Sonic 2 Hack....Split Screens?

Implementing two-player mode in every Zone is actually going to be quite difficult, due to reasons I can't remember.

Someone with more knowledge on how Sonic 2's 2-player mode works can fill in the rest.

 

2 player mode can't handle water.

 

It's possible to a point, I guess. Since it does kinda' work in Wai's Sonic 2 Beta.

But like Phos said the Water Issue would be one of the main problems to get around.

 

A sort of co-op split screen would be kind of cool, but you would have to work around a lot of problems.

 

Does sonic 3 2 player mode support water, because if it did you could just import the 2 player code from sonic 3 into sonic 2.

 

None of Sonic 3's 2 player levels have water, also the game handles two player levels very differently then those of Sonic 2's. Sonic 3 uses it's own 2 player levels. Sonic 2 simply stretches the screen.

 

Sonic Classic will have two player coop, if that interests you at all. Besides that, I'm pretty sure the water issue, and the fact (maybe someones done it now) that no one knows how to compress/decompress the two player level tiles will make this impossible.

 

Nemesis explained to me how 2P mode works once, and you pretty much have to have it planned out when you're drawing the level. Making other Zones work in 2P could be done, but would probably use too much VRAM after you have it all sorted out. Kinda like GHZ in the NA proto.

 

Oh you could support water with some reworking of the code. The issue becomes: can it switch palettes fast enough to keep up with the refresh rate and run the game at normal speed. From what I remember playing with machine code, switching the palette took a good chunk of CPU time.

 

I never did understand what the big deal was with water in 2P. It only requires four palette changes per frame, normal S2 water requires two, and S3&K uses a whole ton of them (at least five or six in some zones) just to show off. If S3&K can do it, why can't S2?

 

Basicly you'd have to change alot of the level art to make them work in 2P, modify most zone's background deformation, and remove alot of spare objects as 2P cant support too many.

As for water in 2P, it does work fine, the code for the water palette would just need to be modified...

 

Maybe there's just something about it I didn't notice before, but how exactly does it use more than two palettes in S3K?...