Has Saturn emulation matured enough to allow people who never had the chance to get a Saturn in the past/can't afford the prices on eBay to properly play through Sonic Jam? That would help out immensely.
Jam appears to run very well on Yabause, albeit there are slowdowns. I'm on i5 2500K 3.3GHz and it uses only 1 core to the max. I imagine with a faster CPU it'll run perfectly. Btw the sound effects are HILARIOUS
It always played fine for me on SSF, provided you collect all the runes and chant the proclamations correctly to get SSF working. I did verify all the bugs I've described on a real Saturn though. Emulation wasn't causing any issues of its own within the games; it seemed a pretty accurate appraisal of the game. I can see if I have any notes left over on extracting the original S3&K layouts from the disc sometime, if someone wants to take up that mantle. IIRC there were some weird factors I didn't quite understand with not finding everything exactly where I expected it, which is pain I don't want to repeat myself, but perhaps someone else can pick it up from there.
Let's have a look at the code of AIZ napalm demo boss from Sonic 3 for the 3 ports... Regular Sonic 3 US ROM: Sonic Jam's Sonic 3 overlay S3BS00.SN3 (all the bosses for AIZ, as boss objects are dynamically loaded at level start from overlays): Sonic & Knuckles Collection PC SONIC3K.EXE: Labels are combined from multiple sources: Nick Arcade build, SONIC3K.EXE, Sonic CD from Gems Gamecube, Genesis and Saturn devkits I think. I tried entering the Sonic 3 level select code at the title screen in both S3C versions, as well as the first S&K beta, but it didn't work (I had to disable the already active flags in RAM to make Sound Test menu go away. If it had worked like Sonic Jam, the menu would have been reenabled again after the code). In Sonic Jam's Sonic 3, all that is needed is pressing Up Up Down Down Up Up Up Up at any point during the title screen, even when the menu is displayed. The codebase for Sonic Jam's Sonic 3 seems to be much closer to the original release of Sonic 3, such that there is no Knuckles player available but the title card can display his name, and a few bosses can be "Knuckles hard mode" enabled by setting $FF at RAM $060FFA81 (for Genesis: $FFFFFA81). But the code for the bosses in Flying Battery Zone has been removed (as they are existing and working in original Sonic 3). Sonic & Knuckles Collection PC's Sonic 3 is impressive (or not) as it kinda goes back in time reimplementing the title screen, sound test, staff roll from Sonic 3, but all the code for the objects in-game is shared with Sonic 3 & Knuckles making it possible to play as Knuckles in Sonic 3 Alone, and trigger all the S&K bosses/cutscenes as long as the Sonic 3 level layout allows for it. I didn't know that. But I did know and hate how the Death Egg background sprite doesn't load at the end of Lava Reef Act 2 in Jam.
