The port is plenty fun and it was nice to see one of the old Blue Sphere special stages in there. One house in GFZ2 even displays a little easter egg message. Not sure how better performance on real hardware is but on Kega Fusion the game eats inputs when too many entities or the Eggman boss are on-screen. It can take nearly a full second of tapping the jump button until Sonic jumps, and Homing Attacks get quite unreliable because of it too. I wonder how even bigger levels will be implemented. Greenflower Zone nearly hits the ceiling limit on the map as it is... I also attempted to run the port on my R36S portable that was trendy on BR last year (it has just 1GB ram so it can't run SRB2 PC very well) but Retroarch only plays 32X via the PicoDrive emulator and it's not compatible.
This port uses proprietary formats for a lot of the data, so direct ports won't be possible. I don't know what SSNTails' plans are in terms of allowing people to make customizations to the game. I don't want to say something on that front that's out of step with the vision here. In terms of button lags, I'd say that's an emulator thing most likely. We regularly use Kega Fusion, and it runs great in that. In fact, turning the "perfect sync" option off makes it run even better! Please consider using that emulator for this game if you have access to a PC. We are eyeing other emulator support, but can't guarantee results across all of them.
Looks like it was reported on Sega-16 that it DOES run on the MegaSD, provided the firmware is up to date.
Amazing work, this kind of stuff is the community at its most interesting! Imagine if this had been a summer 1995 title, it might've blown people's minds.
I watched SSNTails' video on this the other day and was absolutely blown away to see SRB2 on the 32X! I've been dealing with Covid so I haven't had the time to play the demo yet, but damn you guys are amazing!
The new version works ok. I haven't had a chance to get a special stage yet to see how exactly they have got easier though. I can also report the game works fine on a Mega Everdrive Pro but right now I use my own ancient flashcart since it uses much less power and is a bit lighter on the AC brick as a result lol. I was never fluent in QB64 (but in QB45, and FreeBASIC lol). "Back" is a strong word, but I will try to check things every once in a while lol hmm hmmmmm ~
After all these years, I think this is actually my first time playing SRB2 lol cool shit, glad you maniacs are still doing this kind of stuff.
In fairness, I had some eaten inputs on my Model 2 + 32X combo. A few situations where the jump button wouldn't do anything unless I turned away from areas that had a LOT of activity. So I don't think it's emulator only. With that said, please do NOT take this as a dig at what was done here. Because holy shit, this is incredible. I've heard plenty about SRB2 but never played it myself until this 32X port. This is wild and impressive and my hat's off to the whole team for getting this going. I'll need to get v0.1a on, but yeah. Looking forward to seeing what else comes!
Played on my Everdrive x7. Holy cow I felt like a kid again playing this ahaha. I never really could get into SRB2 in the past because the controls on PC are, frankly, a crime against humanity, but playing this on the Genesis controller felt so fluid and natural that if you told me the PC version's controls were created with a Genesis controller and then shoddily mapped to a keyboard I would 100% believe you. Beyond considerable frame drops when too much is drawn on screen at once, the game runs great and I found myself just wanting more. I spent well over an hour ambling around in Greenflower Zone alone and got 4 chaos emeralds out of it, but I was a little disappointed to realize I couldn't save the emeralds and get Super Sonic from a second playthrough (if he's even in SRB2, I don't know). The only real issue I ran into was when I first booted up the game, it froze only 20 seconds into Greenflower act 1. So I tried it again and it froze after a minute or so. On the third try however, nothing went wrong and the game ran totally fine for the rest of the night, so I have no idea what was up. I play on a model 1 Genesis for whatever that may be worth.
It's interesting that it froze like that. Do you have freeze issues with any other games? This is the first I'm hearing of freeze issues with this one. It just makes me wonder if it's something specific to your hardware.
I actually have experienced a freeze or two too, but it is 100% due to finnicky hardware. 32X requires prestinely clean cartslots and the ribbons in 32X that connect two halves together in it are 99% source of all the freezes otherwise. Reseating them will usually get things stable again for a while longer.
Is that the root cause of Chaotix freezing when loading up a level? I used to experience those freezes every so often growing up. And you were lucky if you could play all 16 or 17 of Doom's levels without it freezing. And I guess the less you read from the cartridge, the less likely the freezes are to occur.
