Shadow Man (Dreamcast)

Shadow Man
Developer: Acclaim Studios Teesside Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment Platform: Dreamcast Released in US: December 1, 1999 Released in EU: July 24, 2000 This game has revisional differences.

Shadow Man on the Dreamcast was the last port of the game released and of them, is the closest to the Windows version.

To do: Debug enabled prototype [1], also seems to have higher quality audio than the released port.

Revisional Differences

Paul Taylor, the lead programmer on the Dreamcast port, wrote on his blog:

"The Dreamcast version was a little rushed at the end, however. There was a push to get the game done and published in time for Thanksgiving – that time towards the end of November when us folks in the UK studios had next to no luck getting any information out of the US offices. One small but somewhat important bit of information that was slow in getting back was that they’d gone ahead and published the game, while we were still submitting new revisions to the test dept. The version they initially launched had a fairly major bug in the sound system. We weren’t handling a failure case properly – a situation that might not present itself for a couple of hours of gameplay – but when it did occur, most of the sounds simply stopped playing, and those that did play were heavily distorted. We’d found and fixed the problem, and so were told that the fixed version would go out with the next disk pressing. Allegedly."

A second pressing with changes did indeed happen, some of the differences can be spotted in ROM.PAK at 0x135E982 and more starting at 0x1361800.

0x135E982

1.010 (Nov. 14)	1.001 (Nov. 23)
COMMENT( no music yet! PlayTune (0, "data\\audio\\music\\level17\\epic17.wav", 1, 127)	PlayTune (0, MUSIC_L12_EPIC, 1, 127)

(Source: cyplexia.net)