Biohazard 2 - Beta 1: Anyone have it?

[RMandel]

I once hacked the PC version of the Trial into a "beta 1-ish" version using the backgrounds and room data from the PSM Trial, and then hacked around all three of the rooms that had automatic resets so you could play the entire RPD. The problem is that some of those early rooms are really buggy. The lobby balconies aren't quite fixed yet - sometimes you'd go out through a second floor door and end up downstairs, with no way to get back up, due to faulty room exit/entry data on the doors. You'll crash the game if you try searching the Media Room to the right of the podium. The way you use the outside ladder between the first and second floors in the west wing doesn't fit any known background - even the ones on the Trial. Speaking of which, there's no doors for those outside stairs in those early backgrounds, either - but they're there, nonetheless - leastways the room data. The angle of ascent doesn't match the angle of the stairs. Stuff like that. Many of the rooms work only with the old "beta 1" or even alpha backgrounds - like the room data for the two unfinished renders of the third floor lobby balcony. The camera angles on the lobby in the Trial/"beta 1" only work with the early lobby backgrounds. On top of that, some rooms are just there and you can't do anything with them. For example, you can go into the Clock Room but you can't go back out.

I could root around in my archives and see if I still have this, but anybody could do it themselves using the data and tools available on Resiyoyo's modding site. Martin's put some of these early RE2 rooms in his PMODs - the alpha versions, if I remember correctly - and fixed them better than I ever could. I guess I'm saying all this to say that if anyone really wants a copy of "RE2 beta 1" (cough-cough, nod to Alzaire over the name), it wouldn't be too difficult to hack it up themselves. At least the RPD part of it, anyway.

There's a thought, Martin - next time you update your PMOD, or maybe the time after that, why not give us the "RE2 beta 1" RPD, too? Then you could do a direct jump link from the sewer manhole in the kennels straight to the manhole in the RE15 Warehouse District - as the old game show videos appear to show and then we'd have it. An improved "RE2 beta 1" recreation, if you will. I'd be happy to try to find my old PC Trial hack for you, if you're interested.

[Darkside05]

There's a thought, Martin - next time you update your PMOD, or maybe the time after that, why not give us the "RE2 beta 1" RPD, too? Then you could do a direct jump link from the sewer manhole in the kennels straight to the manhole in the RE15 Warehouse District - as the old game show videos appear to show and then we'd have it. An improved "RE2 beta 1" recreation, if you will. I'd be happy to try to find my old PC Trial hack for you, if you're interested.

As again, there was no warehouse or 1.5 locations in the Beta 1. That video was just a simple mistake edit of putting both Beta 1 and 1.5 era footage together.

[RMandel]

I don't agree. Fact - the backgrounds for almost the entire Warehouse District and all of the Underground Lab are present on the Trial. Fact - both are shown as playable in the game show video. Fact - the Underground Lab was reused for RE2, albeit in a somewhat simplified and revamped form.

I don't believe it was a mistake edit. I think those RE15 areas were actually there and working in that particular early build. All they would have had to done was strip out the room data and hack/block around it. The facts I quoted above point to this, plus another one you probably don't know about.

There are actually four menu loop door blocks in the Trial, not just two as almost every one believes. There's two upstairs - one each on certain doors in each wing, that everyone knows about. The OTHER two are in the kennels (!), which you can't normally get to unless you hack the Trial or take a Game Shark to the PSM version. There's one on the back side of the kennel door, and one on the manhole. Martin can verify this for me. You've never known those last two are there because you've never dug that deep into the Trial, but I have. Why put those last two menu loop blocks there ... unless you could originally go PAST that point? If you don't believe me, get the hacking tools and check for yourself.

[Guest]

I don't agree. Fact - the backgrounds for almost the entire Warehouse District and all of the Underground Lab are present on the Trial. Fact - both are shown as playable in the game show video. Fact - the Underground Lab was reused for RE2, albeit in a somewhat simplified and revamped form.

