Another find

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

This time of another Jazz 2 Beta.

Version 0.98k. The E3 1997 beta in other words...

Now, this might sound silly but I don't know where one can get these days those OEM/magazine "leaked" versions anymore.

I would like if someone PM'd them to me so I could compare.

This new discovery of Jazz2 E3 beta doesn't belong to me, it belongs to a friend (Bryan).

But I'm the first one he shared this discovery with.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Pardon my ignorance, but did any of the OEM version contain MS DOS executable for jazz2?
Because this one does.

[PurpleJazz]

Care to post screenshots? :D

If this is true, this will be the oldest known surviving version of JJ2.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

What do you mean if this is true? Anything I say is true. :D

There are no screenshots now but I will try to post some eventually.

There is a video though but I have to ask Bryan if it's okay to post.

The game has some issues running though but they can be bypassed by setting the compat mode etc right.

I'm still discovering/trying out things.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

I may not post attachments?

Then no screenshots I'm afraid. None of the image uploading sites I tried now work for me. I know attaching on forums works though.

But this one seems to have it disabled on purpose. PM me if you want a screenshot.

[Primpy]

I may not post attachments?

Then no screenshots I'm afraid. None of the image uploading sites I tried now work for me. I know attaching on forums works though.

But this one seems to have it disabled on purpose. PM me if you want a screenshot.

Imgur never fails.

Also, could your friend upload the version anywhere? That would be sweet.

[Violet CLM]

JJ2 takes screenshots in .pcx and .tga formats, which are not very commonly used today, so I can understand if the image uploading sites you tried balked at them. I'll send you a PM.

[Stijn]

That sounds fascinating, amazing how these things keep turning up after all these years. I hope people can collaborate on a solid comparison between this and other OEM versions, who knows what's hidden in this one. Excited to read more about this!

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

I just wanted to say that the reason I can't upload to those image hosting sites is because my browser doesn't support javascript.

If there's image hosting site that does not rely on javascript I'm all ears.

The forum attachment doesn't rely on it either and it just works.

[Stijn]

I've added tga and pcx to the list of allowed extensions... see if that makes attaching the files to your post possible, if not I'll have to fiddle with some other settings.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

But it says in "posting rules" that I may not add attachments. Don't know why. But it really says that here on this forum.

Or is it because I have less than some required number of posts?

[Stijn]

Right... does it work now? I can't test this myself since I'm an admin but I think it should be enabled for regular users too now, sorry for the hassle.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Alright, let's try this. I'm having trouble going back to the post after the attachment, I hope at least one appears when I post this now. If not I'll try to edit the post and add it.

[BaratusII]

Hello there, I'm new to the forum. Yes, I'm the guy (Bryan) who obtained this discovery, I do know I can't share this due to forum rules. But I do like to share this photo of the E3 CD + few floppies contained from the mail to the attachments.

Will possibly upload some screenshots of the prototype sometime, till then here's a (sadly Low Quality) Youtube video of me trying to run it at first.

https://youtu.be/QgPdq2IdsWw

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

I'm running into a bug with this version of the browser that if (I better not explain it because I'm not the technical type to understand this properly)..
What it comes down to is that if certain conditions are met, anything past 14k won't get sent, so I had to mangle the images for them to fit, there were still more screens I took but this will have to do for right now.

[Violet CLM]

Hello there, I'm new to the forum. Yes, I'm the guy (Bryan) who obtained this discovery,Welcome, and congratulations! I've sent you a <a href="https://www.jazz2online.com/privMsgs/">private message</a> with a question.

[Violet CLM]

<a href="https://www.jazz2online.com/wiki/Jazz_Jackrabbit_2_Beta_Versions/#h-2">I've listed my findings in this new beta here.</a> Wow! Some of this is seriously bizarre, yet cool!

[ShadowGPW]

this is one awesome find :O

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

There is actually a little more jazz2 related stuff, some pictures of previous versions/concept art that could be interesting to share.

And a couple of more text files. I'll leave it up to Bryan to post here if he wants.

[Violet CLM]

Well, I'm always a big fan of pictures of previous versions--even if they're duplicates of ones we've already seen, they might be higher resolution or something!

[Love & Thunder]

Text files?


If those are anything like the design docs from the Jazz 3 stuff you put out, those could be a real treat. :)

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Unfortunately no, not design docs. This is all stuff that was supplied on that CD.

