QUOTE (Hayate)

The Lava Reef boss should just restore LRZ2 music when you beat it anyway. The other two are like that because there's no capsule to open.
Indeed, that's what I've done with LRZ in this version. In Launch Base I have a special case of the act complete screen that plays no music of its own to retain the ominous final boss music in the background.
QUOTE (Hayate)

Hold A, press C would do the job much better then. If you change the debug mode's gravity flip feature to be triggered when A is released and check that you didn't press C while it was pressed, that would avoid conflicts.
That's more or less how it works here, except with C and B in place of A and C in your example. B's debug function is suppressed as long as C is held down. As I was saying, I might have a look at making (A or C) plus B work, but I'd probably leave A doing its normal thing in debug, since it's already pretty much off limits in the original version. C+B feels fairly reasonable on my MD pads, but then I do have big thumbs.
QUOTE (nineko)

While I like the Super Sonic music from S&K, I wish there was a way to transform back to normal Sonic, if anything to save your rings.
FWIW, this version lets you do that via the same method as invoking the transformation. I was uneasy about adding that because it feels a bit too easy to abuse somehow... but it's useful for testing at least, so I kept it in. Another idea I have to thank Megamix for.
QUOTE (SOTI)

I love how you changed the level select background to Sonic 3's data select background.

I always wanted to try it, and I'm quite pleased with how it ended up, with a little palette darkening for contrast. The iterations of how that looked along the way tell a sad tale of stumbling around in the dark:

QUOTE (SOTI)

I wouldn't mind looking at this data you're offering though.
I doubt I have much interesting data to share in itself. I'm happy to give the copy of Stealth's disassembly with my changes in it out on individual request, but I'd rather not turn it out in the public domain - it's the first assembly "thing" I've ever done, and combined with the oddities of that disassembly, some of the code is a bit of a mess - I've relied an awful lot on replacing instructions with a jsr or jmp out to a blank bit of ROM to do some alternative calculations for one thing. So I'd rather not put it out as an example that the naive might try to learn technique from, but in terms of using the knowledge for other hacks, or building your own copy with different music switched (for example), I've no objection to either.
Here are some bits and pieces of trivia I found anyway, some of which may be new:
- Here's something I found while copying the final LBZ2 boss's intro routines back over from Sonic 3. Fire up Sonic 3 alone, and use an emulator cheat facility to force FFFA80 to 0101. This makes a few bosses behave like Knuckles' versions: the AIZ1 boss chucks bombs, the HCZ2 boss doesn't fly down for the tornado, and the LBZ2 laser boss runs a very broken version of Knuckles' post-LBZ2 bomb cutscene when you kill it. It appears to carry the garbage that should be the bomb right out of the laser machine carcass, which is quite neat - shame that didn't make it. It also suggests that Knuckles wasn't meant to fight the arm boss at this point.
- The Knuckles vs. Eggman glitch in Mushroom Hill seems to result from the Kosinski decompression queue getting overloaded if you reach the boss too soon after entering the level, presumably due to level art still loading. The EggRobo face is normally patched over the top of the correct section of the Eggman+Eggmobile graphic, but it may be partially or completely unloaded if you go too fast here. EggRobo has a different animation speed and slightly different mappings, and you can see Eggman's 'tache bobs too slowly if this happens, as if it were EggRobo's head. His damaged and killed graphics are also misplaced due to the different mappings. All I did to "fix" this was give Knuckles a different PLC at this point that loads a Nemesis-compressed copy of the EggRobo face as its last item, so it doesn't matter if the Kosinski decompression comes off or not.
- As I mentioned in my first post, DAC samples B2 and B3 use a different sample between the games. This is the clap sound in the miniboss and Knuckles themes in Sonic 3, and Knuckles theme in Sonic & Knuckles. It's apparently not used in any other music, so flies completely under the radar.
- The S3C 0517 credits are clearly longer than the S&K final ones, and don't end up lining up in the same way with the ending visuals. However, they still end up lining up pretty well in their own right somehow, with the music finishing just in time to fade to the Sonic 3 logo (or the appropriate ominous scene of failure), removing the long silence from the end of the S&K version. I'm almost tempted to think the ending timing was designed to work with both, in spite of the longer credits having apparently disappeared before the ending scenes were constructed in the betas.