Sonic Winter Adventures

Hey vladik, how about you do Sonic Season Adventures, which includes the Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter games?

If you can't or will not, I can or will.

 

Wow, that video!! So great! xD ... Really makes me wanna play the game! =P ... In fact, I think if I had to pay for it I would, especially after watching the part when the lava rises! x) ... I really have to try this hack. (Downloading right now ^^) Judging by the reviews/posts (which I barely "passed my eyes through" them) I will most probably just spend the rest of my weekend playing SWA instead of writing a post here with my feedback on the game, if you don't mind. =P

... again, I can't praise enough your video! Just awesome! And many thanks, vladikcomper, for creating and sharing such a professional hack. =)

(and now, the playing!! =] )

 

That sounds great. Awesome work! I'm starting to think the Sega CD is becoming the new frontier for hacking.

 

Your music is quite impressive. How come you never enter any of nineko's SMPS competitions?

 

Is it truly MCD, or a MD hack that utilizes the MCD's music capabilities? =P

 

I loved this hack, especially the music.

 

Thank you for your feedback!

Well, this isn't a full movement to the Sega CD, but a little experiment I'm pulling off. If people like what they see, I may consider a full step into Sega CD and it's extended features then, but this will require a lot of time, a real lot of time for porting, SuperEgg's got a right idea of what it is in the post above. If you aren't familiar with this way of utilizing Sega CD, you'll see how it works pretty soon, when SHC launches.

In fact, I'm not as good in music as you may think. Yes, I'm doing this stuff sometimes, not regularly, trying to compose something original at times, but it always comes out really bad. So, I'm not showing 99% of compositions I've made, because I don't want your ears bleeding. I often think music is not my cup of tea and give it up, but something always makes me go back into it in a while, when I'm free from programming.

All "my" music I have in SWA so far is eventually ports/rips from the other games with (sometimes) minimal touches. There's barely any musician work I've done there, eventually, it's just a matter of porting data, reverse-engineering different games' sound drivers to be able to understand their format and move it to Sonic 1's driver, knowing its format -- this is where I'm more or less good when it comes to musical stuff.

Even so, there's just 2 or 3 actual SMPS ports in SWA that I've made. I'll open up a little secret now. In the Sound Test, most of songs under my name aren't actually SMPS songs. They are played by the Audios Wave Slave MD sound driver, that comes from an unreleased game Mega Drive, Mr. Nutz: Hoppin Mad. The were only 4 known SMD games using this driver, apparently, only one of them, Mega Turrican, was released. I've been reverse-engineering this sound driver for month or so, making a full disassembly of it and cracking its formats. Eventually, I was able to assemble it in Sonic Winter Adventures and it could play songs and SFX from Mr. Nutz. Then I coded a small system in SWA for switching between two drivers. The original plan was to use few Mr. Nutz songs for the menus, but later I found out that Mega Turrican used a similar sound driver and it had way better soundtrack. Apparently, it turned out to be a different Audios version and the original Mr. Nutz driver wasn't able to playback Turrican songs properly. Then I went for disassembling the whole Turrican's driver as well, trying to figure out the difference between formats. Eventually, I managed to create a modified Audios Wave Slave MD version that was able to handle both Turrican and Mr. Nutz formats. Eventually, I could've asked Jet or S_T_D to recreate some of those songs for me and I believe, they would do that way better by improving or remixing then. But I decided it was about time I do something about music myself. And I did it the way I could (yeah, I'm not looking for easy ways =P), but I'm quite happy with the results. It was a good experience for me in disassembling and reverse-engineering and that allowed me to port all the songs I wanted.

 

You and I both, mate. Can't do music for shit; no matter how many times ValleyBell teaches me =P

 

 I have the hack and I like the the new bosses. Also the graphics are amazing but I mostly like the music!   

 

Oh look, another newcomer who uses pointless formatting in his posts.