I don't believe it was a mistake edit. I think those RE15 areas were actually there and working in that particular early build. All they would have had to done was strip out the room data and hack/block around it. The facts I quoted above point to this, plus another one you probably don't know about.

There are actually four menu loop door blocks in the Trial, not just two as almost every one believes. There's two upstairs - one each on certain doors in each wing, that everyone knows about. The OTHER two are in the kennels (!), which you can't normally get to unless you hack the Trial or take a Game Shark to the PSM version. There's one on the back side of the kennel door, and one on the manhole. Martin can verify this for me. You've never known those last two are there because you've never dug that deep into the Trial, but I have. Why put those last two menu loop blocks there ... unless you could originally go PAST that point? If you don't believe me, get the hacking tools and check for yourself.

You do realize in those videos that have both games mixed.... they show elza and claire i'm pretty sure and leon looks different in the 1.5 footage and the re2 footage.

[RMandel]

I realize that. I also realize what I found in the Trial when I started to hack it. And by the way, I forgot about the fifth block on the Cell Bay door.

The menu loop blocks in the Trial work like this. The executable is looking for one of three door codes: the door to the hallway with the Coke machine (where Sherry is first spotted), any door that opens into the East Wing from either floor, or anything outside the RPD itself (stage 3 - door code 2xx or higher). If you try to open a door with any of those codes, from either side, you get looped back to the main menu.

Now tell me - why put those extra blocks that deep in the Trial? They're not necessary ... unless they were either planning a bigger demo or there were more areas you could access in the actual, uhmmm, "working copy" from which the Trial was made - one that still had parts of RE15 in it that were still playable. Strip those out, hard-wire the EXE with the menu loop blocks, and you have your Trial. That explains why those RE15 backgrounds are still there - they only stripped out the room data, and were in such a hurry that they forgot to strip out the backgrounds. Those (RE15 areas) aren't going to end up in the final product anyway - leastways in that form - so gamers (at the time) don't need to play them.

I've also heard rumors that the Trial was originally planned so you could play the entire RPD, but I've never seen a copy that does (except for the one I hacked myself). There's only the one with the extended timer, and that one's rather rare. That still doesn't explain the weirdness going on in the kennels. You might explain the manhole away like that, but one of those menu blocks is on the back of a door and not the front. What was that all about?

I still firmly believe there was a lot more of RE15 in the working copy, or build, or "beta 1" or whatever you want to call it, than what we ended up with in the Trial ... and I'm still yet to be convinced otherwise.

[Guest]

I realize that. I also realize what I found in the Trial when I started to hack it. And by the way, I forgot about the fifth block on the Cell Bay door.

The menu loop blocks in the Trial work like this. The executable is looking for one of three door codes: the door to the hallway with the Coke machine (where Sherry is first spotted), any door that opens into the East Wing from either floor, or anything outside the RPD itself (door code 3xx or higher). If you try to open a door with any of those codes, from either side, you get looped back to the main menu.

Now tell me - why put those extra blocks that deep in the Trial? They're not necessary ... unless they were either planning a bigger demo or there were more areas you could access in the actual, uhmmm, "working copy" from which the Trial was made - one that still had parts of RE15 in it that were still playable. Strip those out, hard-wire the EXE with the menu loop blocks, and you have your Trial. That explains why those RE15 backgrounds are still there - they only stripped out the room data, and were in such a hurry that they forgot to strip out the backgrounds. Those (RE15 areas) aren't going to end up in the final product anyway - leastways in that form - so gamers (at the time) don't need to play them.

I've also heard rumors that the Trial was originally planned so you could play the entire RPD, but I've never seen a copy that does (except for the one I hacked myself). There's only the one with the extended timer, and that one's rather rare. That still doesn't explain the weirdness going on in the kennels. You might explain the manhole away like that, but one of those menu blocks is on the back of a door and not the front. What was that all about?

I still firmly believe there was a lot more of RE15 in the working copy, or build, or "beta 1" or whatever you want to call it, than what we ended up with in the Trial ... and I'm still yet to be convinced otherwise.

