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About
Sonic Spinball BETA

 

The ROM that's been dumped on the net is a pre-release version of Sonic Spinball which was sent to magazines a few months before the official release. The Beta ROM was built in August 1993, and the Final ROM was built in September 1993 and released in November after it had gone through production (Nov. 10th in Japan to be precise). I wouldn't really call it a beta version -- the final version of the game was completed a month later! There are some noticeable things different about the game; a list of these differences can be viewed on the Beta 1 & 2 differences pages.

The actual .SMD file of the ROM was time-stamped October 8th 1999, though this doesn't necessarily mean that it was the time that it was dumped. If it was, then that probably means some magazine's copy of it got out and floated around a bit before someone found it and dumped it. The previous owner of this site, Elliot is the person who originally found the ROM on the net. He discovered it in August 2000 while he was searching Chinese and Japanese search engines, and he put up the SSB site shortly after. The original site that he found it on was http://coobe.cs.hn.cninfo.net/~DOWEIRAN/md.htm, though it's no surprise to me that it doesn't exist anymore.

The official announcement of the game included a number of screenshots, except they are different from this "beta" AND from the final. The most obvious difference is that the final boss is not actually in the boss room! The screenshots were obviously taken from an earlier build than this beta, but that doesn't mean that the earlier build was released as another beta.

For the purposes of this site, I will refer to the beta we all know about as Beta 2, and the version of the game that was featured in the official announcement as Beta 1.