General Screenshot/Movie Thread

A few days ago I stumbled across two unused parallax/scroll effect routines for Techno Tower Zone in Sonic Crackers and after studying them, restored them in the base game:



The parallax doesn't quite work properly likely since the standard draw system doesn't account for it, but that much isn't surprising. Perhaps the most curious here is the H-scroll ripple effect on the foreground that activates when the screen is beneath Y level $D60, leading me to believe that water was intended for this zone in some form.

 

Awesome find! I do enjoy Crackers research.

I'd imagine one other reason for the lack of parallax would be the clouds at the top. Incidentally, there are night-time chunks in ROM data, perhaps you could utilise those if you are intending on making a legitimate Crackers hack.

 

Managed to crack how palette cycling works in Chaotix last week (it uses another scripting-based system, with some LUTs for Act/TOD combinations defined for each zone), and ported over Cracker's palette cycling into Techno Tower Zone Classic with some SonED2 ROMulan support for it that I added.



Have also discovered some unused data within the Chaotix disasm for the Character Select menu, which had Heavy and Bomb defined as accessible characters in the menu. This isn't too surprising, considering the 0119 prototype of Chaotix used a placeholder carousel-based menu with Heavy, Bomb, and a blank space for Wechidna defined. Extending some loops that read the lookup tables for the unused data from $04 menu slots to $06 slots restores the beta functionality of Bomb and Heavy as accessible characters in the menu.

 

It's buggy, but

 

So, I began working on a graphics hack of Sonic 2, to make it look more like its Genesis counterpart, graphics-wise, but also take some cues from the Autodemo as well, plus replacing some Badniks with unused ones from Sonic 2, such as the New Motobug with the wheel snail, the lobster Badnik which looked too much like a real lobster with the one from Tom Payne. Other things include unused chunks and tiles being put to use (Underground Zone and Aqua Lake Act 2), little caves in Green Hills, and Gimmick Mountain actually having proper floor graphics for a change, plus using Sonic's palette for background tiles to maximize colour (Gimmick Mountain really benefitted from this, for all the rails use Sonic's palette!)

 

Welp, here's a picture of my (and my team's) hack: Sonic 1 Definitive.

Art is still WIP, but eh. The animation here, which is based off S1 concept art, replaces airwalking from the spring anim for now.

 

Same hack, alluding to a Christmas present of sorts (not a build), edited slightly:

 

Splashscreen made by a fellow who goes by Rivet. Also foreshadows something I'll be showing here tomorrow:

 

This is set to be so far the most accurate Sonic 1 prototype recreation to date. This recreates the Shinsaku Video Soft prototype from early 1991 (January - March).
While it's not as interesting as TTS or the Computer Chronicles prototype (Often mistakingly mislabeled as the CES prototype), it's the only prototype we have the most information on, wich makes it perfect recreation material.

Also a screenshot of LZ, because it's got some differences off the bat.

 

The team I am leading has uploaded the first video of their existence, as part of pushing a Discord server to get frequent updates:

 

It looks wonderfully professional~

I appreciate the new chunks created and the layout structure seems very solid and playable, very polished! Sounds like you have a very professional team.

Would be nice to see some brand new levels, I think you all have the potential to create a new zone with new badniks, new gimmicks, and with polish and care to game play.

 

Good news:
We have plans to bring over the 8-bit zones and possibly add 4 zones inspired and based off Sonic 1 concepts, eventually. So, new zones, new badniks, and such will emerge

 

I made some Special Stages.

 

You need to give me a compilation ROM of these to play on live stream I think~

This totally looks fun =D

 

They're all for Cursed S3K (see Random Projects thread).

 

You're a mad woman MainMemory. I look forward to playing these in a future Cursed S3K build. xD

 

Just a small teaser that might come for this new year depending on my dying interest to Sonic and inevitable PS5 addiction doesn't mess with development time.
(Tweet is here for short video since I can't embed tweets here, Twitter standard audio warning)

 

Horribly fantastic!