You probably know this but there are quite a few extra rooms that can be accessed by gamesharking some keys... So it's very possible that the trial was meant to be longer then it was and they axed those rooms at the last second. Regardless, this is all very interesting, loving this stuff.

[News Bot]

Extra rooms being on the disk of a trial where they are usually not accessible is usually just because its taken from a build they are present on, and removing them is just pointless. Locking them away is faster and more efficient and people generally won't get to them anyway unless they went out of their way, and even then, who the fuck cares?

[biohazard_star]

It's entirely possible that the 1.5 rooms were playable in an earlier build of retail. If you think about it, it really seems like they were building over the 1.5 backgrounds room by room, as the number of rooms missing from the factory set (Stage 300) is equal to the number of retail rooms found in the same folder. Also, their location/arrangement in the folder is exactly where those 1.5 room files should've been. This would account for why two of the outdoor factory areas, an office room in the factory, and the interior of the warehouse elevator is missing from the set, as they've been replaced by the torture chamber, torture chamber hallway, a sewer vent and the prison cells from retail.

[RMandel]

Plus there's those two or three lone isolated RE15 rooms way back when that Martin found and got working. His efforts are documented on his YouTube channel.

So, while the evidence isn't conclusive, what we have does point to ... let's see, what's the best way to say this ... the "Trial-derived" or "beta 1" having a lot more in it than did the actual Trial, and it was probably a hybrid early RE2/late RE15. I think most of us can agree on that at least. That's to where all the evidence we do have or can find hidden in the Trial points. How much of a hybrid - well, that's the big question. What I described - early RE2 RPD, RE15 Warehouse and Underground Lab - is a good possibility, based on that same evidence. That's the main reason why a lot of us were interested in it. It was an alternate path to RE15 - or at least a good-sized chunk of it. It would also explain why that game show video was edited the way it was, because it represented what that particular build looked and played like. The old RE15 footage was spliced in because it was the easiest thing to do at the time, rather than go to the trouble of capturing new footage - which would have been a pain in the ass back then.

Newsbot is probably right in one respect, even given his language. Does it really matter at this point? Unless you're either a hardcore RE fan, or (dare I say it) just somebody "looking for free ROMz," it doesn't. It did before the recent news from "da team" broke, but it's almost pointless now. We may finally have access to the real RE15 soon. Given that situation, the "Trial-derived" or "beta 1" build becomes irrelevant. It's like those early beta builds of RE1 that surfaced a while back. "Oh, this is neat," and "ooh, look at this odd thing or two that they didn't do, or didn't do quite like retail, or doesn't work quite right," and so on - but that's all. It explains some of the things you saw in those old magazines and game show videos (a-hem), and that's about it. This particular build of RE2 was the most intriguing of them all ... but only to hardcore RE fans and ROMz "collectors." It's not that big a deal now, sad to say.

As I said earlier, anybody who really, truly wants "RE2 beta 1" can just about have it if they're willing to hack it up. All the pieces, or all the one some of us think might have been part of it, are now out there. You can recreate the early RE2 RPD from the Trial, and the PMODders have done a lot a work on recreating the RE15 Warehouse/Factory and Underground Lab in workable form. BUT ... as Newsbot said (and I'll reword it somewhat), why bother? It's not such a big deal anymore.

[DXP]

Despite the fact its true 1.5 and all that I need to put my foot down on some aspects of people's thinking's since I did my own research into the matter.

Now this whole oh at one point the 1.5 factory was used in beta 1 the labs maybe but the factory....nah well in honesty unless we had beta 1's files in hand we could easily confirm it. But as for the trial...not in a million years, this is how I know:

1) Having looked at all the rooms the kennels lead to no unknown location in fact there's no ladder/door trigger for it to go into the sewer areas. These additional doors you speak of are nothing more than duplicates that lead back into the basement cell hallway. And for more added value the doors are brown ones seen in the RPD and not the ones you see in the renders obviously because you aren't supposed to get there.
2)In the kennels are 3 dogs one with its head removed dead, and two more one that follows you as soon as you enter and the other is waiting, funny fact as well for some reason you pick up the handgun parts there but they are thrown more or less in any room that exists in the trial edition.
3)The east stairwell where doors apparently don't work they are usable just deactivated so all that's needed is activation =P
4)The duplicate doors on the 2nd floor east hallway(statue puzzle) contain door triggers for the cola machine hallway again like the renders dictate(however there is not one on the cola machine hallways other side that's why it crashes.)

