Sonic Adventure AutoDemo/Comparisons

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General comparisons

Demo Loop and Game Introduction

Because the game is set by default to never take the player's input, the introduction and the demos themselves cannot be skipped.
The SEGA logo doesn't appear when first loading the game, but shows up normally before the opening movie if the build manages to loop back to that point.
The SEGA logo itself is a darker shade of blue and is much smaller than in the final. It is also missing the "PRESENTED BY" text above it.
The introduction has a few differences:
- Tails has his mouth open when he appears. In the final, it is closed.
- E-102 Gamma is missing the "102" texturing on the side of his body. This is consistent in all of his appearances in the intro.
The list of scenes shown in the autodemo is different than the ones that play in the final game's demo loop:
- The third demo is the prison scene with Amy and Gamma; usually Knuckles' demo would go here. Because of this omission, Knuckles' theme is unused in this build.
- The demo positioning for the final demos used for Amy and Gamma are swapped here - Gamma's appears as the fourth and Amy's is the fifth.
- Gamma's demo has him in Red Mountain instead of Windy Valley (for reasons that will be obvious below).
- Amy's demo has her in Final Egg instead of Hot Shelter (for reasons that will be obvious below).
- Big's demo starts in a different part of Emerald Coast.

General

The player starts with 2 lives instead of 4.
Dying during the demos does not reset the ring count. This can be seen if the Speed Highway demo is watched with the wonky emulator timings - despite Sonic dying repeatedly his count eventually gets high enough to net him an extra life.
The build has an earlier version of the camera system:
- In practice, it tends to more favor straight-up cuts to new shots in this build than in the final - in the final the camera tends to follow characters and then pan or zoom out as opposed to just cutting.
- It has more of a tendency to clip through walls and floors.
- The player-controlled rotation (by pressing either trigger button) is far slower than it is in the final, and has a tendency to invert itself based on the current angle.
The HUD has some differences:
- There is a LEVEL item below the time, which isn't in the final release. As it never has a value next to it whenever the game is hacked to show the HUD in gameplay, it likely had been scrapped by the time of this build.
- The icon for rings is a different image and is also much larger. This makes the ring count off-center vertically.
- The contents for TIME are farther to the right than in the final, while the ring count is closer to the left of its icon than in the final.
The font for the captions (in Japanese) lacks anti-aliasing during gameplay, such as when hint orbs are encountered.
Transitions between acts are broken: the lighting and music will not update for the new act until the player restarts the act or dies.
Drowning is not yet properly implemented: the numbers that appear are rather large and only appear for a fraction of a second. There is no drowning animation, and the game will instead just send the player back to the nearest checkpoint.
There is no end-level sequence yet - when a character lands on a capsule to end the level, no score tally happens, and the level music doesn't stop. The game will play the Chaos Emerald Get jingle, however.

