The game's complete soundtrack is stored in .ogg format within Data.rsdk so I've pulled those out. The loop points are managed by the game (naturally) so unfortunately this format isn't exactly a good way to listen to the tracks as each looping track just cuts off. Still, it's worth acknowledging that it's an option for anyone who has the game on steam. Track names below are my own, but it's clear that they're in alphabetical order: Spoiler 01 - 1-up jingle (0:03) 02 - Act Clear jingle (0:06) 03 - Angel Island Cutscene (0:15) 04 - "Bad" Ending Cutscene (0:25) 05 - Blue Sphere - Constant Speed (1:12) 06 - Blue Sphere - With Speed Up (2:51) 07 - Act 2 Boss Fight - Green Hill, Flying Battery, Hydrocity, Oil Ocean (1:10) 08 - Act 2 Boss Fight - Studiopolis, Metallic Madness (0:44) 09 - Final Boss - Phantom Egg (1:09) 10 - Hard Boiled Heavy Boss Fight (0:53) 11 - Act 1 Boss Fight (0:56) 12 - Mean Bean Machine (1:17) 13 - Chemical Plant Zone, Act 1 (1:03) 14 - Chemical Plant Zone, Act 2 (1:03) 15 - Competition / Time Attack Menu (0:30) 16 - Continue jingle (0:14) 17 - Credits (2:39) 18 - Drowning jingle (0:14) 19 - Egg Reverie Boss Fight (1:29) 20 - Egg Reverie Pinch - Unused(?) (0:42) 21 - Flying Battery Zone, Act 1 (1:24) 22 - Flying Battery Zone, Act 2 (1:22) 23 - Game Over jingle (0:09) 24 - "Good" Ending Cutscene (0:42) 25 - Green Hill Zone, Act 1 (0:56) 26 - Green Hill Zone, Act 2 (1:37) 27 - Hard Boiled Heavy "Mischief" Cutscene (0:52) 28 - Hydrocity Zone, Act 1 (0:57) 29 - Hydrocity Zone, Act 2 (1:00) 30 - Intro Animation - Friends by Hyper Potions (1:17) 31 - Intro Animation - Tee Lopes version (1:18) 32 - Invincibility (0:16) 33 - Lava Reef Zone, Act 1 (1:04) 34 - Lava Reef Zone, Act 2 (1:01) 35 - Main Menu (0:33) 36 - Metallic Madness Zone, Act 1 (1:08) 37 - Metallic Madness Zone, Act 2 (1:14) 38 - Metal Sonic Boss Fight (1:02) 39 - Mirage Saloon Zone, Act 1 ST (1:05) 40 - Mirage Saloon Zone, Act 1 K (1:18) 41 - Mirage Saloon Zone, Act 2 (1:09) 42 - Oil Ocean Zone, Act 1 (0:49) 43 - Oil Ocean Zone, Act 1 (1:02) 44 - Press Garden Zone, Act 1 (0:56) 45 - Press Garden Zone, Act 2 (1:04) 46 - Results - Competition Mode (0:16) 47 - Phantom Ruby Distortion Background "Hum" (0:12) 48 - Save Select (0:40) 49 - An explosion sound effect (0:04) 50 - Speed Shoes (0:25) 51 - Stardust Speedway Zone, Act 1 (1:25) 52 - Stardust Speedway Zone, Act 2 (1:20) 53 - Studiopolis Zone, Act 1 (1:46) 54 - Studiopolis Zone, Act 2 (1:16) 55 - Super Theme (0:40) 56 - Time Travel sound effect (0:08) 57 - Titanic Monarch Zone, Act 1 (1:11) 58 - Titanic Monarch Zone, Act 2 (1:36) 59 - Title Screen jingle (0:16) 60 - Knuckles & Knuckles Ending (0:39) 61 - UFO Special Stage - Dimension Heist (1:16)
I'm up to Metallic Madness act 1 (Sonic & Tails) and realized I haven't really spoiled much. So many surprises! I actually experienced some gameplay slow down, but I forget where. It was between Flying Battery and Stardust Speedway. While Press Garden is beautiful, Oil Ocean Act 2 takes the cake for the "gotcha" moment for sure. I wasn't expecting Oil-dopolis Zone, I couldn't stop laughing in disbelief. I'm still trying to wrap my head around Mirage Saloon (obviously modeled after the North American southwest desert) being anywhere near Oil Ocean Zone (based on the middle east). It had a nice transition, but was still strange. High level of awe is still in effect!