So to sum the 2 trial up there was never a whole version of the RPD since there isn't enough on the trial room wise to make a complete RPD.

I've also not just done a 2 trial comparison but beta 2, the psm demo and the final set of rdt files from BH2 final itself. and here are my findings for those:

The PSM demo despite it being 10 minutes long has all of the door triggers to the sewer areas intact so honestly you could just dump the psm rdts in the main game and they would still work, Which is different to the 2 trial because these work and link 100% however that point in development the 1.5 sewers and everything 1.5 you assume was there wasn't..... take a look at the rdt dates those are the most interesting trial 2's were compiled between June/August 97 so your telling me after they scrapped 1.5 they kept hold of room files from Jan/Feb 97? The PSM demo's are the most finalized in a demo since they match the final RE2 rdt files give or take a few days/hours all between December 1997/January 1998 few were still compiled before its final release, Beta 2's RDT's were all (ironically) compiled on the 30th of October 1997 and at that point the new sewers were shown and worked/linked room wise so from August/October the sewers were re-worked that is why there is no sewer rooms in the trial because there wasn't any =P well I lie because technically there is the cesspool corridor but hey no items no doors to use its a dead room but at that point its data exists again like the cell holding area it exists but contains nothing that can be used. Same for room 3080 it contains a door that links but has no items and no data But they all link to current RPD not to some dead end they were at that time linked to the final RPD so again sound like 1.5?

Then of course the final nail in the whole but they must be 1.5 rooms in the trial that can be used...there is no rdt's for any of them at all because like already stated they were being re-worked and in October 97 were compiled with the beta build for for final 2 anything 1.5 was already removed within the trial rooms as nothing of it existed everything links to the 2 final RPD if it linked to something else the data would state corrupted and its not doing that. Again all these other doors that were to apparently make the demo bigger are duplicates that just go back into the previous room.

[Guest]

Can someone please define the "PSM demo?"

To add to these observations. One major difference between the Trial Edition and beta 2 I've noticed is the way the games events/scenarios are structured. In beta 2 they are very much like the original in that both normal mode and rookie mode are completely independent from each other, as are Jill and Chris' scenarios. However the Trial Edition is quite different, the normal and rookie scenarios are actually merged together in such a way that they can be influenced by in game flags.

The best example of this is to simply modify a door to lead to the rookie side of the streets, at which point the way rooms behave throughout the RPD switch to rookie mode instead of normal mode. I believe that upon loading a room the game will perform a quick check and depending on which flag is marked, the game will load a different version of each room. This behaviour does not happen in beta 2, you can not simply walk into an area, switch on a flag and change the way the game behaves, no matter how you try to jump rooms to influence the game, this flag doesn't exist in the same way.

This leads me to a few conclusions. The first and probably the most solid is that at this point in development Leon and Claire were deffinately playable on the same disc. There was no definition between LeonA/B and ClaireA/B, it was just LeonA/ClaireB and depending on which side of the streets the player first spawned determined the course of the whole game. This leads me to one assumption, that perhaps Leon and Claire were intended to have more indepth interactions throughout the course of the game. If one flag can change the way the game behaves, it's entirely possible that in some hypothetical situation the player could transition between LeonA and ClaireB on the fly. There is no real base for this assumption but it's something that might very well be possible in this build should it be intended to do so by the developer.

