[Icewarrior]

Huh guys, quick question: what's this "NO KNUCKLES STOP TURNING HYPER" thing you're talking about?
I don't remember anything particular about Hyper Knuckles...

If you had all the emeralds with knuckles and had 50 rings, any attempt to glide or wall climb would result in super/hyper knuckles

Ah yes. The problem is the same for Tails too I guess.

[Sonic Warrior TJ]

Huh guys, quick question: what's this "NO KNUCKLES STOP TURNING HYPER" thing you're talking about?
I don't remember anything particular about Hyper Knuckles...

If you had all the emeralds with knuckles and had 50 rings, any attempt to glide or wall climb would result in super/hyper knuckles

Ah yes. The problem is the same for Tails too I guess.

Am I the only one who enjoys using the Insta-Shield or what?

[Spanner]

I love how you changed the level select background to Sonic 3's data select background.
I wouldn't mind looking at this data you're offering though.

[Hayate]

I did add it back in a couple of places where no fade sounded especially wrong - specifically where we go straight from boss music to victory music. That used to be Launch Base, Lava Reef and Sky Sanctuary, but now Sky Sanctuary is the only one left that works that way.

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.

Triple jump is an elegant idea for Sonic, but Tails relies on that anyway for flight

I have to admit I never thought of that. 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.

[ICEknight]

You know, I think this is the first time I don't keep wanting to un-become Super Sonic due to the ear-piercing music. Now it feels more like a true reward.

[Vague Rant]

You know, I think this is the first time I don't keep wanting to un-become Super Sonic due to the ear-piercing music. Now it feels more like a true reward.

While it's not really necessary now that you're already playing with this hack, there's a set of Game Genie codes to disable Super/Hyper music on the wiki's S&K Cheat Codes page. I honestly haven't tried it yet because it's so much crap to copy, paste, and enable, but if you hate them enough it might be worth it.

[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.

[Tiddles]

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

[Hayate]

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.

Wait, you put the final boss music in LBZ? That's not right - Sonic 3 only had it there because they had to cut the game in half and chuck a final boss in.

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.

Exactly - the "arm boss" as you call it was probably never planned to even exist, but SEGA threw it in at the last minute. So when they continued with the full game, they decided "Well, we made this boss now, we might as well use it!"

...Though, it's a bit inconsistent considering Knuckles skips the CNZ and LRZ bosses for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

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.

I use the keyboard, so holding A and pressing C feels a lot more natural than any other combination.

[Covarr]

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.

Cheat yourself into all the chaos and super emeralds, and it becomes rather similar to Unleashed's boost. Quite abusable, but since there's more platforming in this game (such as parts of Flying Battery Zone underneath the airship), there's actually a good reason to want to not just have it on ALL THE TIME. Of course, since you can't use it under 50 rings, it's not TOO easy to abuse.

With this mod, I've noticed some glitches that I never saw before, mostly with music. For example, if you're hyper and the music is fast, you get a 1up, then transform back to regular while the 1up music is still playing, then when the level music continues it's still fast. Hell, there's more than a few issues with Hyper Sonic/1up music.

[Tiddles]

Wait, you put the final boss music in LBZ? That's not right - Sonic 3 only had it there because they had to cut the game in half and chuck a final boss in.

I built this to be the version I'd always wished I'd had, and I was always disappointed by the omission of that fight and everything that went with it. Launch Base felt quite flat without it to me. It's almost certainly not right in the context of what would have happened in a single Sonic 3, since it's pulled out of S3K, but I'm glad to have it back as a mid-game superboss.

With this mod, I've noticed some glitches that I never saw before, mostly with music. For example, if you're hyper and the music is fast, you get a 1up, then transform back to regular while the 1up music is still playing, then when the level music continues it's still fast. Hell, there's more than a few issues with Hyper Sonic/1up music.

Yeah, in general, if any change of music pace occurs during the 1up sound, it'll affect the 1up sound rather than the music behind it. This has always happened if you gain or lose speed shoes while 1up music is playing, but that's much less likely to happen in normal gameplay. It never happened with transformations before because the music track was changed, and the sound code takes care of arranging that properly in a way it doesn't for tempo adjustments. It's quite an annoying bug, and not trivial to work around. I have an idea how I might do it but I don't know when I'll get around to trying it.