Thanks for the write-up on using DirectInput controllers through Steam's controller interface, Cooljerk! I was vaguely aware there were controller options there from my short time using a Steam controller, but I didn't realize how in-depth the feature is. I was planning on picking up the game for PC to play it with my USB Saturn controller prior to finding out about the Denuvo nonsense, but I'm holding off on purchasing the game for a second platform for now. If they remove Denuvo in the future then I'll pick up the PC version in a heartbeat and play it that way. Also I've read some complaints about the Special Stages, but they really weren't that bad? Like, I was awful at them at first, but as someone with a full-time job who hasn't played the game that much due to Pokémon Go's legendary raids taking up large portions of my free time I was able to get good and beat them. You just need to keep trying them, and actively think "Okay, that attempt didn't work. Where did I go wrong?" each time and adjust what you can until you've got the stages down. Memorizing a handful of special stage ring locations and going to them from a cleared save, exiting out to the main menu if you fail, then going back in helps as well! But no, I haven't cleared the final stage as Sonic yet; I gave it a single try and couldn't do it, but that's more "I haven't put forth a serious effort yet" than "omg the stage is too hard nerf plz." I did beat everything else on that Sonic + Tails save though, and I've got a fully-cleared Knuckles save as well. I started on a Sonic-only save and could have had all of the Chaos Emeralds by the end of Chemical Plant if I hadn't messed up on two of the special stages. I did get them all by the end of Studiopolis, though. I think I'm at Stardust Speedway on that save last I played? If I had more free time then I could have completed that one in one sitting. In any case if I don't beat the extra zone on this one I can go right to it from the save menu without going through both acts of Titanic Monarch first if I run out of lives. That'll be nice.
That's really just a primer to get non-standardized controllers working in steam, the true power of the Steam Controller API is really deep. By far the coolest stuff it can do is pretty useless for a game like Sonic mania - it actually has the ability to incorporate itself into games. Like so: The colorful menu on the left is being put into the game by steam. Each one of those menu selections counts as a "virtual button" which itself can be mapped just like any button on the steam controller. you can also make these types of menus pop up or disappear at the press of other buttons. Other things you can do, for example, include being able to make your mouse "bind" to a region of the screen for 1:1 mapping with the touchpads, useful for things like manipulating mini-maps or inventories, or enabling splatoon-like gyroscope aiming controls in literally any game ever. It's really, really deep. Biggest compliment I can give -- I was able to make X-Wing completely playable with every ability in the game usable from the controller. X-Wing's joystick support only originally included support for 4 buttons, it was *required* you use a keyboard to play X-wing even if you were using a joystick. also worth noting - anything launched through steam can use this stuff, even non-steam games. I play titanfall this way, and that's an Origin game.
It really isn't obvious to new players how easily the GHZ2 boss can be hit. https://www.youtube....h?v=TrCxzaqPPWg Edit: New video about a palette issue in CPZ1 https://www.youtube....h?v=EZPCO8yYt1w
I believe this is related to the way Retro SDK actually handles palettes. It doesn't offer true palette support, you see. Rather, when a tilesheet is loaded in Retro SDK, it will redraw the tilesheet a number of times in different palettes in VRAM, then the engine will pick which specific tilesheet to pull those tiles from depending on the circumstances. Palette rotations and under water palettes are handled this way. In Sonic CD, they only had IIRC 6 tilesheets in different palettes to work with, and chose to use true transparency for the water in some ports (like the mobile phone ports) because of further VRAM limitations. Because of this limitation, they might not have enought colored tilesheets available for palette rotation both above and below water. In which case, this wouldn't be a bug, but rather a limitation of the engine (or VRAM consideration). Unless, of course, the new version of the Retro SDK doesn't work this way (which it might not, Sonic CD was version 3, this is version 5). Here is a picture to illustrate what i mean (I'm pretty sure it's ok to post this -- if you (you know who) has a problem with me posting this, PM me and I'll remove the pic): There are mutliple copies of this sheet in different palettes in VRAM (in 24bpp or 32bpp color) as opposed to a true 8bpp tilemap that maps to a real palette in real time.
