Now it remembers the last level you completed, and starts at that level next time. If you downloaded this already, you'll have to delete the SRAM file, or change the first 8 bytes to 0. Also, you can now simply press Start at the NO WAY screen instead of holding A+B+C (that still works though).
Why not remove the No Way screen entirely or at least auto press ABC to skip it? I never saw the point of this screen in any way, not even in being funny.
Well... it still works as a title screen of sorts. Perhaps he could import the "PRESS START BUTTON" from one of the other games, so it makes a bit more sense?
Sonic & Knuckles Collection automatically skips that screen after half a second, but I have some plans involving it... Edit: Also, yeah, adding "PRESS START BUTTON" would be a good idea.
I wasn't sure you actually would. I didn't actually play the hack so I just used info found in this thread.
Update: Hold A while pressing Start at the first screen, and you will play through all 16 of Sonic 3 & Knuckles' Special Stages in order. Saving is disabled while this mode is active, and the game will reset upon completion of the last stage. Edit: Fixed the ninth stage in S3K mode, A button no longer changes characters.
If you are referring to the eighth special stage in Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, those are included.
There are only 128,016,000 distinct stages. After stage 128,016,000, previous stages repeat even though the stage number continues to advance all the way through the last official stage (134,217,728). Personally, I won't play to that stage... I doubt anyone else would. But I guess it would make sense to remove the repeated stages since it might downsize the ROM (I'm assuming). Since the stages are repeats, then they are pretty pointless IMO. Just making a suggestion though.
The stages in Blue Sphere consist of a set of layouts defining 1/4 of the stage, which are then combined in various ways to make the full map. Removing "repeat" stages would not reduce the size of the map data, and besides that, quite a bit of the filesize is padding for the sound driver, so the rom size remains constant no matter how much data I remove.
Update: Can Lock-On to other ROMs, including the Sonic games that would normally enable special modes when locked-on to Sonic & Knuckles. (S1, S2, S3) Edit: Fixed palette on S&K stages.
Heres another suggestion. Since you're thinking about importing or adding in "Press Start Button" text at the NO WAY! Start Screen, you could make a small selection menu after the NO WAY! screen. That way instead of having to hold specific buttons to start the S3&K Stages or the Blue Sphere ROM Stages, you have an easy up-down/start button menu to select the between the two modes you want to play: [Stage Menu] Blue Sphere Sonic 3 & Knuckles
Knucklez: One problem with that is that the font doesn't have all the letters, and I'm not sure where I could put them. If I added tiles to the end I'd probably have to move all the other art, and change the tile indexes for all the objects that use art loaded after it. The other problem is that I'd have to figure out how to make a menu. As for MathUser's suggestion, no.
Now it is possible to load custom levels: drag-and-drop a collection of map files onto this program (or type in the names manually), then append the resulting file to Blue Sphere.bin in the same way you would lock-on a rom to S&K. For windows, this is usually done with 'copy /b "Blue Sphere.bin"+maps.bin "Blue Sphere Custom Maps.bin"'. If you're interested in the technical details: 16 byte header, starting with "BSMAP", a zero byte, followed by a longword (4 byte) number of levels - 1. The rest is padding, followed by the maps in the regular format with no space between them. Although the number of levels is stored as a longword, you can only have 65535 (?) levels. But you'll run out of space before then.
This screen is skipped if you have a ROM or map file locked-on. There's a small bug in this version: you can see the code for a level in a locked-on ROM without having to complete it first.
Haha! Damn you're good. Glad my suggestion actually came into play. Not to be picky, but you should fix the size of the "SO" or the "NIC 3K" in 'SONIC 3K' to match the other letters on the menu. Otherwise, great job and thanks for the modification. Much respect.