Sonic 1 Mobile stuff

Well, the game came in part 1, part 2 and one full version (which was first), so it's no surprise there are some leftovers. I dug through the files, too, and changed some graphics inside.

And, even if it's not a direct port, they have the source code available, and it's only logic that they kept the level names (and the object images have Japanese names, too).

 

Yeah, most of the stuff is shared between the versions, but I see the "Special Stage" text there, and the special stage which was cutoff from all the Ifone releases (Full version, part 1 and 2), so why would they keep something they wouldn't use anyway?

 

Didn't the original Sonic Cafe version have the special stage in? I remember the Sonic Cafe version of Sonic 2 having a redesigned special stage, but that never made it when it came to the states.

Speaking of the Sonic Cafe versions, do we have more information about them? Are they actually in Java? Has anyone released them on the net yet?

If the iFone version of Sonic 1 was interesting, the Sonic Cafe version should be better.

 

Both the Special Stage text and "Chaos Emeralds" shows up when you "enter" special stage and immediately get the emerald.

If I'm not mistaken, a developer (registered on this forum) said, that they didn't have time to even start working on the special stages.

 

Interesting, what's this sonic cafe version all about? Never heard of that before.

Didn't someone also find a MZ ufo sprite in sonic 1 mobile too?

 

The Sonic Cafe version is an entirely different (and older) wannabe Sonic game.

And yes, there is an unused downgraded UFO sprite in the game. Evidence that they had the source code, perhaps?

 

Wasn't that the old Sonic game for phones in Japan around 2001ish?

 

As Sanky said, the special stage & chaos emeralds text appears briefly. The actual special stage was one of the first things to go due to various reasons. I was working on a Monkeyball game at this time so I'm not sure exactly what the reasons were but I'd imagine the main one was the lack of free rotation in j2me graphics, so the additional overhead of having a whole extra tileset of graphics when build siszes were already over the limits on many devices would be too much to handle.

As for having all of the zone names in the image, the Part 1 & Part 2 code was all actually a single codebase, the levels that were included with each particular build was configured by our preprocessor at build time. At different points in time, different levels were going to be used, originally they were all going to be in, then they were split into 3 alternating zones (I think it was Green Hill, Spring Yard, and Star Light for part 1), but as you probably know the level structure in Sonic 1 alternates between fast levels, and slower-more puzzle based levels, so that would have meant part 1 had all the fast levels and part 2 have all the puzzle levels. So it was changed to the current configuration. Since we could use any or all levels we would have to either store each zone title in a seperate image or keep them in a single image (which meant we didn't have the overhead of the header chunks for all the png files, and it compressed better).

 

Time to blame whoever decided that phones should use Java, don't you think? =P

Programs for the newest phones aren't programmed in Java but in C or C++, so J2ME may not have much time alive. Yet that'd be useless as you still have to remake the entire game for every phone as they're completely different and too weak to include stuff for several phones into a single one.

 

Yes I am condemned to work with not merely java, but j2me... A particularly nasty strain! I'm trying to return to the land of pc's and consoles, but java experience is a nasty blot on my record. On the plus side I've had the chance to work on a number of games that others can only pray for.

The key word there is SHOULD. but in the mobile industry that means next to nothing. My job as a java porting engineer shouldn't even exist due to the whole "build once, run anywhere" concept of java, but it does.

 

Maybe the situation changes once phones either get more memory or more power. But until then yes, games have to be remade for every phone. Even if the codebase is the same, there's stuff like display resolution and such that have to be dealt with. There isn't enough power to try vector graphics or scaling in all phones, neither enough memory to be able to fit several graphic sizes (even in phones with SD cards, if they first download it into internal memory, you're lost). So pretty much the game has to be rebuilt for every phone out there, even if the code remains the same (somewhat).

 

With luck that will happen, but I'm still supporting phones released back in 2001 (and the phone networks demand that these devices are supported, else they won't sell the game), so even if every new phone started using Android, it would still take the better part of a decade for publishers to be able to support Android only. :'(