I just checked the original Chemical Plant in Sonic 2 and it turns out it behaves the exact same way. I guess I just never noticed. I'm still going to quibble about it in Mania though, this isn't 1992 anymore :v:/>
That's precisely why they have to do things this way. I explained earlier, but anachronistically, a lot of oldschool retro console tricks are very hard to do on modern machines. Through independent yet concurrent invention, I actually ran into the exact same problem while I was building my own engine, and had originally decided to use this very same solution that Taxman used, before instead deciding to write some really complex OpenGL support and using shaders to do true palette swapping. Remember, though -- when RetroSDK was first written, a big selling point was mobile support. And back then, the biggest mobile platform -- IOS -- couldn't guarantee shader support. This was the only viable way to maximize the number of platforms it could run on. Today, you're guaranteed shader support on virtually every modern platform, but who knows, perhaps changing this stuff would have required a substantial reworking of RetroSDK. Ironically, though, the Dreamcast does offer true 4bpp and 8bpp palettes
So, Neo Reviews discovered a weird little easter egg. Grab a hook in Hydrocity, put in the Sonic & Knuckles level select code, and then find a booster... [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TftUoKFNKcg[/youtube]
This info is incorrect - it's only the iOS version of Sonic CD that did this due to the low spec of mobile at the time. Pixel graphics in the Retro Engine are done with sofware rendering, so there's true palette support across multiple banks, which can be assigned per scanline and modified at will. In this case, the blocks don't animate underwater because the palette cycle is only applied to bank0, they don't animate in the original Sonic 2 either so it's technically accurate :v:
Well I stand corrected. To be fair to the person from whom that research came from, he did tell me his research was limited to the mobile ports. My bad for assuming the rest of the ports worked the same way. EDIT: I'm curious, though - is this confirmation that the mobile ports of Sonic 1 and 2 don't behave the same way?
Just finished my second run as Sonic alone again. I still ended up with only four Chaos Emeralds. I failed at the fourth one a few times, but I actually made it to the fifth one and failed even more times at it. I wanted to get them all on one run, but I might just settle for collecting them on my clear save. Part of me wishes that getting into special stages was just a matter of finishing a stage with 50 rings again or that it was at least an option. I forgot how unfun I found hunting for ways to enter special stages. I remember enough of the locations of the ones in S3&K for it to not be a problem and the other games I've played either made them much easier to enter and retry or were the Advance trilogy. I need to find a video of the giant ring locations. It feels like there are far fewer in Mania and I find its special stages to be far more difficult than any of the ones in S3&K. I realized during the Heavy Gunner fight that I could just roll into the blue missiles, making him and his posse a hell of a lot easier. Earlier, I stated that I didn't really have much issue with with most of the bosses outside of CP2 and H1. I felt that they were mostly fair and that even if the player is taken by surprise, they can learn from it. Then I fought Heavy Rider again. Unless there's just some strategy I'm failing to realize, then it's borderline impossible to not get hit during that fight.
Yeah, by the time work on Sonic 1 & 2 began, the bottleneck in the process of transferring pixels to texture memory on mobile was largely gone. This meant Sonic 1 & 2 were able to use the software renderer and have accurate water colours and full palette cycling support.
Terrific to know, thanks for the input! EDIT: I would love to hear how you overcame that limitation, but I get the feeling that's a bit too in depth...
Anyone else notice that the "clean" filter doesn't seem to be different from the "none" filter above 1x resolutions? I made a small imgur album with comparison images. At 1x size, the clear filter clearly renders every pixel 1:1 with no filtering, but at 2x, everything's still a bit blurred. At first, I thought the perpetual blurriness was a result of the settings.ini file having an imperfect screen size put in for windowed mode, but now that I've checked out the clear filter at 1x, I'm pretty sure that's not the case. There's something weird going on here. If there's a way to fix this, I'd like to know. Whether or not it's "accurate" or the best look for the game, I was raised on 1:1 pixel emulation, and I'd like to be able to play this with 2:2 or 3:3 pixel scaling without any filtering. EDIT: Talking about the PC version. A friend with the game on his Switch has said there's a difference between the filters there, so this seems to be a PC version issue.
I'm assuming you're referring to the PC version as my PS4 copy does show a difference between those modes. This might have been brought up already, but has anyone documented the fact that none of the 3&K levels are levels with music that is thought to be created by MJ and gang?
This super theme is amazing. This isn't saying much, but this is by far my favorite in-stage Super theme in the entire series. I normally don't like using Super, but this theme makes it very tempting.
My favorite in-stage Super Sonic themes are either http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH_MCPcjxP0 or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gPBmDptqlQ :P
