u/goody_fyre11

Very recently, modding community member Archy purchased and dumped a Preview build of SSX 3 dated July 31st, roughly 2 months before release. What we found on the disc was nothing short of a miracle - a FULL BUILD (NOT A DEMO) from the early beta phase of development with tons of content that was either cut before release and never seen by the public, or extremely early versions of things we have seen. This is also very likely the build of the game used to record some of the shots seen in the final release's pre-rendered intro cutscene.

https://hiddenpalace.org/SSX_3_(Jul_17,_2003_prototype)

A very small selection notable differences (listing the things that aren't different would be MUCH easier):

• It runs at 60 frames per second, and Metro City's framelimiter hasn't been added yet. It seems that the early demos weren't capped to 30 frames per second because that's what the developers were targetting, rather the game was going to run at 60 from the start, but the early builds were terribly unoptimized and have lots of stuttering, this not being visible at 30 frames per second.

• The Early Atomika voice actor is present and has several new voice lines recorded, including a bunch unused in the game data as well. There's now enough evidence to say that this unknown person wasn't simply a stand-in for Mark Hildreth, but rather EA's original choice. Early French Atomika, Early German Atomika, and Early Spanish Atomika are also present.

• "Get Retarded" by the Black Eyed Peas is present, and some songs like "Rock Star" are also completely uncensored. All mentions of Goldfrapp and Kazzer were removed.

• Extremely early track designs. Peak 1 mostly resembles the Beta Demo, however most of Peak 2 and all of Peak 3 are using their Pre-Alpha designs. I'd seriously give Throne and Black Station a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeXAV1cnxF8

• The debug menu exists, accessible by pressing Circle in the pause menu. This is also the first publicly-available console build to contain a working debug freecam, which you can access by holding L3 and pressing R2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSDALFjqu0A

• Lots of cut clothing items are present, including an even more skin-exposed bikini top for Elise and an inflatable duck inner-tube for Moby, plus so much more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsx4z8lKdv4

• Transporting plays a unique music track which was in the Pre-Alpha Demo, but unused, and its purpose couldn't be identified at the time. Peak 2 and Peak 3 hub music is VERY different.

• Menus are newer than the designs seen in the Pre-Alpha demo but slightly older than the Beta Demo. The scapped "session cost" feature, which required you to pay to teleport around tracks, is present and fully functional. The pre-race Rider Aggression menu is also here and presumably works fine.

• So, so, SO much more, including a bunch of unused gamedata on the disc hinting at more features that got scrapped. If anyone attempts to create a page on The Cutting Room Floor for this build, it may be one of the biggest pages on the website. It's clear that over half of the content for SSX 3 got scrapped.

Note that if you choose to play this build, you'll want to grab the PCSX2 PNACH (PCSX2 2.0+ extremely highly recommended, pre-1.7 builds are a massive detriment to you, the user, seriously, update) cheat from the Internet Archive mirror. This game is set to intentionally crash and display a detailed crash message if even the slightest error happens, which was very useful for the developers to find bugs, but most if them aren't gamebreaking to us. The included patch disables the intentional crashing, leaving only the actual unsolvable crashes. It's not compatible with real hardware and never will be due to its enormous size.

Through DJ Atomika, you learn the names of lots of people that never actually physically appear in the game. I went ahead and listened to the entire SSX 3 part of my Sound Pack project and created a list of all of them. I also looked at the game's credits and added who the names are likely to be references to. If anyone has any ideas about the ones I wasn't able to figure out or ways to narrow down the ones with lots of potential name matches, please let me know.

• Rosemary - Left a message in Radio BIG's answering machine in the unused "Voicemail" sound clip from the retail demo. No known production team connection.

• LG - That nasty ski patroller up on Peak 3. It's time to chill, sweetheart. No known production team connection.

• Rob and Bob - Owners of Rob and Bob's board shop. Rob is likely a reference either to Lead Lighter Robin Kort, Development Director Robyn Wallace, or Marketing Team member Rob Bucci, and Bob is likely a reference to Programming Team member Bob Silliker. In Rob's case, odds are it's only one of them.

• Eva - Owner of Eva's Coffee Hut. Very low chance of being a reference to Production Support member Lynn Corcuera, the logic being Eva = Evalynn = Lynn.

• El Franco - Possible real person related to El Franco Loco Fire Sauce. Potentially a reference to Audio Team member Frank Faugno.

• Rory McKenzie - Owner of the infamous Orange Cat. Potentially related to Audio Team member Tim McKenzie.

