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The Cutting Room Floor
The Cutting Room Floor is a site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games. From debug menus, to unused music, graphics, enemies, or levels, many games have content never meant to be seen by anybody but the developers — or even meant for everybody, but cut due to time/budget constraints.
Feel free to browse ourcollection of games and start reading. Up for research? Try looking atsome stubs and see if you can help us out. Just have some faint memory of some unused menu/level you saw years ago but can't remember how to access it? Feel free to start a page with what you saw and we'll take a look. If you want to help keep this site running and help further research into games,feel free to donate.
Featured Article
Developers:Epic MegaGames,Orange Games
Publishers:Gathering of Developers,MacPlay (Mac OS Classic)
Released: 1998,Windows,Mac OS Classic
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was a huge step up fromits predecessor, but it wasn't a huge financial success by any means thanks to it being a 2D platformer released at a time when 3D games were all the rage. However, it did gain a cult following and has become something of a platforming classic for some PC gamers.
It also has a fair amount of hidden content lying within, ranging from unused bosses to several unused graphics.
All Featured BlurbsDid You Know...
- ...that Matt Duncan was in big trouble if the PCSpider-Man game didn't work right?
- ...that the DOS version ofMario is Missing! has cut dialogue for the ending?
- ...that the battle courses fromSuper Mario Kart were planned to be included inMario Kart: Super Circuit?
- ...thatConker's Bad Fur Day has a model for a Pikachu tail, part of a cutscene that was cut at Nintendo's request?
- ...thatPuLiRuLa has a hidden snowy stage in the game's code?
- ...that Valve accidentally leaked cut weapon names inTeam Fortress 2 then leaked the assets for said weapons almost two years later to the day?
- ...that at least31 games released on today's date have articles?
Contributing
Want to contribute? Not sure where to begin? Visit theHelp page for everything you need to get started, including...
- Instructions for creating and editing articles
- Guides that will help you find debug modes, unused graphics, hidden levels, and more
- Alist of what needs to be done
- Common things that can be found in hundreds of different games
We also have asizable list of games that either don't have pages yet, or whose pages are in serious need of expansion. Check it out!
Featured File
Perhaps one of the most infamous bugs in gaming,Pac-Man renders garbage at Level 256. It is commonly referred to as "Split Screen" due to the right half of the screen looking garbled, while the left half is still intact.
The "Split Screen" or "Kill Screen" marks the end of the game, as the level no longer gives enough dots to progress to the next.
This happens due to a bug in the code responsible for retrieving the number of fruits to draw at the bottom right corner of the screen. Inside the routine, it loads the number of the current level (being 0-based and thus 255 for Level 256, or 0xFF in hexadecimal), then increases it by one. In the case of Level 256, this overflows the register and makes it loop back to 0 (0x00) since a byte cannot hold a number higher than 255, simply restarting from 0 if that is the case. The code does not check if an overflow has happened (which could be possible due to a so-called carry flag set in the CPU registers). In fact, it simply uses the resulting number in a check on which fruits to draw.
In Level 256, the loop counter is initialized with 0 from the start (line 0x2BFC). When decremented to possibly restart the loop again (line 0x2C17), it underflows back to 255 (since a byte can't hold values lower than 0, thus 0 minus 1 results in 255, or 0xFF). The loop now repeats as often as required to bring 255 back to 0. What this means is that the game is now instructed to loop over the fruit drawing code 256 times - these are by far too many fruits to draw. Running out of entries in the fruit table (which also point to the video memory holding the graphics of the fruits to draw), it starts accessing other parts of the video memory, grabbing seemingly random tiles of graphics and drawing them onto the screen into increasing video memory locations.
A full in-depth explanation can be found at the link below.View more...
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