Rayman 1

[Mortamon Saturn]

Am I the only SEGA Saturn kid who thought the Tings were like the console's logo? Oh wait, I must be the only Saturn kid to have even existed... :'(
...Well, whether you did or not, now you won't be able to unsee it since I fused them together!

I've even made animated sprites out of that idea!





Rayman 1's Saturn version was the first video game I've ever played, so I just had to!

[The Jonster]

Speaking of Tings, I find it curious that the PC and PS1 have different sound effects for them. I prefer how they sound on PS1 though.

[Master]

I like the detail in the PS1 version where Tings have different notes, adds a little musical flair to playing.

[Mortamon Saturn]

There are actually even more versions of the Ting sounds, like the Jaguar and Japanese beta! Rayman Redemption lets you freely choose between all of them and so I did a video on the "Au Clair de la Lune" Ting sequence a while back for comparison!



Though, I'll always prefer the PS1 sound and their variety of notes, truly magical!

[The Jonster]

There are actually even more versions of the Ting sounds, like the Jaguar and Japanese beta! Rayman Redemption lets you freely choose between all of them and so I did a video on the "Au Clair de la Lune" Ting sequence a while back for comparison!



Though, I'll always prefer the PS1 sound and their variety of notes, truly magical!

Oh I only ever heard the PS1 version of this, I didn't know they all could play this tune there!

[RibShark]

Recently I decided to do a playthrough of a mostly undocumented Rayman 1 version, Rayman Ultimate for the Pocket PC. Turns out there are actually a decent amount of differences, the most obvious being that all the bosses have reduced health, some by a little and some by a lot. In fact, since Mr Sax's health is only 5 in this version, it is possible to actually underflow his health during the chase by hitting him with all the wrong notes, meaning 255 hits are required after!


Platforms also tend to move way slower (Eat at Joe's is painfully slow to complete because of this), voice clips are way higher, photographers display the text "CHECKPOINT" when your photo is taken, knockback from hits works differently (seems to mostly move you upwards rather than sideways), you have 20 health (big powers no longer increase the max health, instead just restoring it to 20), there are some minor layout changes, the Skops chase was made super easy (the red spiky platforms no longer fall), and there's probably some other stuff too.

[Mortamon Saturn]

That's really great! I really wanted to see a playthrough of this obscure version for the longest time! I'll make sure to watch the whole thing later!
That's very interesting! That'll be very handy to document many things about this port!

And I though the DSi version gave too much health with its 10 HPs, 20 is crazy! But not as crazy as a boss ending up with 255 health points, imagine a challenge like this for Rayman bosses!

Now if only someone could get to do a playthrough on the Symbian version of Rayman GBC... and also clean complete recordings for the other PDA versions, while we're at it.

[lyndo64]

Awesome! I always wanted to see video footage of that! The music is oscar worthy

[The Jonster]

So this is Rayman Ultimate. I look forward to watching this after the day ends.

[Mortamon Saturn]

The music is oscar worthy

I even included the music in my Rayman resource pack for Terraria as an extra, because that "masterpiece" of a soundtrack oddly fit in a sandbox game!

[Hunchman801]

Well that's really interesting, it's like Rayman Advance on steroids. I understand that playing the game might be harder on this platform, but some choices appear rather questionable. Anyway, this is a good occasion to document all this on RayWiki now. And what's with the music too, I don't think I've heard it before?

As for Tings, the PC sound is my favorite, but probably because that's the one I'm used to. Had no idea there were so many, though...

[dr_st]

In fact, since Mr Sax's health is only 5 in this version, it is possible to actually underflow his health during the chase by hitting him with all the wrong notes, meaning 255 hits are required after!

I think there is a trick in Doom that if you hack something to give yourself too much damage, your health will overflow as well. But since health is signed 32-bit (IIRC), it really has to be like 2^31 damage. I'm sure I've seen documentation of the glitch at one point, but can't find it now.

[PluMGMK]

I like the detail in the PS1 version where Tings have different notes, adds a little musical flair to playing.

