Is there any way for me (or us) to convince you to write them down soon, please? Do you have any cheat to disable all camera locks?
Nothing that exciting, though I have some PAR codes for that somewhere (which are now awkward to use with debug mode since I fixed - apparently not particularly well - the ability to go beyond the screen lock in debug). I was probably referring to the ending shortcuts: C+Start on 26 to see the S3 credits, C+Start on DC to see the S&K/S3C ending (if you're Knuckles it just starts his Sky Sanctuary since I never got around to developing a skip straight to his ending). What other undocumented things? You can do both the title screen cheats on the game menu if the cursor is on Options. You can also press B+C on the game menu to clear the options SRAM (won't affect save games) - useful if you want to netplay since different settings might desync you - use that shortcut before you start or join. If they were more interesting I would have documented them. You've already seen how much irrelevant rubbish does make it into the changelog, after all.
It may just be me, but I think all this stuff is interesting. So thanks for all those details I you have this codes, I would really appreciate them What exactly did you try to fix? (can you move past the screen lock in S3&K in debug mode?)
Yeah, you can move the debug cursor out of bounds in S3K. The camera stays locked, but the player position keeps moving. You can cause a few glitches this way, especially in a level where you can wrap it back around to zero again. It's fixed in Sonic 3 Complete since 110706, but since that fix, using the screen unlock PAR codes causes horrible things to happen while moving around in debug mode. Anyway, these are the codes I use. They don't block every possible kind of screen locking, but they work for most of the game. FFFFEE14:0000 FFFFEE16:7EC0 FFFFEE18:0000 FFFFEE12:0F20 These are valid for Complete, S&K and S3&K. I haven't tried them with original Sonic 3 or the 3C betas.
Thanks for theses codes. It is fun to fight some bosses (Knuckles, Metal Sonic) outside of their areas, or just run past the bosses of Angel Island Act 1 I lowered the value of FFFFEE16:7EC0 to 7E00, otherwise as soon as you press right in debug mode the cursor is set to the right most coordinate. Is 7EC0 a magic value, or why is it problematic? p.s.: I chose 7E00 arbitrarily, because lowering to 7E2F was not enough. The codes seem to work in a European Sonic 3 alone
7E00 is fine, it's just an arbitrarily high number less than 8000. If it avoids the cursor issue, so much the better. I don't know exactly why that was a problem - I never investigated it. The LRZ boss is a fun place to use it, but make sure you let the boss appear before enabling the codes - it won't happen until the screen locks correctly.
Hey Tiddles, I ran into a bug with S3C that actually exists in the original game. In AIZ Act 2 as Knuckles, spindash into the spring that sends you to the boss. If executed correctly, you'll somehow be crushed by the rocks ahead. This fix, if you could share it, would make a great addition to the SCHG, and we could start work on building the S3 section of the SCHG wiki, like we were talking about before. (Sorry, about not getting back to you about that BTW I didnt forget, just haven't had time.) If you need, I'll provide a screenshot... and no its not an emulator issue... I've done it on the old console before many times. I also have managed to capture a savestate of the bug just before it happens... that could be more help. That is, assuming you don't know about the bug, which I'm sure you do. Also, I found that climbing upwards into a vertical spring sends Knuckles down in his climbing animation. Playing HCZ Act 1 is a good place to test this and see.
I'll keep those in mind to look at in the future, but I am not working on new bugfixes (or indeed new anything) at the moment, so if you want some fix documentation any time soon, it would be much better to start with things I've already done, and I'll try to tease out how I did them.
I've been wondering as of late how hard it'd be to extract or create a 'fixed' Sonic 3 ROM from this project? I've been playing Sonic 3 alone lately and it made me wonder.
The easiest thing to do is make a copy of the ROM, go into the Options menu, and select Sonic 3 Part One as the startup game. Then you effectively have that - it goes straight into Sonic 3 Part One and you can ignore the front menu and extra stuff. I'm sure it'd be possible to build a ROM with all the S&K-only bits removed, but you'd just end up with a smaller version of the same thing - the original flavour Sonic 3 in Sonic 3 Complete is a backport over the top of S&K code, rather than an attempt to fix up the original as it was, so it's not as if there's a whole discrete ROM to cleave off like the original.
I thought about this myself and I thought that maybe all but one mode could be disabled (I actually got this idea when I saw edited roms of Sonic Classics that only load one specific game).
The main benefit from that to my perspective would be that you might be able to shrink the ROM to under 3 MB if it was done right, I'd imagine, making it playable on, say, jenesisDS, since it has that size limit.
Good idea! The only 'issue' I see with that is I can't port my Sonic 3 SRAM file over, but that doesn't mean I can't marathon the game! But the fixes from S&K and the ones you've done are applied to Sonic 3 Part One, right? But yeah, seeing either a program that can 'fix' various bugs in Sonic 3 or someone creating a fixed Sonic 3 project would be very interesting to see indeed. :D
You can bring your Sonic 3 SRAM file to the party. Just copy that in first, then make your menu selection to always load S3 (and any other tweaks you want), and all your S3 saves should be present. You can take the SRAM file back to original S3, too: the saves should be 100% compatible (it'll just ignore the menu data at the end).
So, I recall this statement, and that's all well and good... but I stumbled upon something interesting... A series of videos showing bugs I've never seen before. Here is a link to Sky Sanc. Zone bugs/glitches - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06kF024U8EM&feature=g-vrec If you haven't fixed them already, this would be a nice thing to look into when coming back. BTW your new avatar is awesome.
Indeed, and as with S3&K, it will import regular S3 saves if you don't have any S3&K ones. It can do the reverse if you have S3&K saves but no S3 ones too. (You have to start one of the imported save files to commit the imported saves to SRAM). The saves will remain compatible with the original games in all cases.
About the super/hyper music: If you won't allow us to disable super music, what about these 2 variants: 1) when you turn super a jingle is played (for example the not currently used 1up or invincible track) once, and than the current act's music restarts. 2) when you turn super in act1 the music of act2 is played, and vice versa. IMHO that would be really cool on Angel Island or Flying Battery where the music has a kick-ass tart, but of course it would be really boring on Carnival Night, and of course a solution would be needed for Sky Sanctuary. Wait, are you saying the original S3 game imported S3K saves, if no S3 saves were present? I knew it worked the other way round, but that is news to me. So S3 knows about the S3K save format (with lives & continues)? Or are the S3K saves arranged in a way, that is compatible to S3, and additional infos are appended? How much more free space do you have in SRAM?
