NOTICE: This is not an unofficial sequel or Spinoff to any other creepypasta. Any similarities to other creepypastas are coincidental. That being said, have fun reading.
Story[]
This happened to me back in 2010. I had just downloaded "Fusion", a Sega Genesis/Sega CD/Sega 32x emulator. I already had a my own physical real life Megadrive, but I wanted to get more games on it without the the cost of paying anything. I searched if I could find Sonic CD for the Sega CD, but I didn't find any website where I could download it for a decent download speed. I kept looking and after what seemed like an eternity, I found a website which offered ROMs for the Sega CD. I searched, if I could find Sonic CD, but only thing I found was a hack created by some anonymous user. I downloaded that ROM since it was only version of the game it could find.
The file contained a folder which was named AU_. I had no idea at the time why it had a strange name like that. I was curious about what the folder contained, so without hesitation I opened it. It contained a file called SonicCD.bin, rom file and AU_.txt, a text file. I opened the text file first but it only contained
AU_.txt
scrambled text and some binary code on top. The binary translated to "Robot36Robot36Robot36" repeated about four times. I thought to myself, what did this have to do with anything, but I gave up after a couple of minutes of thinking. "It doesn't make sense" I said to myself.
I opened the ROM file on my emulator and started playing. Eveything seemed normal, no distorted music, no glitchy backgrounds or scrambled sprites. The game played normally for a while, before it freezed on me. It sounded as if an cartridge was pulled out of the system before turning it off. Imagine a sustained buzz of the last sound heard in the game. I reset the emulator but this time the game started without a title screen. I did not notice that at first so I kept playing. The game played as usual before I jumped. Sonic jumped really high, flying of the screen. The game gave me an "Illegal Instruction" like in Sonic 1. I said to myself "What's wrong with this thing?" and I had reset the emulator again. Things started to get weird from now on.
During the title screen Sonic's color palette was a bit off and music was distorted and missing some parts. Fortunately, the glitches ingame were not as bad. Sonic's sprite was still messed up and the ground's sprites wete glitched, but atleast the music was still normal. The game did not have any enemies except for Buzz Bombers. I started to suspect if this hack was intedted to be like this or not. I got to end of the Palmtree Panic Zone 1, but then game froze again accompanied by a high pitched buzzing noise. I reset the emulator once again and this time the game spawned me straight to the Paltree Panic Zone act 2. I was about to travel to different a time perioid, like you do in the game, but the game skipped me right to thr boss fight with Eggman. When I almost had destroyed Eggman's robot, the game glitched me through the ground and I got "Illegal Instruction" screen one last time. I was about to reset the system when something flashed on the screen. It seemed as if Sonic was hanging from a tree on the right side of the screen.
I reset the emulator and got a message that stated "Fusion.exe has stopped working". The emulator crashed to the desktop and the Au_ folder still visible on screen. SonicCD.bin had been deleted and it was replaced with a new file, AU_.wav. I wasn't sure at first if I should listen it or not but curiosity got the best of me. The sound file contained high piched screeching sounds that lasted the entire recording. I had no idea what is was about, so I did some research about high pitched sounds and finally found about SSTV signals.
SSTV or Slow-Scan Television is a picture transmission method used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio(read more here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television).
I was able to find a program(RX-SSTV) which could decode the sound signal back to a picture, but it was not easy. You see, SSTV signals have different families on which the picture is coded in to a sound wave and every one of them are different. Since I had no idea what my file's codec family was, I had to take a deeper look at the text file that had come with the game. Fortunately I got the clue I needed from binary text. Robot36 is SSTV family, so using that setting, I converted the picture. What I saw was a bit disturbing.
It was hard to make out, because the signal was distorted and made the photo low-quality, but I could tell it was the same picture that had flashed
Sonic's Death. He's in right corner.
on screen during the glitch.
Sonic was hanging from the tree, water was red for some reason and the top of the picture was glitched. However, because the picture was distorted, Sonic was only a blue pixelated blur on the picture, but you could see him if you looked closely.
I searched from google if anyone else had heard from this mysterious AU_folder, but only thing I found was a malware virus of the same name. I thought if it could have something to do with my case? "Could the author just be someone who just wanted to spread this melware?". "Or could this be something more sinister than that". After that I stashed the folder on my hard drive and to this day. I have not touched it since.
Reason I didn't post this 3 years ago is simple: I really didn't know about creepypastas at the time.The folder is downloadable from the link on top.