Sonic's Schoolhouse

Sonic's Schoolhouse
Developers: Orion Interactive, BAP Interactive Publisher: Sega Platform: Windows Released in US: November 15, 1996 This game has hidden developer credits. This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused cinematics. This game has unused sounds. This game has debugging material.

Sonic's Schoolhouse is a rather bland educational game starring Sonic the Hedgehog, intended for kids no older than 9 years old. It includes awful pre-rendered graphics (even for the time), irritating MIDI files, and pointless AVI animations everywhere. Not to mention Sonic's girly voice...

Unused Videos

Present in four of the AVI files is a strange talking clock which may have been used before the developers managed to get the Sonic license. The voice actor is unknown, but sounds different from Sonic's.

CC_HELP2.avi, CC_HELP3.avi, and CC_HELP4.avi

These three files, created on January 8, 1996, are all identical in content: an animation of a clock jumping up and rotating in midair while saying "Click on me for help!"

CC_HELP3 has noticeably blockier video quality than the other two, possibly as a test for the video compression.

GUMC_.avi

Created October 2, 1995, predating the aforementioned files. It contains the animation of the above files, played forward then in reverse until stopping on a still frame of the clock.

Unused Audio

You don't have the bus pass yet... Give it another try

Dated September ‎21, ‎1995.

Elephant Hit

Dated September ‎14, ‎1995.

The voice clips used in-game are dated no earlier than May 6, 1996, suggesting that the above two were placeholders until the Sonic license was acquired.

Hidden Command Line Parameters

To do: The video demonstrating these has been removed. Get a new one if possible.

If you run Sonic's Schoolhouse from the command line, you can set the following parameters:

• CHEAT - Enables you to load any of the maps from a dialog box, add/remove PCX files from data files, record and play demos, and get all items (bus passes, minigame passes, etc.). Adding/removing PCX files and recording demos requires "BUILD" mode to be enabled as well.
• BUILD - Allows you to "build" the data used by the game, as seen in the "CHEAT" features.
• NODAT - Makes the game not load SONIC.DAT, and thus not load certain files, which can cause the game to crash.
• NOSOUND - Disables loading the sound subsystem.
• MSG - Takes a number from 40-200 and sets that as the controller poll frequency (not shown in the video).
• JOY - This one's functionality is strange. It takes a number from 0-100 (any other numbers will just cap it within that range) and if it's nonzero, what happens is that after the first time you press the "GO" stoplight button, it takes the number you put in and decrements it until it reaches 0. When it does, it plays the animation that plays when you press the "GO" stoplight button again. After that, the timer is never reset. This is the only time that happens. By default, this value is 0, so it never happens in-game normally anyways. This parameter has no other functionality.

Hidden Strings

Old Game Title

Present in various places in the executable are strings referring to the game as "Answer Hunt" or "AnswerHunt".

An error message is at 0x2FD74:

AnswerHunt - MCI Error

A reference to a TTF file is at 0x2F29E and 0x2F48E:

ANSWHUNT.TTF

And at seven different places (0x351E2, 0x3561A, 0x35842, 0x3594E, 0x359D6, 0x35DE2, and 0x35E12) is this:

A.n.s.w.e.r. .H.u.n.t.

(Note that those periods are 0x00 in the binary data, not 0x2E.)

Function Names

There exists error message strings used when loading SONIC.DAT for debugging purposes. These messages include what seem to be original function names for such. It all starts at 0x2AB54 in the executable.

DatafileOpen: unable to open file %s in mode %s
DatafileOpen: Bad read reading ID
DatafileOpen: Bad ID
DatafileOpen: Bad read index position
DatafileOpen: Bad seek
DatafileOpen: Bad read index count
DatafileOpen: Out of memory allocing index.
DatafileOpen: Bad read index sort flag
DatafileOpen: Bad read index
DatafileClose: Datafile file not open
DatafileGetData: seek error.
DatafileGetData: comp none read error.
DatafileGetData: Out of memory alloc'ing temp.
DatafileGetData: COMPRESSED read error.
DatafileGetData: unknown compression type %d.
DatafileAddData: Datafile entry %s already exists.
DatafileAddData: Out of memory allocing index.
DatafileAddData: Out of memory on index resize.
DatafileAddData: seek failure
DatafileAddData: comp none write failure
DatafileAddData: out of memory on temp alloc.
DatafileAddData: FAST COMPRESSED write failure
DatafileAddData: write failure
DatafileAddData: unknown compression type %d.
DatafileAddFile: out of memory on temp alloc
DatafileAddFile: read error.
DatafileExtractFile: file name not in index
DatafileExtractFile: out of memory on temp alloc
DatafileExtractFile: write file failed.
DatafileRemoveData: couldn't open temp file.%s
DatafileRemoveData: seek error.
DatafileRemoveData: couldn't remove old Datafile.
DatafileRemoveData: couldn't rename tempfile. %s
DatafileRemoveData: couldn't reopen Datafile. %s
DatafileRemoveByName: name not in index

Hidden Credits

Present at 0x2C080 in the executable is a credit for an "I3D Tool Kit". I3D was a toolkit used to create 3D applications in MS-DOS and Windows (see here for more).

I3D Tool Kit 2.1 (c)1993-94 Jim O'Keane