• S.M. Smiley - Referred to as S.M. Morrison by Pre-Alpha DJ Atomika, "the town's" founder and first to climb BIG Mountain, got to name all the tracks. Likely a reference to both game Tester Shaun Morrison and Production Team member Sean Smillie, the latter being referenced by the "Tired Smillie" goggles.

• Powder Pete - Reckless Osprey pilot constantly getting into crashes. Likely a reference to either Video Post Production team member Peter Miller or Localization Team member Peter Frankemölle.

• Dangerous Dave - Snowplow driver known for plowing more cars than snow. Likely a reference to either Co-Producer J. David Elton, Programming Team member David Weedon, Modeler David Lam, game Tester David Shen, Localization Coordination member David Wiens, Localization Team member David Pérez, Public Relations Team member David Lee, or Music Services member Dave Taylor. Definitely only one of them though.

• Tiger - An avalanche rescue dog, presumed to be Zoe's dog, although unconfirmed.

• Fisheye Rich - Cameraman for Frozen Films. Potentially related to Modeler Cody Ritchie, game Tester Richard Given, or game Tester Richard Seto.

• Buford Summers - Local author and (sometimes) Frozen Films scriptwriter. No known production team connection.

• Big T - His snowmobile broke down again. He made it back, only for his van to break down too. Way too many first names in the credits that start with T to figure this out.

• Chuck Clark - Has rocks thrown at his house, making it hard to sleep. Also, he has llamas in his basement. Potentially related to game Tester Tiffin Clark.

• JB - Organizer of the Mountain Bike Ride. Potentially related to either Production Team member Jay Balmer, Concept Artist James Bowes, Animator Jay Bulbrook, Screenwriter Janice Beaudoin, Subject Matter Expert Jim Barnum, Subject Matter Expert James Bishop, or a combination of these people considering how many JBs were on the team!

• Mr. Morrison - Local high school geography teacher. Skips classes every snowfall. Wait a second... Morrison? As in the early name for S.M. Smiley? How curious. Likely a second reference to game Tester Shaun Morrison.

• Angry Phil - Got his board stolen, I guess. No known production team connection.

• MC Queen - Local DJ, played at the Day Shack, competing against Mac Fraser and one other local DJ. Likely a reference to Project Manager Martin McQueen.

• Lil' Cammy Carvealot - The one other participating local DJ. Likely a reference to Team Lead Cameron MacKinnon.

• Nick "The Duke" Lloyd - Creates slideshows for past historical events. Potentially related to Art Director Ian Lloyd.

• Carlos - The Duke's sitar-playing sherpa man-servant. No known production team connection.

• Rockin' Riley - Local snowmobile mechanic. Lost a contact up on Peak 2. RIP. No known production team connection.

• Belgium Mike - Mentioned a single time in a list of names right before Dangerous Dave. Likely a reference to either Lead Programmer Mike Rayner or Michael Dobson, the voice actor for Nate Logan.

• Jock "Bendit Backwards" Bruster - A Scottish yoga instructor whose classes require a very worrying set of gear. No known production team connection.

• Sophia - Peak 2 resident, calls in to request Screw Up by Overseer. No known production team connection.

• TG - Peak 1 resident, calls in to request Mas by Kinky. Likely a reference to Technical Artist Tom Graham.

• Combat Tracy - BIG Mountain resident, calls in to request Don't Let the Man Get You Down by Fatboy Slim. No known production team connection.

I've been looking for an arcade cabinet that I played a few times when I was very young, but I can't remember where it was or what it was called.

Things I remember:

• Early 2000s interpretation of a sci-fi alien invasion.

• You played as a ground turret protecting a space station on a planet that wasn't Earth.

• The turret was never moving or attached to a vehicle (so not Incoming from 1998)

• Friendly Fire was enabled, and you should shoot at the buildings you were supposed to be protecting and watch them crumble to the ground as you fail objectives. One of these buildings was a massive satellite dish.

• The environment design resembled the Thule maps from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and the HUD design was a cross between the Stitch: Experiment 626 game on PlayStation 2 and Halo 1.

• There was a big emphasis on the color green in the early 2000s' aliens kind of way, green static-y design with scrolling alien symbols, but most of the screen was unobscured.

• It was absolutely an arcade cabinet. Absoluely 0% chance it was a console game. I only played PS2 and I can confirm it's not on PS2, I literally only owned a PS2, but I played in arcades a whole lot.

