Alongside the release of BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1 dump, GuyPerfect, one of the creators of BS F-Zero Deluxe, wrote us a post doing the comparisons between the recreation and original data. You’d be impressed how extremely close they got to the real deal!
You can find the full release post here:
Bounty Prize Check! We found BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1!
When we first learned that BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1 had been found, our first thought was “no way!”, but our second thought was pretty consistently “darn, we only get the courses Forest I and Forest II?” After all, had we gotten Week 2 instead, we would have had three courses as well as the graphics for both Forest and Metal Fort, so in that sense it can feel like Week 2 holds more value. Once we started digging in, however, it became clear that the Metal Fort assets are only a drop in the bucket as far as value is concerned, and all the juiciest parts of BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 are present in Week 1 as well.
In context, Week 1 is actually the luckier find. Imagine yourself being there back in 1997, where you had enough interest in F-Zero to sit down for an hour for a radio show and game play combo presentation. You knew there would be another installment the following week, but instead you unplugged your Super Famicom and sold your Satellaview stuff without overwriting the memory pak. Of the two, it seems like Week 2 should be far more likely, so it’s fortuitous that we have Week 1 at all.
Of course it’s worth mentioning that a $2500 USD prize was awarded for finding Week 1, and an additional $2500 USD is available for Week 2. If Week 1 was out there, Week 2 may be as well.
BS F-Zero Deluxe is a mod of F-Zero that expands the game to incorporate the content from BS F-Zero Grand Prix and BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2. It was in development years before Week 1 ever surfaced, so including Forest and Metal Fort required some innovation and a lot of man-hours. The courses were reconstructed from old video recordings that weren’t of particularly great quality, but BS F-Zero Deluxe is said to be very accurate nonetheless. Now that we have Week 1, we can see just how accurate it was, at least for Forest I and Forest II.
Courses are positioned within a canvas of sorts that is 1,024 tiles wide and 512 tiles tall. A course can appear anywhere within this canvas, provided it doesn’t spill over the edge. BS F-Zero Deluxe approximated course positioning based on the little dot on the minimap: the dot will move 1 pixel for every 16 tiles traveled. Some assumptions had to be made regarding the layout of the minimap graphic itself, but in the end, BS F-Zero Deluxe happened to position the Forest courses in exactly the right spots.
As for the minimaps themselves, the video recordings didn’t clearly show where all the black pixels were, but BS F-Zero Deluxe got all but one the white pixels right.
The level of Mode 7 magnification made it reasonably clear what was nearby when the player in the video recordings drove around each course. However, not every single region of every course is clearly shown in those videos. The Forest courses in particular tend to be rather wide, and the player stuck somewhat close to the inside walls of each curve, so those outside walls are just barely visible way off on the edges of the screen. BS F-Zero Deluxe had to make a few guesses regarding the exact layout of those outside walls, to varying degrees of accuracy.
Full-size maps are provided below. The solid red squares show the tiles that BS F-Zero Deluxe got wrong.
The exterior scenery for the Forest courses is a repeating square pattern 64 tiles on a side. The graphics themselves are accurate because they appear in the graphics for Port Town, just with different colors. The differences between the real deal and what BS F-Zero Deluxe worked out are minor enough that they’re hard to spot even with the aid of a computer program pointing them out.
When it’s all said and done, here’s how close BS F-Zero Deluxe got to the actual assets for BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1…
Minimaps, counting only the pixels that are not transparent in both versions:
* Forest I – 422 correct out of 433 = 97.460% accuracy
* Forest II – 477 correct out of 528 = 90.341% accuracy
Track maps, counting only the tiles that are not scenery in both versions:
* Forest I – 56,770 correct out of 57,859 = 98.118% accuracy
* Forest II – 72,134 correct out of 73,503 = 98.137% accuracy
Scenery repeating pattern
* 4,019 tiles correct out of 4,096 = 98.120% accuracy
For over a year, we boasted that BS F-Zero Deluxe was over 99% accurate, but objective comparisons for Forest I and Forest II show that it is between 98% and 99% accurate.
It isn’t really possible to precisely quantify how accurate BS F-Zero Deluxe was regarding the sky/horizon graphics. It’s clear that there are some significant discrepancies, but it’s important to emphasize that the clarity of the reference videos was not sufficient for this task.
Original and then Reconstruction for each sky/horizon graphics:
Likewise, putting a singular number on course paths is challenging to define. In the images below, the solid blue path is the actual path in Week 1, and the dashed red path is BS F-Zero Deluxe’s best guess.
Find the full release post here:
Bounty Prize Check! We found BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1!
