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.



Also, here's a zip to let you download all the images at once, 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

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.

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.

I love those art works!

I kinda like the old Inferno ground tiles.

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.

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

Originally Posted by cooba

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

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

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

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.)

Originally Posted by 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.)

Looks like I was right B-)

Originally Posted by cooba

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



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.

Here's the beta running in 640x480 by the way

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.




I also started a version comparison spreadsheet but haven't touched it in a long time.

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?

We've always known that JJ2 was in development for DOS around this time, since this January 1997 interview. 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.