Thursday, May 14, 2015

24 Megs of Evermore


I ran across this during a recent move. It's an EPROM we used during the final test phase of Secret of Evermore in late 1995. This would be a near-final beta of the game. No, it doesn't contain any secret, hidden unreleased stuff. We were too busy furiously trimming tiles from levels in our attempt to fit on the cartridge to leave in anything remotely like that.
I'm tempted to boot it up for old time's sake, but I have my doubts about that battery. I should also review which direction the board faces when you plug it in: EPROMS can be plugged into a console from either direction (chips towards or away from the player). Finished retail cartridges prevented that but during production we had to be careful. Facing the wrong direction would wipe the whole works.

CK

3 comments:

Evan G said...

I'm sure it is fine. I investigated another Secret of Evermore prototype a few months ago, and everything worked all right. It was the same as the US release, though (it was used for evaluation at Nintendo of Europe).

Colin McShane said...

Have you managed to boot this up?

I wonder if there are around still copies of the beta version...it had different dialog texts and areas...

I would love to read more about the development of SoE, if you remember!

Clayton Kauzlaric said...

Ha - Not yet. Too many other things going on this year. I'll try to get it going soon-ish. I'll see if I can dredge up more Evermore stories.