Sonic 3K Save Editor 0.6

You can even select Blue Knuckles? Now this makes the whole thing a lot more interesting. I'm honestly looking forward to this. =)

 

Lookin' pretty spiff, there, Xeey. I haven't installed my Sonic and Knuckles PC copy in ages.

 

wat?!

I've never seem that Flying Battery Zone icon. Also note that it shows when editing Sonic 3, and is remarked as ZONE 5. It is further evidence that Flying Baterry was indeed supposed to come after Carnival Night Zone and before Ice Cap Zone (and that the wicket at the end of Flying Battery Zone ACT 2 is what Sonic uses as a snowboard ).

 

This has been known for a while. I still wish they'd done it that way, though. I think we've also had theories to suggest that Flying Battery Zone originally had a dark palette in Act 1, to comply with time progression. (I.e. MGZ is late afternoon, sun sets towards the end, CNZ is night, FBZ would be early morning, ICZ is morning with sun rising in Act 2, etc.)

 

This makes me wish someone would get a hack of Sonic 3 going to put Flying Battery back in like that.

 

I seem to recall Tiddles (Sonic 3 Complete) and/or Hayate (Sonic 3 Customizable) floating that possibility, at least at one point.

 

They both have the icon back in place already, but it's still for Zone 8.
This is definitely a planned feature for Customizable. I don't have any plans to put it in Complete yet, but I haven't ruled it out.

I had a go with the beta editor. It looks quite nice, but I had an issue - using a completed file I'd created with another editor in the past, the zone was presented as CLEAR but with a blank icon, and no apparent effect if I moved left or right on it. I couldn't edit the S3K emeralds either - I guess this isn't implemented yet? Editing the S3 ones worked fine and it's quite easy to fill up by pressing left, but editing a semi-complete game to have all the emeralds could take quite a bit of pressing left or right from the incomplete state! Maybe there could be a shortcut to completely empty/fill the emerald slots?

I don't know if there could be an option for a double-size window, too - it's quite hard for me to read in its original size.

I'll probably be able to provide more feedback once you finish Mega Drive SRAM editing functionality, because it could actually be quite useful for me for testing purposes - I don't use S&KC much so I only had a quick play around to get an idea. Keep up the good work!

 

Also further support of this lies in the colors of the special stages. The 5th special stages uses a flying battery color theme, while the 4th uses a Carnival Night theme and the 6th uses and Ice Cap theme

 

I remember an old save editor I had that also allowed selecting Flying Battery in Sonic 3.

What's funny is after beating the (fully-functional[!]) stage, it continued right on into Sandopolis, still using the Sonic 3 titlecard and music. Eventually, you played through the entire Sonic 3 & Knuckles game like it was always intended.

 

Certainly. FWIW, the S3K slots in this work fine in game, but the S3 ones don't properly recognise that all the emeralds have been collected - giant rings still lead to special stages for some reason. If your editor can sort that out correctly it would be a bonus - I haven't tried actually playing a game edited with it yet so I don't know.

I feel your pain there. This is exactly why an editor would be helpful.
I've taken to picking at savestates and forcing it to resave to SRAM when I need to edit something. I don't know if that might be a useful way to go about figuring out the checksum routine.

This is because S&KC Sonic 3 is a "hack" of sorts built on top of its version of S3&K. The leftover Flying Battery entry from the save screen will happily take you into the final Flying Battery because it's still present in the master game (and always retained its intended Sonic 3 zone ID even though it never ended up being played in that order), you just never get there in S3 mode. And because you should never get into the S&K half of the game, there's no special code to stop you going further once you do break in. The same principle applies to hacked saves using Knuckles in S&KC S3 - Knuckles works fine, but he'll still be visiting the Sonic 3 versions of the level layouts, which are mostly uncompletable along his routes.

It's just as possible to create an FBZ save in regular Sonic 3, in which case you'll get a title card for it and nothing more, since it's fairly comprehensively removed from the final game. Likewise a Knuckles game will mostly send you around as Sonic with some signpost and results screen references to Knuckles.

 

Sorry if I'm asking a stupid question but why does Knuckles turn blue? Can we also edit character pallets or something?

 

Because the game doesn't know to load his correct pallet?
If you wanted to edit the pallets, you'd have to edit them in the ROM, not using a save file.

 

I assume you're referring to the "Blue Knuckles" that shows up as an option in the save editor and can be save edited or game genied into the game. This is an artifact of selecting a character ID that is meaningless to the game, resulting in the game falling into a state of complete confusion and giving you Knuckles' character object with Sonic's palette (to start with at least) and Tails' name on the victory screen, along with a general heap of broken.

 

And if I remember correctly, you'd have to restart because knuckles wouldn't be able to die after words.

 

^ That's because Blue Knuckles attempts to go to Knuckles' area in AI1, but since the game thinks you are playing as Sonic it loads Sonic's level boundaries and you die instantly.