I thought the game had nothing to do with Starfox until it got moved to gamecube
That's what I and everyone else thought too. This is the first anyone outside of Nintendo/Rare is hearing that Fox was in the game back in the N64 versions.
Although, it appears to have been a last-minute change. Several parts of the game still refer to him as his original name "Sabre", his player icon is still Sabre's, and the voice-acted line where he says his name was clearly re-recorded as a placeholder as it's considerably lower quality than the rest of his spoken lines that don't contain his name. He also claims he is a "knight". I wonder if it was going to originally be an alternate universe or something.
why does General Scales speak native English in the intro, this is weird
IIRC, because in the original game everyone was speaking gibberish until Fox got a "translator" from Slippy, you hear one of Tricky's lines go from gibberish to English mid-sentence as the translator comes online.
In this game these characters were supposed to be natively living on this planet, so it would make sense that they understand the native language.
Is it illegal to share a rom of something that never was released and never made any money?
It's abandoned software
Well I guess it could be illegal since the company is still in business.. And they probably owns the right to this. Or something like that, I'm not a lawyer..
Technically, yes, since the IP is still owned by Nintendo/Rare. (Unclear who owns what parts, especially parts that never made it into Adventures) but really, it's not like people are going to be hunted down for releasing a 20+ year old beta unfinished copy of an unreleased game.
It is pretty much this proto with a few changes. At least the ~hour I've played.
Nah, there's some significant differences. Other than obviously Sabre still being in the game, the UI is also quite different and some of the puzzles were simplified/removed from what little I played. (E.G. In the leaked version that pressure-block puzzle right near the beginning of the game had the tower already toppled-over and you just needed to put a piece of it on the switch, in that video you see that you have to topple over the tower yourself first)