I've found several working (or at least they used to work back when I could get my copy to start up without crashing *shrug*) no-CD cracks. In particular the resolution-hacked EXEs linked to on the PCGamingWiki should disable the disc checks. Never found a working disc check hack for Sonic Riders though!
Hey, There is an image from the early 90s which had s picture of Sonic with some goofy but inspirational text at the bottom. At first, I thought it was the Dreams Come True tour poster from 1990, but that text is all Kanji. Anyone know what I am talking about?
You could be thinking of most of the japnese box covers for the MD games. http://info.sonicretro.org/images/3/37/Sonic1_box_jap.jpg http://info.sonicretro.org/images/f/f4/Sonic2_box_jap.jpg http://info.sonicretro.org/images/e/e5/Scd-box-jap.jpg http://info.sonicretro.org/images/f/f1/Sk-box-jap.jpg
LOL! Yes, Sonic 1 was what I originally saw. I had no idea they wrte on the other gamEs. These make me laugh and feel inspired at the same time. Thank you!
Lazy Game Reviews reviews Sonic's Schoolhouse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aySRoyUif4g Sonic has balls of steel.
I was playing S3C last night for the first time in ages. Has it ever been discussed that in the fresco it appears that the Robotnik figure is gifting the sonic figure with an emerald with his left hand, and taking it back with the right? The lord giveth and the lord taketh away?
Or not, considering his voice in that game Reading the comments, Muteki points out that the music for one of the bonus minigames is also taken from elsewhere: REGGAE.MID. I honestly never knew that; I knew one of the classroom tracks was from The [Even More] Incredible Machine, but this one's new to me. Also something about requiring SB16 support, which might explain why I can't get the music to work on my Windows 98 machine (I'm trying to use the built-in mobo soundcard, which doesn't entirely seem set up correctly). This game remains utterly bizarre to me.
Well, Sonic 06 was rumoured to get a PC port at one point, but due to how the game panned out, those planned were quickly scrapped, so 2006/2007 would have been another release had it gone well.
Yeah, it's like the exact opposite of future proofing. For background music playback, there's a configuration file that's hiding in the install directory that lists basically every sound card that was available to use at the time; if your sound card isn't in the list, the music errors out and doesn't play. I've been able to get music working in a virtual machine using the Windows Virtual PC (or Microsoft Virtual PC, whichever's the more recent one). It seems like there's a sounblaster setting available on VirtualBox so that might work too, but trying to run any Windows before XP on that thing is a hassle -- which is why I went with Virtual PC instead, since I had a 98 setup handy. Also, when I was trying to get the game working, this happened: [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dHoYe-3fy0[/media] As with the scenes in that review, the game is pretty trollish.
Hmm, would compatibles count for anything? The motherboard of my Win98 machine doesn't have any ISA slots for me to pick up an actual Sound Blaster 16 or Pro or whatever, so as far as PCI sound cards go I was thinking of picking up an Avance Logic ALS4000 instead (because the ALS4000's 4-OP FM is better than a SB Live!'s - and presumably its OPL2 is far better than the SBLive!'s, because holy shit is that bad).
This discussion reminded me that I had Windows 3.1 set up in DOSBox with SoundBlaster support. Lo and behold, Schoolhouse seems to work, sound and all:
Anyone notice how the Simon Wai beta has S1 REV01's checksum, yet Beta 4 has S1 REV00's? Because of the incorrect checksum, the branch that leads to a red-screen is nop'd out. Having looked at an S2F pirate lately, and how it skips the Sega screen while avoiding the red-screen, I noticed just how different how the implementation is compared to S2B. The checksum was a change by the actual developers, and replaced the instruction with a pair of 'nop's, while the S2F pirate just changes the branch's condition; S2B set the screenmode to title screen at boot, while the S2F pirate changes the 'bra.w SegaScreen' to a 'bra.s ptr_GM_Title', which works much better. The S2F pirate was also able to blank out the title screen copyright. It makes me wonder, was S2B actually modified by pirates? Being a demonstration cart, is there any sense in cutting straight to the action, instead of waiting through all those splashes? Or perhaps S2B's pirates were just not as good as S2F's.
I've long felt that the Wai beta's SEGA screen handling was not the work of pirates, just without evidence to back me up. In-development builds were not, in and of themselves, subject to SEGA's requirements, especially not first-party titles. The requirements were only necessary for SEGA to actually approve the final ROM for RTM, so as long as they were met by that time, devs were good to go. Nobody's ever had anything more conclusive than "final pirates also remove copyrights" to support it being the work of pirates. If it were the work of pirates, wouldn't the title screen copyright have been removed as well, as it was for both S1 and S2? It's not like nobody outside of SEGA (and licensed devs) knew how the hardware worked, even at the time.
I found some chinese knock off selling The S Factor at a phisical release. That should be fairly "normal", but what I found funny is that they call the game "Sonic Retro", not "The S Factor". :v: http://es.aliexpress.com/item/Sega-16bit-MD-games-card-Sonic-Retro-For-16-bit-Sega-MegaDrive-Genesis-game-console/1970641100.html?isOrigTitle=true