Unfortunately there was very little of Unreal and Wheel of Time, just some screenshots and empty directories. (I am still looking for a couple of Unreal betas that might be floating around but difficult to get in practice, one reportedly containing a file called "child3.umx" and might have been part of another ISO)

What is playable on the CD was the jazz2 beta, ravage racers, seventh legion alpha (can't get it to run properly). And well, that's it, the rest are presentations of games/screenshots.

It was intended for the press.

[snzspeed]

Would be amazing to see the screenshots.

[Love & Thunder]

Unfortunately no, not design docs. This is all stuff that was supplied on that CD.

Unfortunately there was very little of Unreal and Wheel of Time, just some screenshots and empty directories. (I am still looking for a couple of Unreal betas that might be floating around but difficult to get in practice, one reportedly containing a file called "child3.umx" and might have been part of another ISO)

What is playable on the CD was the jazz2 beta, ravage racers, seventh legion alpha (can't get it to run properly). And well, that's it, the rest are presentations of games/screenshots.

It was intended for the press.
Ah, I see.
Still, sounds really interesting. I'd love to get my hands on the stuff from this press disc. :)
I'm curious, though; do the floppies contain the same contents as the CD, or is that different Epic stuff? (Looking at the picture Baratusll posted)

(BTW, I sent you a PM :))

[Primpy]

(BTW, I sent you a PM :))

Me too.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

You have to wait for Baratus II to post the screenshots.

As for the floppies, acording to Bryan a lot of it has been replaced by personal files or something, but there is still possibility that if he makes image out of it I could explore it with someone properly.

There might be stuff he looked over. Either way I don't have the contents of the floppies in any form currently, still waiting for any of that myself but it's most likely most of it can't be seen by public if it contains personal things. But if there's anything jazz related, perhaps via "undeleted files" or something (it is apparently possible to see what was there before if image of a floppy is made and you explore it with proper tools, I'm not the expert on this however) then that will be worth something, but we'll have to see.

[Slaz]

Hey, amazing find there! I never thought something like this would surface after all these years. :7

Besides Violet's additions to the wiki entry on Beta's, Hopefully any audiovisual changes can be salvaged and shared as imagery sometime. That Epic logo looks oddly cartoonish.

[Violet CLM]

Besides Violet's additions to the wiki entry on Beta's, Hopefully any audiovisual changes can be salvaged and shared as imagery sometime. That Epic logo looks oddly cartoonish.
It's conveniently inside the anims file, whose format is close enough to the final .j2a format that I was able to decompile it in good time. <a href="https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/171304512068255745/481966606986117140/098k_menu_graphics.zip">Here you go.</a>

[Newspaz]

Did you manage to find out if the DOS executables actually work? And if so, at what video resolution does the game run in DOS mode? According to an old interview with Nick Stadler they were shooting for 320x200, just like JJ1. So that is why I am curious.

[Violet CLM]

I can get the DOS executable to show me the intro sequences, the main menu, and the level loading screen, but not any actual gameplay. (I think Shadow was able to get levels to play, though.) It's all in the general area of 320x200, though the resolution appears to change while showing Dean's animated intro.

[Love & Thunder]

Interesting thing I noticed in the Readme included in this beta...
MLLE

I’ve included a version of MLLE, the Jazz2 editor. It might be missing a couple of DLL’s; I’m not sure what it needs. I assure you that if it doesn’t work this time it will the next time around.

Here is all you really need to know:

E - Event Window. Choose an event, click OK, and the event is there.

Right click on every main window to see options. You can choose various layers and edit them individually. (properties as well)

Everything else is Windows easy.
The beta does not seem to include a copy of MLLE, as claimed by the readme, and the readme also details many cheat codes that don't work(A couple that do, though. It lists "JJTIMSGIRLFRIEND" as a cheat code it described as "For programmers." Doing "JJTIMSGIRL" seemed to toggle showing the framerate in my experimenting), so I feel like the readme was for an even earlier version, and was mistakenly included on the CD.


