledge is limited, and this one has not been sent to any technical expert for deeper analysis yet, so if you are so inclined to play the game or dig into the data, there should be plenty left to explore!
Release Coming Soon
Have any prototypes that you want to share or need help backing up?
Please let us or someone else from the preservation community know!