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1993 "Sonic" game on Sharp X68k

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by doc eggfan, Oct 28, 2015.

  1. doc eggfan

    doc eggfan

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    Sonic clone on Sharp X68000, circa 1993, part 1
    Sonic clone on Sharp X68000, circa 1993, part 2

    Thanks to Ash the Dragon for retweeting this blog post from 2014. Based on the responses in the Supreme topic of other knowledge, this seems to have remained buried for the last 20 years. The art style seems to pre-empt future retro classic sonic and I like it. I'd like to see the assets ripped from the game but using my advanced google fu (ie simply searching for 'hedgehog' in a X68k rom set) I have yet to find a rom dump/disk image of this game/demo. Do I sense a community project looming to track this down?
     
  2. Wow, nice find Ash & Doc!

    Really diggin that fake 3D plastic sheen. I doubt I'd be able to help out with that so I'll leave it to the pros!

    Looking forward to seeing more...
     
  3. 360

    360

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    Amazing find! Two decades later and we're still discovering games from Sonic's legacy. This is a precious gem of a find. I rushed to Google (pretty much mirroring what you tried) and failed to find a rom image hosted on the sites that I searched. It looks like this particular rom isn't widely available at the rom sites as say a Genesis rom would be. I tried on one particular site that had over 3K rom images and both "Sonic" and "Hedgehog" were not among the results. Searching more specifically for the rom on Google turned up zero results too. It looks like this might take more effort than searching for the rom image. So where would we begin?

    EDIT: Searching around a little more I think we may not have the correct name. "Sonic the Hedgehog" for the Sharp x68k brings up zero results anywhere. I tried the developer name "Sakai" but that company must have evaporated in to oblivion or something as there's no record of them either.

    Something tells me this might be hard to track down. Then again this is Sonic Retro. We can pretty much find anything.
     
  4. Kyuu

    Kyuu

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    I realize that this is kinda stating the obvious, but maybe we'd get more results by "translating" the Japanese (I assume it's Japanese, correct me if I'm wrong) part of the title into Romaji and running that through Google, or a x68k romset? I'd try it myself, but my ability when it comes to translating Japanese is pretty much just Google Translate.
     
  5. Hivebrain

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    The text is "????? Hedgehog", which doesn't yield much on Google besides the pages already mentioned.
     
  6. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    I had a dig yesterday or the day before, and came up with nothing.

    Do not underestimate how badly Japanese computers are documented and/or preserved, especially when it comes to non-commercial fangames from 20+ years ago. This bloke is the only lead we're likely going to get, unless you can find someone who can trawl through the Japanese side of the internet*

    *Google translate won't do - you have to find the semi-underground X68000 communities of old.


    That being said, it was similarly difficult to find that Amiga Sonic demo until the realisation was made that it was on the fourth disk in a set of demoscene stuff. But that one ended up being kinda crap - this one looks less so.
     
  7. ashthedragon

    ashthedragon

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    About Sonic at Amiga...I don't know if it is well known or not, but at related videos from that Amiga Sonic demo is this one who looks a bit better
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-XtWcmJl04

    About the Sharp x68k, I didn't knew this was unknown! Only say it around twitter and retwitted it because it looked interesting.
     
  8. BSonirachi

    BSonirachi

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    So apparently, a PS1 port of this game exists that was made with Net Yaroze, and I found it in a homebrew Net Yaroze collection that I found a year ago. The ISO of it no longer exists on the site I found it on, but I still have the ISO on my computer for over a year. For Sonic game preservation's sake, I've extracted the game from the ISO and putting it up here:

    http://files.holenet.info/MINIC.EXE
    This is a PlayStation executable, so you have to boot this in ePSXe or whatever PS1 emulator you prefer to use.

    There are differences in this version compared to the X68k version in the blog post, as Sonic is recoloured red, and the title screen is crudely drawn with a copyright date listing both 1993 and 1997, but everything else should be the same.
     
  9. Techokami

    Techokami

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    Been poking around in here, found two sets of palette data: one at 0x0F087C containing the red Sonic palette, and one at 0x0F8A9C containing the blue Sonic palette!
     
  10. Lanzer

    Lanzer

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    So crude port and all, we found it then?
     
  11. Techokami

    Techokami

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    Pretty much. However, it's not really a "crude" port as it was done by the original author.
     
  12. BSonirachi

    BSonirachi

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    It's the best we have for now until the X68k original is found.
     
  13. Tanks

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    For what it is... Its actually surprisingly decent. o_O It certainly puts SonYc to shame at least. If the author fleshed it out some more I'd say it would have made for a pretty viable fan game.

    Have we figured out what to call it yet? Hivebrain did the heavy lifting up there. Surely we have a weeaboo here with some basics in kanji. :V

    EDIT: Haha... We COULD just stick with "Minic." Its catchy at least.
     
  14. BSonirachi

    BSonirachi

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    I think Minic the Hedgehog is the best name to give it, since that's what the collection calls it:

    [​IMG]
     
  15. ashthedragon

    ashthedragon

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    Nice find!! I think the original title screen and pallete for Sonic suits the game much better than the red recolor, but the game itself has surprised me, is quite more complex than what I thought it was going to be from the pictures, although phisics are too sloppy. A nice homebrew.

    I recorded a video of if, if you want to take a look.

     

  16. Ha, awesome! Still better physics than EP1 :v:
     
  17. Zycor

    Zycor

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    Beats me.
    As for the name of the game, while Minic the Hedgehog certainly works...

    The title roughly translates to "Go to see Hedgehog" or "Go to see a Hedgehog".

    For example if you said ??????? it is roughly "Go to see a movie"

    So basically... I have no idea. :\ My guess would be "see about getting Sonic to work on this machine" due to the homebrew nature?

    It's not complicated, certainly. It's a grammar pattern you learn in the first year. It's just kind of bland.

    Oh, and ?! is just an assertive ending basically used by men who think they're the shit (or just normal people if you don't want to believe your professors who lie to you constantly)
     
  18. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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  19. Tanks

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    Minic the Hedgehog it is then. We've got our Wiki entry name. :P