Aha, there's that misconception again that they don't have different notes on the PC version. They do in fact pitch shift on the PC version, but on Android this was removed because they were too lazy to include pitch shifting and panning in the stripped-down sound system of that version! (I guess this was also the case on Pocket PC, judging from Rib's video…)
Of course, Rayman Designer also has monotonous Tings, because they are limited to 100 per level, and that limit is easier to enfore by only providing one Ting object to the mapper. But you can get the other notes by modifying the EVE.MLT, and that also allows you to have more than 100 per level!

That business with Mister Sax's health underflowing really sucks. I wonder if the same can happen on PC. I know it's possible if you're really skilled to hit him twelve times in the chase level, but I'm not sure if you can get to thirteen (and even if you could, I'm not sure if the game logic would allow the underflow).

The music sounds interesting. It's got a calm Rayman-2-ish vibe to it, while also being reminiscent of Rayman Advance…

–––

Since I referenced this message the other day, I may as well revisit it based on my more recent experience:

First thing: this walking drum takes you towards a Magician level. When I attempted to play this particular Magician level, it seemed to be broken. The screen would not scroll horizontally, so it was impossible to complete it. Is that a known bug with v1.00 or was something screwed up on my end? (I did exit and re-enter the bonus level at least once)

That didn't happen this time, I guess it was just some random bug when I booted up the game in 2023!

Apart from that, there were a few more nasties that I don't think were mentioned before:

And another one: the bottom-most cloud at the bottom right of Cave 05 isn't there in v1.00, meaning you have to kill yourself to go back and get the cage if you fail to grab the ring and/or land on one of the higher clouds! Can't believe I didn't mention that last time…

By the way, there were a few other things I forgot to mention about v1.00. Firstly, the default keyboard control scheme is different from all the others. It's more like Rayman 2's actually, except it uses Alt for jump. I decided to use that scheme while playing v1.00 just to see what it was like (even though I could of course change it if I wanted to).

Yeah, I didn't do that this time, I switched to the Ctrl/Alt/X scheme that's the default in all the later versions

The other thing is that for some reason it always insists on changing the graphics card setting to PCI2 when running natively on my PC, so I have to manually change it back to PCI1 each time I boot up the game in order to get Differential Scrolling working. This doesn't happen under Dosbox though, and it also doesn't happen with newer versions, so I'm not too sure what's happening there…

So this was related to some junk that got into my RAYMAN.CFG for some reason that I'm sure I'll never understand… It turns out that after loading the config file, all versions check if the first RefRam2VramNormalFix is over 128. The number in my Dosbox installation's RAYMAN.CFG was less than 128, but the one on my native installation was bigger. If version 1.00 finds that it's over 128, then it automatically sets the video mode to PCI2. Whereas the newer versions also check if XPadMax is equal to -1, which of course it never is because the game always clamps it to -2 before saving the config file. So this junk in my config file never affected any of the other versions!

Now I have no idea what this RefRam2VramNormalFix value is supposed to represent, and I have even less of an idea why the XPadMax value is of any relevance to the video mode! All I know is that it's not a DRM, because the same code (checking both RefRam2VramNormalFix and XPadMax) is present in the UNPROTECTED version…

EDIT: I think it's something the installer calculates by doing a speed test on the video RAM. I probably ran it with an Intel GPU, which is why it came out too slow for PCI1 mode. I guess the XPadMax check then is to see if it's a fresh installation, precisely so you don't have to override it every time you start the game!

[Master]

Ahhh, pardon my ignorance then, I grew up on the PS1 version and don't have the most knowledge of the PC version. I know the general sounds are different, but I didn't know they also pitch shifted them in the PC version as well - I'll have to look at some footage to correct myself then.

[Hunchman801]

I've been comparing the PC versions today and interestingly PC version 1.00 retains a lot of level design from the PS1 version, even going as far as including the moving drum!

I was reminded of this by PluM's post and thought of documenting this fact; can you remind me under which circumstances version 1.00 was published? Also, the PlayStation and Jaguar versions only have walking drums in the first part of Bongo Hills, right?