There's also a text file called ChangesLT.txt, which isn't massively interesting, but contains a few mildly neat tidbits...
- increased speed of zipping/dezipping routines for file compression (new level format
coming, one of the first things in the USA)


- cheatcodes:
"jjguns",
"jjgod",
"jjshield",
"jjpower",
"jjd", //debug
"jjcpu", //cpu stats : writes CPU stats in LOG, gives percentages spent on AI/graphics etc
"jjkill",
"jjquit",
"jjinv",
"jjfly",
"jjnowall",
"jjlight",
"jjammo",
"jjgems",
"jjfire",
"jjnext",
"jjmorph",
"jjrush",
"jjbird",
"jjq",
"jjk",
"jjnxt", //NEXT LEVEL!
"jjt"

[Violet CLM]

Doing "JJTIMSGIRL" seemed to toggle showing the framerate in my experimenting)
Pressing the R key does that.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

I can get the DOS executable to show me the intro sequences, the main menu, and the level loading screen, but not any actual gameplay. (I think Shadow was able to get levels to play, though.) It's all in the general area of 320x200, though the resolution appears to change while showing Dean's animated intro.
I'm interested about how he got the levels to run then, because they freeze up for me too, just display the beginning of the level text and then it freezes.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

As for the editor, well...
it must have been just a leftover text file from a previous beta, stuff like that happens all the time.

[Violet CLM]

Shadow wasn't too specific about his findings but he mentioned an emulated Windows 95, and an old computer with DOS 6.0.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Okay I give permission to whoever has been shared with the full disk image to upload and show the images here (and the text files).

I cannot get hold of Bryan at the moment and I hope he's fine.

[P4R4D0X]

I was able to run it in DOSBox. I was experimenting will all sorts of settings in the config file. I got it right and I can play the game after selecting the episode. The loading screen won't hang and it will dump you in the level so you can play it. The only downside is that you cannot hear any music while you are in a level. If you rename the intro animation and music to something else you can get the music working in the menu and you can hear the sound effects as well.

Another thing you have to deal with is the slowness until you are in a level because you have to mess with the cycles. Menu will be slow and the loading screen as well. But once the level loaded you can raise the cycles and make it faster.

And here's the magical numbers you need. You need to use fixed cycles. What worked for me is 10000. Once you in game you in a level just raise the cycles until the game runs at full speed. You can now enjoy the game with no sound. Once you finish the level it will go to the next one without any issues. But if you go back to the main menu and you pick another episode and try to play that you will run into the frozen state again.

If you can fix the sound and the loading thing let me know because I am interested. No screenshots because I am not sure if Bryan allows that.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

It's fine, lol why would screenshots be a problem.

In fact perhaps you should post even those screenshots that were included on the cd itself from an earlier version.

EDIT: It works, but only after setting the card differently. I mean in dosbox.

[Violet CLM]

I would like to see these screenshots :O

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

I will send the screenshots via e-mail as I'm having a different problem now using a different browser...

Just send me pm with e-mail address (sorry if you've already done that, I forgot), you could then post it yourself violet. I'll just attach them all to the message, that will work. The Manage Attachment is stuck on loading.

I want to get this done and I really would like to share all these screenshots.

[Violet CLM]

Okay! The CD had a lot of old JJ2 images, many of which we've seen before in lower quality and some of which are new. I'm just going to post them all here... I've converted the PCX and TIF files to PNG, because those are easier to use these days, but otherwise I have not edited any of the images at all.

<img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/Eva.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/Rat.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_7.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_4.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_3.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/j2_2.jpg" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2shot1.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/j2_3.jpg" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_12.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/j2_5.jpg" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_5.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_1.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_10.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_11.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_2.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2_8.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/j2mp_1.jpg" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/j2mp_2.jpg" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/j2mp_3.jpg" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/mlle_1.jpg" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/mlle_2.jpg" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/mlle_3.jpg" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/J2edit2.png" /> <img src="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/jazscrn6.png" />

Also, <a href="https://shemitz.net/static/files/misc/jj2prerelease/Art-screens.zip">here's a zip to let you download all the images at once</a>, which also includes eight official prerelease JJ2 palettes extracted from the above images, already in the format JJ2+/MLLE uses:
BetaCastle1: brighter gold than final Castle
BetaCastle2: identical to this tileset but included in the interest of completeness
BetaDamn1: barely different from final Damn, just slightly more muted colors
BetaDamn2: everything is a bit pinker
BetaInferno1: darker blue ground colors, though remember that the ground tiles were different back then
BetaInferno2: much redder and less subdued than the final version
BetaJungle: different from either of the final Jungle palettes
BetaPsych: barely different from final Psych Night, but the textured background is 50% blue instead of 100% purple

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Well, finally. Those are of course not screenshots from the beta that was included, but nonetheless it's good to have the screenshots here for display. Kind of disappointed there wasn't a little more stuff, but I'm glad this leads to creation of new content, like the tilesets.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

To not forget I should post here about that if you want sound in the dos version of the game(not just the menus),
you can change for example in dosbox the sound card to "sbpro2" or anything else that might work too.