Another weird one you might spot in debug is that if you hit a hyper monitor if you're already super or hyper, the level music restarts. That shouldn't be too hard to fix, but I've yet to do anything with it because it's a debug-only condition.

I'd be eager to hear of any other odd bugs you've found in this version - at the very least I can add them to the list of things I'd like to do with it.

[ICEknight]

Wait, you put the final boss music in LBZ? That's not right - Sonic 3 only had it there because they had to cut the game in half and chuck a final boss in.

I built this to be the version I'd always wished I'd had, and I was always disappointed by the omission of that fight and everything that went with it. Launch Base felt quite flat without it to me. It's almost certainly not right in the context of what would have happened in a single Sonic 3, since it's pulled out of S3K, but I'm glad to have it back as a mid-game superboss.

I must agree with this. Having a mid-game boss is not something too out of place, with all the mid-level bosses Sonic 3 added to the mix. It certainly didn't feel as epic as a true final boss, but it was a shame to remove it from Sonic's adventure.


The last split second of Sonic, Tails and the Death Egg falling down the screen still looks as bad as it did in S3&K, though. I would have tried to fix that by fading the screen a bit earlier... if I knew how to do it.

This post has been edited by ICEknight: 26 December 2009 - 09:27 PM

[GeneHF]

Hi folks. I joined after seeing this thread and thinking someone might be interested in a similar edit I've been working on for my own purposes.

Get it here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=87YWA614

This replaces the same songs as Hayate's version, but doesn't drop any tracks other than the S&K versions being replaced, and fixes the clap sound in the miniboss and Knuckles themes. (Fun fact - DAC samples B2 and B3 are different in S&K vs. S3. Spent ages working that one out.)

It does a number of other tweaky/fixy things in addition to this, so it's probably not to everyone's taste if you just want those themes back (for one thing, it brings back the main themes from Sonic 3 too, which everyone seems to hate, but at least you don't have to suffer it during Super/Hyper any more.) It also contains the S3C 0517 credits music. So take your pick. There's a full list of changes in this version in the zip file.

If anyone wants the disassembly for any of the stuff in here feel free to contact me, but I make no warranty as to the quality of the code, and none of it is spectacularly innovative or exciting.

EDIT: How rude of me. I forgot to add that I absolutely love being able to fight the S3 Final boss with Sonic again. Fantastic work with that one.

And since I'm putting this into the public domain, allow me to take a moment to credit shobiz, whose code to do the initial music switch stuff got me started on this project (found at http://sonicresearch...p?showtopic=636), and apologies to the Megamix folks for making off with the B+C Super activation concept, which turned out to be just the solution to "NO KNUCKLES STOP TURNING HYPER" I'd wanted since I first played S3K. Plus Wiki contributors everywhere and everyone who worked on Music Pointer Fixer.

It does seem like, generally speaking, most people around the 'net prefer the S&K music versions, but I'm sure someone will care to use this at least - if I've been inspired enough to put it all together I'm sure someone will appreciate the result.

This is pretty nifty! My only problem with it, as it stands, is it uses the really inferior S3 theme and invincibility. Honestly, S3K did them a lot better... especially the invincibility. Would you be opposed to producing a version that uses those two instead, you know, as an option for the people who aren't fond of the older themes?

EDIT: How rude of me, I forgot to add how much I love that you added in the final boss to Sonic and Tails' modes. I didn't like that they removed that from Launch Base too much since I found it to be a good boss in Sonic 3... more so because it was able to knock Super Sonic right out of that state. Fantastic job with that!

[MathUser]

Added Tiddles hack to the wiki: Sonic 3C 091224

[Vague Rant]

If it's not a great deal of them, what might be worth doing is documenting what each section of changes you've made do to the ROM; then using an app like IPSelect, people could pick and choose which changes to apply and have their own custom version which uses their preferred music, allows keeping the boss disabled, etc.