Recently I decided to do a playthrough of a mostly undocumented Rayman 1 version, Rayman Ultimate for the Pocket PC. [...]

I documented what I could here, but of course it will have to be expanded at some point, for example with the HP for the other bosses. One question though, the French wiki mentions that the default health is 12, not 20, and that the latter is only obtained using a Super Power. Is that a mistake?

[RibShark]

I documented what I could here, but of course it will have to be expanded at some point, for example with the HP for the other bosses. One question though, the French wiki mentions that the default health is 12, not 20, and that the latter is only obtained using a Super Power. Is that a mistake?

I believe so; if you look in my playthrough you will see that I start a new file with 20.

[Mortamon Saturn]

Raydijay has discovered a music glitch in the 10th Anniversary release of Rayman Advance. The track Lurking in the Darkness that plays exclusively in Eat at Joe's water section will sound all messed up if you wait for it to loop a seventh time:


(2:36 in the video)

As explained, it works both on a 10th Anniversary cartridge and when emulating that same bundle (so it's not that his cartridge is damaged or something).
He first filmed it on original hardware to show me the glitch in a DM, and he asked me to test out the Wii U Virtual Console release of the game (as I just played it for my channel) to see if the glitch triggered in the original release... and it didn't. Then I tried to reproduce the issue on an original Rayman Advance cartridge and got the same result... This led us to the conclusion that this triggers exclusively in the 10th Anniversary bundle.

Could there be something different about Advance in that 10th Anniversary cartridge, like is it a limitation due to having less space or did they use a different build of the game?


Finally, the "Thank You For Playing Rayman" creepypasta is on its way to becoming canon

[lyndo64]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVXXnY1NuA

I'm adding this to my Spotify playlist

[RayCarrot]

I was reminded of this by PluM's post and thought of documenting this fact; can you remind me under which circumstances version 1.00 was published?

I'm pretty sure 1.00 was published like any other release, but probably in less quantities. Rib was the one who dumped the 1.00 version we have.

Also, the PlayStation and Jaguar versions only have walking drums in the first part of Bongo Hills, right?

No, it also exists in Allegro Presto part 3. This map exists on PC too, but in all versions after 1.00 they removed the drum and replaced it with more platforms and clouds.

It's quite interesting comparing the maps like this as it becomes apparent how they tried making the levels easier than they originally were on PS1.

Btw, I should also mention the drum appears on Sega Saturn since I see you didn't include that on the wiki. The Saturn version is usually the same as the PS1 version.

I documented what I could here, but of course it will have to be expanded at some point, for example with the HP for the other bosses. One question though, the French wiki mentions that the default health is 12, not 20, and that the latter is only obtained using a Super Power. Is that a mistake?

I believe so; if you look in my playthrough you will see that I start a new file with 20.

I had a look in the code and yeah it always sets it to 20, never to 12. I assume the misconception came from the promo screenshots showing either 12 or 20 hp.

[PluMGMK]

The track Lurking in the Darkness that plays exclusively in Eat at Joe's water section

Aha, another crime against musical suitability! Of all places to put "Lurking in the Darkness", they picked the brightest map in the entire level!

Could there be something different about Advance in that 10th Anniversary cartridge, like is it a limitation due to having less space or did they use a different build of the game?

Interesting… I don't really know anything about how the music works in the GBA version, but now I kinda wanna find out

Finally, the "Thank You For Playing Rayman" creepypasta is on its way to becoming canon

If only – but remember that that story featured Skops rather than Joe! That said, I've long questioned Joe's true motivations

(For context, at the time of that second link, my signature included the Joe rank with the "shooting" smiley beside it, to indicate to anyone who read any of my posts, that I wanted to shoot Joe )

–––

I was reminded of this by PluM's post and thought of documenting this fact; can you remind me under which circumstances version 1.00 was published?

Here's some more info from Rib on the subject:

1.00 was released officially, I believe I have mostly seen these discs coming from France and Italy. The easiest way to tell whether an original disc is 1.00 is to look above the Ubi Soft logo on the disc. If there is one Moskito, it's the 1.00 version, if there are two, it's one of the later versions.