Technical

The build has .bins that are compiled at different times - some stages are compiled in September while others are compiled in October. Because of this, several stages won't load because they're pointing at different locations that have been moved or removed in this build's version of 1ST_READ.bin. This basically means that this build is a Frankenstein's monster of stages and assets that were put together from different, previous builds of the game - for instance, Windy Valley is from a build earlier than the Speed Highway included here.
An older compressed version of the executable used to play the movies in the demo (MOVIE.PRS) exists in the build, and predates the used, uncompressed version (MOVIE.BIN) by three days, indicating that this change was at the last minute. Both of these files mention the file names of the .SFD videos that can be played, and only MOVIE.BIN actually points to video files that exist in the build. MOVIE.PRS points to SNTM_450.SFD and SAOP600.SFD.
The demo's opening movie hsa the final name SAOP1006.SFD, with "1006" being a timestamp. Note that the section above notes that MOVIE.PRS refers to SAOP600.SFD, which would indicate a version of this movie that had a timestamp of 6:00.
The SPR Task debug menu seen in the final is present here too, with an additional "ADX" item alongside the items at the bottom left. Of note, ADX is the file extension for audio files.
A level select menu is included. It works much like the one in the final, except it uses images to select characters instead of names (but this is broken - the textures do not load in properly). Levels loaded through this menu don't load their textures to RAM properly, and the player cannot control their character without hacking. The menu also shows some differences in the listings:
- There are three practice levels (PRACTICE 1, PRACTICE 2, PRACTICE 3). In the final, only PRACTICE 1 is listed.
- Hot Shelter (SHELTER 1, SHELTER 2, SHELTER 3, SHELTER 4) is entirely missing.
- Knuckles' version of Chaos 6 (CHAOS 6 KN) is entirely missing.
- The Perfect Chaos slot is just called CHAOS 7 - in the final it is listed as CHAOS 7 1 (despite there being only one CHAOS 7 listing in the final).
- Egg Walker (EGGMOBILE 2) is entirely missing.
- The first battle with E-101 (E101) is entirely missing.
- The Mystic Ruins listings have placeholder names - in this build they are listed as MR A, MR B, MR C, and MR D. In the final, they are MR STATION, MR ISLAND, MR JUNGLE, and MR BASE, respectively.
- Sky Chase has two slots like in the final (SHOOTING1 and SHOOTING2) despite only having one level present (see below).
The lighting looks strange in several stages - this is because the build is missing their respective PL_/SL_ (Palette/Source) files that are used by the game's lighting engine (referred to interally as LANTERN). As a result, the lighting in this levels makes it so that everything lacks shine or shadows. In the case of models that are just one color (like the fire-spewing skulls in Red Mountain), they become hard to make out in gameplay.
Fog to hide pop-up for long draw distances is missing entirely. This is especially obvious in the first act of Speed Highway (see below).
This build's camera system lacks a few of the camera types that the final has. Alongside this, the list of camera types also got shuffled around in development too - for instance, in the final, type 02 is C_FOLLOW, while type 02 in the autodemo is instead MAGONOTE, with C_FOLLOW being type 29.
Several of the stages are missing death zones (data set to NULL). These death zones are what tells the game that the player has fallen to their death (bottomless pits and the ocean in Emerald Coast, for instance). This is why in some stages in this build, the player can fall and just end up in the bottom of the level instead of dying and respawning. Oddly, a few of the stages in question that act like this are ones that are actually properly included in this build, such as Emerald Coast.
On hardware, the game can only be played with AV output - trying to play it on scart output will give the audio but not the picture.
KEY0502OO.BIN is a demo key file, used in the build's demo playback. However, it is unused - the build instead uses KEY0502. KEY0502OO has a datestamp of Oct 2nd 1998, while the used KEY0502 has a datestamp of Oct 8th 1998. How it differs from the newer, used one is still unknown due to the build's tendency to desynchronize in emulators.
There are several mission files (the files detailing the goal of the level) that are made exclusively for this demo, and all of them have localized counterparts. The localized files have some form of "US" or "USA" in their file name (for instance, for instance, MISSION_A_US0.PVR vs MISSION_A0.PVR, outlining the goal of Amy's demo level). All characters have two mission files and two localized counterparts included. The majority of the mission cards are less wide than their final versions, and also have a different set of translations. Of note, E-102's mission card, like with his TGS assets, show that E-104 Epsilon is using the same textures as Gamma.

TGS Mode

Editing the value of the menu ID byte allows for the loading of TGS mode - what is left of the game's demo from the Tokyo Game Show 1998.
The TGS mode starts with a character menu that uses the 2D character portraits seen in the game's promotional material. The menu header says "Choose Your Buddy!", which also happens to be the name of the character select theme in the official OST release (Sonic Adventure Digi-log Conversion).
Choosing any character works as it should: tutorial screens appear and fully-functional levels load that can be played.
All characters have localized "How to Play" assets - screens detailing the controls and base objectives for each character.
Knuckles has a fully-functioning in-level tutorial, in which the level (Red Mountain) starts with messages at the top and bottom of the screen and an invisible barrier Knuckles needs to glide into to proceed. stg00.bin (see below) still has tutorial strings for Sonic, which indicates that other characters had in-level tutorials as well that were taken out by the time of this build.
- Both K_TUTORIAL.PRS (the original JP tutorial files, which exist in the JP final but are unused) and K_TUTORIAL_USA.PRS (which are the English-translated tutorial files) are present in this build. K_TUTORIAL_USA is exclusive to this build, and is also fascinating due to its timing - this build predates the formation of Sonic Team USA's localization arm, so whoever translated this is a mystery.

General Sound

The game's title screen has a five-second rendition of Open Your Heart. (28.ADX)
The 1-up jingle is the Get Chaos Emerald jingle taken straight from Sonic 2. In the final it is a reorchestrated arrangement of that jingle.
No voice clips are played when the player finishes a level.
The "animal get" sound is present, but unused. Instead, the ring sound is played when an animal is acquired from a Badnik.
The classic "bubble collect" sound from the original 2D games is present, but unused. In both this build and the final, no sound is played when a bubble is collected.
Likewise, the classic drowning sound from the original 2D games is present, but unused. In the final, voice acting is used for the drowning death animation.
The classic sound effect for losing a shield from the original 2D games is present, but unused. In the final, no sound is made in this situation.
The classic sound effect for getting hurt is present, but unused. The final uses a modern version of the ring drop sound instead.
ALIFE Bank 1, where the Chao voices are stored, has some voices for actions the Chao can't do in this build.
Many enemies are missing their sound effects; for instance, the shuffling sound Ice Balls make in Icecap.
Tikal's "This Way!" hint (mainly seen in the final in Knuckles' levels) is not voiced in this build.

