At the Edge of the Universe...
A BlueSky user named revenant was recently noodling around with the SNES port of Wing Commander and made a pretty exciting discovery and a cool tool for taking a closer look at the game's assets! Revenant turned ROMs of the two surviving SNES ports into in flight object viewers that let you explore the in-game background layers, essentially letting you scroll through the different ships and objects stored in the game! Their first thread starts here.
completely pointless activity of the week: hacking a Mode 7 object viewer into the janky SNES port of wing commander
(d-pad cycles objects/frames, start button exits)
right now this only shows the 'up close' frames for ingame objects (which are background layers rather than the sprites used for distant objects)
also the displayed names of objects come from the list of text strings which doesn't always match the actual object - i.e. unused Venture graphics are called Hornet, and some non-ship objects show names of expansion-only ships instead
These text strings, which include Spikeri and Snakeir (a corvette cut from the original game and the Kilrathi carrier from Secret Missions 2) seem to suggest that the SNES version at least started with the PC codebase! You can download the viewer ROMs below and explore them using your preferred SNES emulator:
These tools are, on their own, fascinating. I am so excited to get this small look into the SNES ports, which is something I'd love to see more of; wouldn't it be cool to explore Wing Commander Prophecy GBA or the Sega CD port of the original? Or more SNES material! And I had not realized how close to the bone some of the cuts were; for instance, capital ships in the SNES version have five angles each instead of 37! Compare the Lumbari across both versions of The Secret Missions:
But the viewers led to something even more interesting being revealed: a graphic logo labeled "The Edge of the Universe / No Flash Photos". Huh?! Luckily, revenant was able to discover exactly what it was for: if you travel to the very edge of displayable space, the game displays an 'edge' to the map! From the screenshot it looks like that edge is over 8 million klicks from your starting point... which means you'll need to fly in a straight line at top speed for well over five hours to see this.
But wait, there's more! Revenant checked the Secret Missions SNES and found that not only did it upgrade to a fancier 'edge of the universe' graphic but it included an unusual object: the face of a moustachioed man wearing a helmet labeled GRENO!
From there, they dug into the game to find out what was going on. And the answer was a pretty incredible Easter egg that you can activate on the original hardware if you have a second controller! Here's the original thread.
silly new discovery in the SNES version of Wing Commander: The Secret Missions
pressing L+R+Sel+Start on both controllers at once unlocks "The Really Really Secret Missions", adding a photo to the credits, replacing asteroids w/ former Mindscape CTO David "Greno" Grenewetzki...
...and after completing the game, you get an additional couple of scenes based on what I can only assume is a 100% true story
Wow! The cutscene part of this egg was uncovered several years ago by Music_Guru but his solution involved accessing it directly with an in-game password or Game Genie... so we never saw the asteroids or the alternate introduction! Hard to believe something like that could stay hidden for so long.
This also lets us get a great look at the famous 'green Salthi' Jalthi, so look forward to another update summarizing that story!
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