OH SHIT, Sonic Rush find

Techokami · Jun 29, 2006

Okay so I've figured out how to rip the mostly uncompressed graphics of Sonic Rush recently with the correct palletes, and as I was doing a large scale sprite rip, I opened /act/ac_ene_tento.bac, and inside was the ladybug badnik of Sonic Advance 3.

Used for testing? Was Sonic Rush originally going to use Sonic Advance sprites?
Discuss.

WiteoutKing · Jun 29, 2006

Whoa, EXCELLENT find, man. I wouldn't be horribly surprised if they were going to use Advance-style sprites initially, as the scenery actually does have Advance-y feel to it.

Sazpaimon · Jun 29, 2006

They might have built rush on top of Sonic Advance 3, and the sprites might have been leftovers from an early engine test.

Good find btw.

Quickman · Jun 29, 2006

Nice find.

Techokami · Jun 29, 2006

Quickman said:

Nice find.
Click to expand...

SH2000 said:

Good find btw.
Click to expand...

WiteoutKing said:

Whoa, EXCELLENT find, man.
Click to expand...

heh, thanks =P

GameNerd Advance · Jun 29, 2006

Sonic Hackr 2000 said:

They might have built rush on top of Sonic Advance 3
Click to expand...

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to dig deeper into games we don't usually research/hack. Hackr may well be on to something there.

Anyway, nice find.

Shade · Jun 29, 2006

This is indeed a nice find. This game seems to have more and more links to Advance to it. A while back I pointed out the musical oddity of the track "Blaze Appears - Friend or enemy?" being used as the background music for Leaf Storm in the first footage released for this game. Further research lead to the discovery of certain tracks, I believe such as the one I just mentioned, "What U Need is PGS Remix", and the drowning countdown, using GBA music tools. Then of course during the credits you see sprites of characters.

To be honest, one of my theories is that this game was originally going to be another Sonic Advance (Rush and the Advance games play very much alike anyway), but they figured they could make a much better DS game out of it than that "rub and go" demo they had going.

Dark Sonic · Jun 29, 2006

I bet that Sonic Team just built Rush over Sonic Advance 3, or they started by making the game an advance 4 until they made it what it is now (I would have prefered the 2-d sprites really). I mean after all, they built Sonic 3 over Sonic 2.

Really nice find though, good job.

Robjoe · Jun 29, 2006

Interesting stuff you got there. Be sure to tell us about anything else you come across!

Billy · Jun 30, 2006

This is very interesting. But anyone mind showing me a screen of this in SA3, I've almost beaten the entire game and never seen it anywhere.

Techokami · Jun 30, 2006

Billy said:

This is very interesting. But anyone mind showing me a screen of this in SA3, I've almost beaten the entire game and never seen it anywhere.
Click to expand...

'SSUK on Sonic CulT said:

It's from Sonic Advance 3... The first ever enemy you come across... (Other than Omochao. =P)

Click to expand...

Gibbo · Jun 30, 2006

This is indeed a nice find. Makes you wonder if it was Based on SA3. They could have been making another GBA Game but then switched over to the DS when they saw its potential???

Heran Bago · Jul 1, 2006

Awesome. Nice to find someone besides myself and Dioxas (where'd he go? =/) picking apart Sonic Rush.
I must ask sir, what's your meathod to "to rip the mostly uncompressed graphics of Sonic Rush with the correct palletes"? It's not just the same format as GBA, is it?

Techokami · Jul 1, 2006

It kinda is.

There is a distinct file structure to the graphic files. My friend, Retriever II (who cracked all of the formats in Paper Mario and Paper Mario: TTYD), is working on the format. He has it mostly mapped out, but the badnik Falco didn't conform with all the other damn sprites XD

Generally, the pallette data is stored before the first image. It's 32 bytes long, 15bpp BGR (555). In other words, it's the GBA pallete format. The images are 4bpp linear, reverse-order.

At the start of each image, there are 4 bytes, which goes like this:
XX00 YYYY
XX = Compression flag. 00 = Uncompressed, 10 = LZ77 Compressed
YYYY = Length of image (bytes) (unsure if this is little or big endian, will have to check later)

At the end of each image is 4 bytes of FF. This is used to signify an end-of-image. The same goes for the end of a pallete.

Before the first image, there are an extra 2 bytes, which is for how long the image data itself in total is.

Heran Bago · Jul 2, 2006

Techokami said:

It kinda is.

There is a distinct file structure to the graphic files. My friend, Retriever II (who cracked all of the formats in Paper Mario and Paper Mario: TTYD), is working on the format. He has it mostly mapped out, but the badnik Falco didn't conform with all the other damn sprites XD

Generally, the pallette data is stored before the first image. It's 32 bytes long, 15bpp BGR (555). In other words, it's the GBA pallete format. The images are 4bpp linear, reverse-order.

At the start of each image, there are 4 bytes, which goes like this:
XX00 YYYY
XX = Compression flag. 00 = Uncompressed, 10 = LZ77 Compressed
YYYY = Length of image (bytes) (unsure if this is little or big endian, will have to check later)

At the end of each image is 4 bytes of FF. This is used to signify an end-of-image. The same goes for the end of a pallete.

Before the first image, there are an extra 2 bytes, which is for how long the image data itself in total is.
Click to expand...

You seem to be fackin' like a master at this moment. :D
Do you know of any LZ77 compressor/decompressor? BEcause I would greatly appreciate one!

Techokami · Jul 4, 2006

Unless the NSMB level layouts are uncompressed, I thought you had one =O

Anyways, this is what I used. Lightning made another decompressor that runs on the DS, using the BIOS calls; I'll let him post the code here.

Heran Bago · Jul 4, 2006

The object layouts are indeed uncompressed in NSMB. =P

Thanks for the decompressor, I can't wait to see Lightning's!

OH SHIT, Sonic Rush find

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