Music

All of the music in this build is in one single file, BGM.AFS. In the final, each song is its own separate file.
This build has far many songs in it than are actually used. The following tracks are not loaded in even when their respective levels loaded are via hacking:
- Open Your Heart Menu Version
- Azure Blue World (Emerald Coast Act 1)
- Windy and Ripply (Emerald Coast Act 2)
- And...Fish Hits!
- Limestone Cave (Icecap Act 2)
- Tricky Maze (Lost World Act 1)
- Danger! Chased By Rock (Lost World Act 2)
The Chao Garden background music is mixed and arranged quite differently from the final:
- The melody is much quieter.
- The backing brass and accordion are also much quieter.
- The percussion is made up of standard instruments (what sound like maracas, drums etc) as opposed to the electronic beat used in the final, and is much more prominent.
- There are additional flourishes to the backing brass near the end of the song (at about 1:20 in the track).
"Azure Blue World ...for Emerald Coast" (4.ADX) has several differences:
- The drums in the introduction are lacking reverb and are missing some backing drums (it has less volume than in the final).
- The cymbal hi-hats in the introduction are much quieter than in the final.
- The lead guitars leading into the track's chorus sound unmixed.
- The backing instruments are a mixed a bit louder throughout the track.
- The synths are louder in the chorus.
"Event: The Past" (8.ADX) is missing the clarinet after the intro.
"Event: Fanfare for Dr.EGGMAN" (9.ADX) has its instruments panned differently.
"And...Fish Hits!" (12.ADX) is entirely missing the guitar solo in the second portion of the song, but has all the backing instruments.
"Run Through The Speed Highway" (13.ADX) has multiple differences:
- The track as a whole seems slightly faster than the final version.
- The "Right!" voice clip is slightly quieter.
- The track's volume seems to get louder 54 seconds in.
"Goin Down?! ...for Speed Highway" (14.ADX) is longer than in the final - the background voice and laugh loops twice. In the final, those clips are only played once.
"Danger! Chased By Rock ...for Lost World" (19.ADX) has quieter mixing on the percussion.
The guitar solo in "Mt. Red, A Symbol of Thrill" (22.ADX) is an earlier, more messy take in this prototype.
Tails' theme (26.ADX) has heavy stereo separation that makes the lead vocals sound dull compared to the final.

Enemies and Objects

Reflections on the spike balls are completely broken.
Rockets use a different model for their launchpads - they're larger with more detail, and small doors that flip up to open when the rocket comes out. The design here also forces the player to jump onto the platform to access a rocket - in the final, part of the platform is lowered so the player can just walk up to it.
Jump ramps lack their sounds and are largely broken, generally flinging the player into incorrect locations or not high enough to continue.
Only large springs are used in this build, lacking the small springs that occasionally crop up in the final.
Checkpoints are not activated when the player respawns at them, so the player has to run through them again to activate them after death.
Item boxes have a green tint at the bottom that is not present in the final.
All the life icons except Sonic are facing right. In the final, all of them face to the left.
? ring boxes show the ? icon to the player when broken instead of showing the corresponding icon for the number of rings given.
Only icons for 5 and 10 boxes exist in the game - the icons for 1 and 50 ring boxes are missing.
Likewise, the Bomb, Invincibility, and Shield item box icons, as well as the Timer icon unused in the final, are also missing, and none of these items are placed anywhere in the autodemo's levels.
Kikis have even more of a tendency to blow themselves up.
Bombs thrown by Kikis cannot be thrown by picked up by the player.
Rhinotanks are using incorrect textures, looking orange instead of blue and having broken jet trails behind them. This is because their actual textures are missing from the build entirely, but the game still references them.
The Sweeps (water strider badniks) don't float on the surface of the water like they should - they're always underwater but animate and act like they do in the final.
Leon, the chameleon badnik, is present within the game's files but isn't actually used by any of the build's levels. If loaded in via hacking, the tongue attack does not hurt the player and the enemy itself cannot be harmed by the player.
Characters have no voice clips when immobilized by an Egg Robo.
End level capsules don't spawn Chao animals when broken open.

Level comparisons

References

Sonic Adventure AutoDemo, prototype version of Sonic Adventure
	Main page \| Comparisons \| Hidden content Part of Sonic Adventure development