[ShadowGPW]

I love those art works!

[PT32]

I kinda like the old Inferno ground tiles.

[Sun Fun Dude]

Surprised no one has posted these, the original versions of the episode and title graphics in 320 x 200 before they were hastily upscaled by Nick for the 640 x 480 resolution.
https://i.imgur.com/aiT0HOn.png
https://i.imgur.com/iqUHH9k.png
https://i.imgur.com/B8fpT7O.png
https://i.imgur.com/l8M1sZz.png
https://i.imgur.com/bACjon6.png

[cooba]

They weren't upscaled by Nick, it's what Jazz2.exe does.

[Sun Fun Dude]

They weren't upscaled by Nick, it's what Jazz2.exe does.

https://i.imgur.com/ozdrgwY.png
What kind of image up scaling algorithm would leave the foreground of this image pixelated while selectively fully upscaling and smoothing out Devan? A lot of them have pixelated remnants, seems like human work to me but I guess I don't know anything about the source code

[cooba]

That's the original picture, which JJ2 either upscales or downscales depending on the game's resolution.

[Violet CLM]

In 0.98k the episode images are 154x178. In the final game's .j2e files they're 304x354.

(source: looked at the actual images inside 0.98k's anims file; looked at the width and height fields in the .j2e headers.)

[Sun Fun Dude]

In 0.98k the episode images are 154x178. In the final game's .j2e files they're 304x354.

(source: looked at the actual images inside 0.98k's anims file; looked at the width and height fields in the .j2e headers.)

Looks like I was right B-)

That's the original picture, which JJ2 either upscales or downscales depending on the game's resolution.

I think you're kind of confused. Have you actually played this beta? Because if you put it in 640 by 480 the episode images are heavily pixelated. I don't think you actually know what you're talking about. Maybe you're confused because they were drawn for a 640x400 resolution and they are slightly being upscaled (only vertically, mind you) to 640x480. But that is not the 'original' picture that was drawn. As Violet said the originals were drawn at 154x178 for a 320 x 200 resolution, they were upscaled to 304x354 for 640 x 400 for the final game and clearly drawn over hence the presence of random pixely areas on all of them like the one I pointed out. Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was uprezed from 320x200 to 640x480 midway through development, this is very apparent as many backgrounds and background elements are clearly drawn for this resolution and weirdly rest at the bottom of the screen at higher ones. Or things like the Damn tileset background weridly tiling at 640x480, yet fitting perfectly once at 320x200

https://i.imgur.com/fqnM3tv.png

Another comparison to the original and Nick's upscale, notice the top of the wheel where he's accidentally left it pixelated from upscaling the original. Also notice the one pixel dithering, if the game was up-scaling a smaller image there's no way it'd have perfect 1 pixel dithering.

[Sun Fun Dude]

Here's the beta running in 640x480 by the way https://i.imgur.com/tXQDNsJ.png

[Violet CLM]

Data.j2 in 0.98k (the equivalent of Data.j2d in 1.10o and above) contains these three images we've not seen before. Presumably they were intended to display when you closed the game, akin to the Order Info sequence in shareware versions.
<img src="https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/171304512068255745/851534717287137350/order1.png" />
<img src="https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/171304512068255745/851534719199346738/order2.png" />
<img src="https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/171304512068255745/851534722998730842/order3.png" />

I also started a <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11o9ftqsjwUN33HL88q_m_UNaV-W5LOG-KPOqFmyOBeI/edit?ouid=111597248472992563555&usp=sheets_home&ths=true">version comparison spreadsheet</a> but haven't touched it in a long time.

[Darkhog]

This whole thread is so cool. Any info on the origin of the DOS executable for JJ2? I'm curious because if the game was always meant to be a Windows title (as the final screenshot above shows), why DOS version was even made?

[Violet CLM]

We've always known that JJ2 was in development for DOS around this time, since this January 1997 interview. (https://web.archive.org/web/20010506042203fw_/http://www.gamesdomain.com/j2w/cliffarjan.html) They may have been hedging their bets in that image, knowing it wasn't guaranteed they'd be able to get everything working on DOS? I dunno.