I have to agree, in my personal opinion I believe that builds from the beta 1 era that predate the Trial Edition were much more developed than the Trial Edition its self and there was probably a larger demo developed and intended to be played before the build we got. The big give away for me is the Ada scene which Martin unlocked in the East Office. As Leon approaches the back of the room there is a small corridor with a door to his left and a book cabinet to the right. During this Ada scene the sound effect for the door on the right exists as she walks through it to confront Leon even though in this build there is no such door. It shows that what came before the Trial Edition was more "final" than first meets the eye and was potentially playable for any given length in regards to the amount of content which actually existed at that period of time.

One things for certain though the hybrid footage is just an amalgamation of two different games, as clearly they used two different Leon models, 1.5 Leon and 2 Leon.

[RMandel]

You forgot about Stage 7 on the PSM demo - the one with all the alpha and beta rooms, one of which is most definitely RE15 (ROOM706). That's the hidden stage whose rooms Martin unlocked - and if memory serves, that room's backgrounds are duplicated in the Trial. Why? (rhetorical question). So your statement about there not being ANY RE15 rooms on the PSM Demo (Trial, i.e. hacked beta 1) is incorrect. That's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect in a beta build - a developer's-only level for test rooms, or something like that. You're also forgetting about the other files on the disc, many of which point to there being six playable stages in the game, not just two - as well as the hidden RE15 graphic content. That extra content matches up almost exactly with those extra missing stages. I'm still not convinced.

Having said that, I think we're still agreed that a lot of stuff got deleted before the Trial came out in its first form. What it was, and how much ... well, we may end up agreeing to disagree on that. I think we can agree that the Trial we got wasn't the Trial as originally intended or shown. That may be as far as we can come in agreement, but I'm willing to let it go at that and move on.

As it turns out, I seem to have deleted my copy of the "Extended Demo" after making it available on the 1 2 3 Modding Forum a while back. Oh, well. It was a fun project. Might be worth redoing ... some day.

There's one thing I really liked about hacking the PC Trial, DXP. All those backgrounds and object overlays were out "in the open," so to say. No packing and unpacking archive data files to get at them and put new ones in the game. I wish the retail RE2 was like that. There's already a patch out there to loop the timer. Now, if only somebody with the skill could figure out how to hack or patch in a load/save function, or find a third-party utility to do the same, well ... (laugh). And yes, I had to use beta 2 to fill in some of the holes in the beta 1 RPD. Finally went with all retail, since this was supposed to be a playable demo and some of those beta rooms (especially beta 1) were reeeeeeeeellly buggy. And no, I never did figure out how to deal with the object overlays - but I found a way to "turn them off," so to speak. I just made them all transparent. More of a kludge than a hack, but it worked.

And then there's that "missing outside stairwell" on the East Wing. The backgrounds don't show it there and there's no background for it, yet a beta 1 RDT exists in the PSM trial - and it doesn't match the retail background. The staircase is angled differently, once you load it up and play it. Perhaps an early stab - like the beta 1 entrance-only-no-exit Clock Tower room? (May have the name wrong - it's the room where you're supposed to use the cogwheel). Might have something to do with geluda's observations about Leon and Ada's first encounter.

[RMandel]

Did some more digging. Still haven't found my copy of my RE2 Extended PC Demo, but I did find something else. It's a modding FAQ I started writing but never finished, for anybody else who wanted to hack the PC Trial. Those of you interested in what we call "RE beta 1," for lack of a better term - i.e. the PSM Demo/Trial, the PC Demo/Trial, et al - might be interested. I had intended to recreate this using the PC Trial as a base, but real world events intervened. Still, you might find it useful - and others who are far more skilled with PMODding than I can probably pick up where I left off.

RE2 [PC] Demo Modding FAQ (unfinished)

http://www.mediafire.com/view/?6l3c6eg3i47v8em

[Marvin]

This is interesting.

I think this has been discussed earlier, but does the retail jap TRIAL , that contains 1.5 shots. ARE THESE same era build shots than the Infalmes pictures?

[Guest]

This is interesting.

I think this has been discussed earlier, but does the retail jap TRIAL , that contains 1.5 shots. ARE THESE same era build shots than the Infalmes pictures?

Some of them are the same, some of them are actually newer than the Bioflames build.