• It's not a game on Global VR's Vortek machine, which is why I specifically said it wasn't Incoming, but it's the type of game that would be on that machine.

• The arcade cabinet in question only had this one game.

• The complexity of the graphics was that of early Windows XP gaming, and the cabinet likely had such a computer inside of it.

I'm using VirtualBox version 7.2.4 r170995, for context, and on a Windows 11 machine with all latest updates, drivers, no malware, everything is clean.

I'm at my wits' end. I have tried everything on the planet, accessed every resource I can find, and did every conceivable internet search on the entirety of the internet, yet I cannot find solutions for my problem. I also work in tech support for a living, so I'm very far from the average layman and I know to try super-advanced things, I'm not the "help why no pc work" kind of person.

I had a dying Windows 10 computer, so I made a raw image of the drive with HDDRawCopy. I want to convert this into a VirtualBox-compatible image so I can use it as a virtual machine instead. I've actually done this before with no issues whatsoever, in fact I've found massive success in the past, having turned AT LEAST 10 real computers into virtual machines with absolutely no issues whatsoever. So no, don't tell me what I'm doing doesn't work or isn't intended, because yes it does, and yes it is.

Why, then, does it not work with THIS HDD image?

Things I've tried, in chronological order:

1. Using "VBoxManage convertdd" to convert it into a VDI image. The conversion succeeds, but VirtualBox completely fails to boot into it. I just get a black screen with the letter J and a blinking cursor. No disk, CPU, or network activity. Every reddit post and forum thread on the internet that has this exact issue is at least 5 years old with either zero replies or baby steps I've already tried.

2. Using "VBoxManage convertfromraw" to convert it into a VMDK image. The conversion succeeds, but VirtualBox refuses to use it because "VER_VD_IMAGE_READ_ONLY", even though it is ABSOLUTELY NOT READ-ONLY IN ANY CONCEIVABLE WAY. Literally, 100% confirmed by Windows' Security tab, the file and EVERY FOLDER AND SUBFOLDER LEADING TO IT has full read-write permissions, and EVERYTHING is being run as Administrator. VirtualBox doesn't care, and thinks it's still read-only. Every reddit post and forum thread on the internet that has this exact issue is at least 5 years old with either zero replies or baby steps I've already tried.

3. Mounting the image with Windows 11, something it claims to be able to do. It fails, claiming it's "corrupted".

4. Converted it to VHD, the only format I hadn't tried. It fails to boot as well, giving me the same letter J and blinking cursor.

5. As a sanity check, I wrote the image to a hard drive with the same size and inserted it into 5 different computers, each with different manufacturers and hardware. All 5 of them booted it perfectly with no issues whatsoever, fully proving it's not corrupted.

I really, really, really, really, REALLY, REEEEEEAAAAAALLLLYYYYYY hope this thread doesn't die immediately like the hundreds I've found across the internet, because I EXTREMELY DESEPERATELY need this for a project.

After much procrastination, the IcebergCharts website shutting down, a video having been made on it, and a large amount of documentation, the Ultimate SSX Iceberg is now complete! Everything I ever wanted to put on it, everything I encountered on the way to completion, as well as most community suggestions have been added! It's now in a state of completion, as there's nothing left on my to-do list for it. Check it out, there's some seriously unseen material on this thing:

https://icebergthreads.com/iceberg/IYLkML9Kc8rapTc2t1GM

This doesn't mean it can't be expanded though, it absolutely can, and some individual entries are a work-in-progress. The Chinese bootleg SSX 2012 arcade cabinet hasn't arrived for documentation yet, and the SSX Tricky movie shorcut research project is still underway, just to give two examples. If anyone has something not on this iceberg that's confirmed with at least one official source (not Fandom, no inside jokes, no "DO NOT RESEARCH") then feel free to suggest it.

This was one of the biggest projects in my massive backlog, so I'm glad I can move on to other things now.

Reposting my old post from 5 years ago because it got no attention and I've still had no luck finding this:

I remember watching a video about a competition that was quite serious to the people who organized it, but was meme material to anyone who has an IQ higher than 10. I remember the line "and here we have a ____ eating contest, the winner gets a handful of M&Ms and a Gameboy Color". It was apparently a real thing that happened, but the video was in so many meme compilations, mainly due to its low-effort editing. I don't remember enough of the video to search for it. I remember it had a real website attatched to it when I searched it on Google back in the day. I remember the event or the website may have contained the names of two people, but I don't remember the names.