Sega Ages: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - Out Now on Switch

https://segaretro.org/Virtual_Console#Wii_U_2

 

Yep, this is pretty much what we expected. I'd argue this is worse (or at least no better) than the Sonic 1 release.

Anyway, GameXplain did a playthrough:

 

I mean it's not unaltered, but what the hell happened to 'we're gonna add things the original planned to have?' NOTHING they added was intended for the original game. Did they predict Knuckles? The Drop Dash? At least most people expected to be able to fly as Tails, why isn't that in there?

I am surprised there's ZERO optimisation for split screen either. That seemed like something up their alley with how they tweak the emulation. I mean, even MEGA COLLECTION tuned it a little.

 

brb, getting a pair of ROM splitters to get M2 Sonic & Knuckles

 

I mean this whole thing is just shittily reinventing the wheel. Like add to the taxman port, at this point there's no good reason to use the original ROM.

 

I doubt M2 fixed the Super Sonic bug. They probably just used the later revision that had the bug fixed anyway.

It’s too bad they couldn’t have included all the different revisions of Sonic 2. Mega collection did this for Sonic 1 and it was neat (SMC+ did have different versions of Sonic 2 on the disc but there was no way to access them in game).

 

Well the game offers the international and Japanese releases of the game... but idk wtf that means in this case.

 

Have we ever found a standalone rev 02 ROM? I wonder if they used that as a base here, and if so maybe we could extract it.

 

any idea why this is not on the US eshop? It's not even on the coming soon list.

Missed marketing opportunity to tie in with the movie.

 

Because it (and Puyo Puyo Tsu) comes out on the 20th.

 

Well shut my mouth. Japan only though, which is silly.

 

I think you can play them on an English system if you set the language to Japanese. Don't quote me on that though.

 

Of course it's a 1:1 match, the ROM contents of the original cartridge aren't going to change depending on who releases it...

 

Except you didn't read the article. The online ROMs are modified inorder to run on emulators. They contain a special header added to help the emulator identify the different memory banks.

 

Dumps of the same cartridge will obviously need the header configured the same way to work...

 

They are using the iNES format and require the right header to be described for Mario to run in an emulator (Because they are using the ines format), so why would the header be different?

If they do a 1:1 dump of their own cartridge and use the same ines format, it'll still look 1:1 with roms online because if Nintendo and pirates online did a good dump in the same format, it'll be identical. You're assuming that if they did their own dump in ines they would for some reason use a different header that doesn't match their chips?

Basically it looks identical when they use the same format that was invented by Marat. Weather or not it was downloaded online or they dumped it in the same way, we can't tell.

EDIT: Ah beaten because i'm rambling a bit, oh well haha

 

Also, Nintendo has released stuff like Famicom Disk System images which couldn't be found untampered on the internet, so it's known that they do keep their own archive of old releases.

 

But according to the guy who said that, the iNES format is quite flexible, for example, you can produce different dumps by leaving the padding on the ending of each bank or not, or even include make changes to the headers themselves depending on which dumping device you use to encode the ROMs. It's hard to obtain a 1:1 copy because the ROM has to be modified inorder to be iNES compliant.

 

It's hard but it can be done. The rom we have dumped isn't padded or anything, the mario1 rom is dumped pretty perfectly at this point. What makes you think Nintendo can't make a perfect dump themselves? They probably have each bank archived already and just moved it into the ines format a long time ago.

 

...No it's not. Just yellow press stuff, really.