Mattfrie1

Here's some more of John Carmack's thoughts on the Jaguar, circa 2000: http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-slashdot.pdf#section.1.13

Wow, I can't believe I didn't make that connection... That sound wasn't present in the Saturn port which is why it took me by surprise, but a quick search of the original DOS version reveals the same exact sound in that version. The only difference being that it is much longer in duration in the DOS version instead of the quiet 3 second loop that appears in the Jaguar port.

Hello everyone. I've just recently took the plunge and bought a Jaguar after having the console on my wish list for several years now. One of the games I bought right away was "Theme Park", a fairly common title for the Jag. A seller on Ebay had brand new sealed copies for sale, so I figured why not? I figured I should share two weird things I've noticed about this port that no one probably cares about. First off, One thing that struck me right away when I started the game was a very strange sound "loop" that appeared to be playing constantly in the background. This "sound" isn't there when you fire the game up, but the sound starts after you begin a new game and open the gates of your park for the first time. The loop starts out quite loud, but then fades into the background after a few seconds or so. This sound constantly loops underneath all the other game audio, and just struck me as rather odd. I've played the Sega Saturn port of Theme Park for years, and nothing like this exists in that version of the game. Would there be some technical reason as to why this sound is there in the first place? For anyone interested, you can hear the audio pretty well in this video starting at about 7:20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYWXgTUIpeY&t=440 Anyway, I figured I'd do a little bit of detective work. I opened the game's ROM in a hex editor and did some digging around. I didn't find anything really unusual at first, but I was rather intrigued to see that at the end of the ROM were numerous fragmented text strings left over from the mission screens in "Syndicate" (The only other title that Bullfrog made for the Jaguar). Doing some research, I found that the Jaguar ports of Syndicate and Theme Park were programmed by the same people, Alan Wright and Mike Diskett. I looked at the ROM of Syndicate, and those same text strings occupy the same area in the Syndicate ROM as they do in the Theme Park ROM. They obviously must have worked on porting Theme Park after Syndicate, but would there be any logical reason as to why stuff from Syndicate would be in Theme Park?