No, and I also own Knuckles Chaotix, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing Deluxe, and Star Wars, and this is the first time I can remember ever having a Genesis/32X game freeze while running. And I don't mean a crash with an illegal instruction error or what have you, I mean the music keeps on chugging along but the game just... stops. For whatever it may be worth, I did some more run throughs this morning and didn't have any freezes, so it really may have just been me. I did, however, notice how bad the frame drops are in certain areas, and I wanted to ask some technical questions about the hardware/software and what future plans may look like for the project if that's alright
So the Z80 and 68000 are probably doing just fine in that regard since they're both used in the playback of music (same as Doom CD32X Fusion). So one or both of the SH-2s must have had some kind of error. Maybe we should embed some kind of debugger into the game to help decipher these freezes. And perhaps a checksum at startup to at least make sure everything is connecting okay initially. I love to answer technical questions. Feel free to ask, and if I can answer them, I will.
Now I'm not gonna pretend like I know... uh... anything about how the 32X or SRB2 work under the hood, but from being co-lead on Super Mario Eclipse for 5 years and picking up quite a few fan project odd-jobs here and there, I do have enough experience to see a couple of things that made me raise an eyebrow. Firstly I noticed that quite a few areas in GFZ have been remodeled and redesigned to remove virtually every slope from the game. Can the 32X not handle proper slopes/player angle changes like that? I know SRB2 is the distant spawn of Doom (of which I have never played), so for all I know, Doom 32X can't support it, and that explains that, but I can't help but look at games like Virtua Racing Deluxe or Knuckles Chaotix and see that the hardware itself should be able to handle slopes pretty alright? This is all well and good by itself, I don't need slopes by any stretch of the imagination, but unless there's some technical reason I'm not aware of that informed this decision, I found many a place in the 2 main acts where polygons are being completely wasted on needlessly complex stage geometry that I'd wager is contributing to the abundant lag spikes anytime Sonic is looking at anything other than a wall corner, heh. Lots of areas where something is modeled with 10-15 polygons where I personally would have built it with 2-4, and on hardware as limited as the 32X, I'd think it's imperative to save as many polygons as possible, yeah? This is an especially odd problem to me, considering having slopes in the zone would save considerably on resources all around, and some of the redesign decisions feel arbitrary and wasteful (especially since there are already angled/"curved" walls present, yet many areas are still constructed with jagged right angles that double, if not triple poly count), so I have been vexed thinking about this and am chomping at the bit to know more. In addition to this, I had no idea the 32X could render textured surfaces- it was actually an incredibly pleasant surprise to see! Most 32-bit 3D games I know of (such as the other 32X games I own, along with others like Star Fox and Stunt Race FX) appear to use completely flat-colored polygons with no textures at all (save for Andross in Star Fox), so I genuinely had no idea the 32X could. That does make me wonder though, how much is the hardware strain rendering textured surfaces as opposed to flat-colored? In my honest opinion, this port of SRB2 is at its worst when looking out over a vast, open space, the game crawls to a meager 4-5 fps, and all the textured surfaces in the distance garble together in an unintelligible mess. Again, I have no experience working with this hardware or software, and feel free to publicly shame me if I'm stepping way out of line here, but I feel like this project could get a lot better performance if there were some sort of LOD system in place...? Like, have the game stop rendering textures and switch to flat-color after a certain distance, along with maybe just culling out distant polygons outright? Along with stripping out needless polygons as well, I just personally see a lot of opportunities for optimization, you know? I could be way off base here, but I wanted to ask about this because the 3D level designer in my brain turned the sirens on when I stopped to examine things critically ahaha, and I'd love to either be onto something, or get great info on why these things can't be done
There's also the factor of which particular MD model you have. VA4 and older (without TMSS) need some modifications as outlined in Sega tech bulletins to improve clock integrity reaching the cartslot, which 32X then multiplies into the clocks it uses. It is another source of possible freezes etc. but vast majority of the problems are fixed by reseating the ribbon cables in the 32X... they are the achilles heel in the device and are the primary source of all the instability one may experience.