Did you even notice that Ordos recently updated the rules to make it clear that you shouldn't do that? It wasn't explicitly stated until a couple of days ago because we all assumed it was common sense to post with a proper grammar and whatnot, but apparently we were being too optimistic and we overestimated the people we can find on the internet...

 

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HACKING CONTEST 2013 SPECIAL​

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It's a been a little while since the last release -- it was on April 28. Originally, my plans weren't to release the next update too soon, apparently some people were asking me if there would be a SWA release on the hacking contest, and I actually thought this would be a wonderful idea. I quickly changed my plans then to get the next version ready by the this year's Hacking Contest.

Sorry to disappoint those who has played the first release already, but there isn't new levels in this special edition. This is the reason I'm not calling it a proper release, but just an edition. Unfortunately, there weren't enough time to add new content without holding the quality bar I set in the first release. However, if you would like another play through a little upgraded and improved version of the game, then be my guest!





As you might notice from the recently shown video...

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... one of the biggest additions in this version is the CD-music playback. Many of you wondered since if I really went for porting the whole hack to Sega CD.


Well, partially. I've been indeed thinking of moving to the Sega CD platform recently, so by this small update, I'm setting a little experiment here. It all depends on you, my dear players! If many of you prefer CD-music to old-school chiptunes, I may really consider a full porting to the Sega CD platform.


So what platform Sonic Winter Adventures is now on? Both!


Sonic Winter Adventures is present in a form of a ROM, that can work on plain Sega Mega-Drive platform, as well as using Sega Mega-CD addon. In other words, you still can play it as your ordinary Mega-Drive ROM in any emulator, but once you active the Sega CD emulation, the game is able to use this platform's extended features for CD-Audio playback. If you were to put this on real hardware, it would look like so: you plug a cartridge in your Mega-Drive, append it with Mega-CD addon, insert CD-Audio disk in your Sega CD and play. This is so-called Mode 1: booting Sega CD from a cartridge (as opposed to Mode 2: booting from a disc).


I would like to hugely thank Tristanseifert, LazloPsylus and MarkeyJester. This won't happen without the help of this awesome guys! Thank you for providing me hardware initialization code, support, testing it on real hardware, and specially for answering my dumb Sega CD hardware questions, as I even didn't have enough time to read through the pile of docs (yeah, the decision was really taken too late).




How to use

Booting with the Sega CD addon (highly recommended!)

• Run SWA.BAT to open the game in a specially configured emulator.
• To connect a CD-image and boot Sega CD, just drag&drop SWA.CUE file onto the emulator's window with SWA running. The game will reboot and a notification message will appear if success.

Booting as an ordinary SMD ROM

• Run SWA.GEN in your favorite emulator.

For more info and configuration guidelines (if case you would like to configure your own emulator manually), see ReadMe.txt.

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DOWNLOAD

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I'm so trying this later on (busy right now), I'll give feedback tomorrow. Nice feature; this is unique feature, yes?

 

Mode 1 isn't a unique feature. The last (and only other) hack that comes to mind that uses it is S1M1, and it was a piss-poor version of what has been done in this hack. The Mode 1 code has been completely rewritten and stabilized to be worlds better than the original iteration used in S1M1, so it's unique in that it's the first hack to use the much-improved version of the code. Mode 1 itself is, however, not a unique feature. If you have the right friends, Mode 1 is obtainable.

 

That scaling effect on the splash screen is pretty sweet. Is it rendered in realtime?

 

The scaling/rotating square on the SSRG screen is rendered in realtime, yes.

If you meant Sonic Winter Adventures logo, it's actually a combination of realtime rendering along with some pre-rendered data. I'm saying data here for a good reason, because no tiles are actually drawn as the image updated. I have a bank of 256 pre-rendered 8-pixel lines preloaded in VRAM, I'm rendering the image by managing those with the help of VDP tricks. The pre-rendered data I've mentioned represents horizontally stretched logo frames, whereas the vertical stretching is done on the fly, using software tricks as well. The image is stretched right according to scaling on the X-axis, forming a correct frame, respectively stretched on both axis.