[Grazester]

I believe they did no such thing(proof would be greatly appreciated). What they did was downsample the audio files and the pvr game textures.

To achieve what you claim would more than likely mean game engine modification and without the source code I dont see that happening.

[christoph]

If you search google for their Skies of Arcadia nfo file, you will see this is clearly what they claim. I won't link to it here due to other material hosted on those sites. The trainer injected into the executable also makes this claim (you can view this on pouet.net).

I have little reason to doubt their claims given their clear technical skill spanning multiple console generations (Echelon might have only been associated with the Dreamcast/PS2, but it's obvious that their 'group' were behind multiple other, very highly technically accomplished scene groups).

Access to the source code is even a possibility - at one point they routinely released games weeks or even months before street dates.

http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=97250 is worth a read for an indication of some of the shenanigans that were afoot back in those days.

[voltagex_]

Wonderful. I love things like this. In these days of Steam DB and people scrutinising every byte, it seems like the easter egg / message from the developer has gone by the wayside.

https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor has a lot of examples of left over / hidden content but nothing as cool as a message left for a particular group.

[uxp100]

Honestly, inserting compression doesn't sound impossible. Difficult, but a few months and a team of people and it sounds achievable. Warez folks do some crazy stuff.

However, I read some forums from the time, it sounds like the results weren't great. Mainly folks notice sound triggering noticably late. So uh, Maybe instead of downsampling they built a MP3 decoder, but to use the existing system, it couldn't stream the audio, so they had to decompress the clip completely into a buffer before playback?