Shadow Hog, on 12 March 2013 - 10:19 AM, said:
I'd imagine they work better than Classic Collection did, too (never did buy that, but not especially compelled to, either).
They do, on a regular DS (I think Classic Collection runs full-speed on a DSi, but I don't have one). It could have been worse; I was wondering if they might be using the same people that were responsible for Sonic Genesis. Instead, what actually happened was that they hired the guy that did jenesisDS to work on it. With it being emulation, it's accurate, but the overhead of trying to emulate the genesis on the DS causes each game to exhibit slowdown. If I remember correctly, that's even with forgoing sound emulation and just streaming in pre-recorded audio. On the other hand, though, again if I'm remembering this correctly, every single one of the ROMs was RLE-compressed. This wasn't just for storage and they were decompressed for running, they were actually run while RLE-compressed. Presumeably, they did this so they could actually use Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which would have taken up the entire 4MB of the DS' working RAM alone (the DS and above don't have direct addressing to data on the game card like the GBA did, and have to read data and code into RAM first to actually make use of it). Rebuilding Sonic 3 & Knuckles to strip out padding and redundant data introduced by just combining ROM images of the two games as they were originally released (as could be done with the existing disassembly, if not original sources) might have made this unnecessary, but it comes down to what they have knowledge of or access to and are willing to make use of
These, on the other hand, are native code (rebuilt in and compiled from C); there's no emulation involved, and therefore no additional processing overhead. They run at full speed
ICEknight, on 12 March 2013 - 10:22 AM, said:
Oh my god, to think that they could have released a decent collection made by one dedicated man and rather chose to release a steaming pile of shit made by many people who couldn't put their stuff together. And it could have included Sonic CD, even!
There's something very wrong with the way this industry works... Or perhaps they just hate you with a passion.
Haha. I started to think so, but no, I think it's just how big business is. It's very difficult to get anywhere with them from the outside, and you can't know what they are already doing until it's too late. It's likely that if they had heard me, they'd have put too much into Classic Collection already to have backed out anyway. Money, contracts.. they'd also have no clue who I am. They could see what I've done if they took the time to look it over, but it doesn't say much about how I'd do on a contract (like timeliness, dealing with the company and how they want me to behave, end quality since they're not gonna spend resources to QA my old projects just to find out how well-put-together they are or how I'd respond)
ICEknight, on 12 March 2013 - 10:22 AM, said:
EDIT: If that SoA producer is gone now, perhaps you could still aim for the 3DS (3D Sonic Classics) and consoles (Sonic Classic Trilogy)?
Well, something like what I was doing would have been necessary for proper performance (aside from proper enhancements and special features) on the DS due to its 67MHz processor and 4MB of RAM. On the other hand, as I mentioned, I think they managed to get Classic Collection running at full speed on the DSi, with its 133MHz processor. Given that the 3DS is using a 266MHz dual-core processor and 64MB of RAM, I'm not absolutely certain that it's not capable of handling Taxman's Retro Engine. I can push full speed for a similarly-designed game in E02 on the PSP with a single 333MHz core, which is hindered by slow memory access, so I can't say without seeing for myself that the 3DS isn't sufficient to handle something like that. In that case, they've already worked with Taxman on a successfully-released game, and can very likely get him again for other remakes or whatever, so, for them, messing around with me and this project would probably be entirely unnecessary
Dark Sonic, on 12 March 2013 - 11:00 AM, said:
A 3DS collection would be rather awesome. We don't need a console port though, there are enough of those even if this does have new features, unless it was a budget downloadable for $10 or something.
That's how things seem to be going, anyway :P
winterhell, on 12 March 2013 - 11:10 AM, said:
Awesome!
Are those direct ports of the split disassemblies?
The game logic is, mostly. I did my own I/O code (with the exception of using MaxMod for the audio), and gameplay code ranges from what I know and understand to direct transliterations of assembly code to C. They're combined into a single overall engine that's more similar to Sonic 3 rather than each game being built individually, though
winterhell, on 12 March 2013 - 11:10 AM, said:
There is much crap and lack of transparency in the multi-tier managed companies. Remember people get paid hourly so nobody wants to do more work than the bare minimum to not get fired. If someone is willing/capable of doing more work he makes the rest(and the direct boss) look bad. On the other hand if that man can do the work for 10 regular guys and do it better, the higher ups are never going to give him 10 times the salary but instead are going to reduce the budget(because the task is OBVIOUSLY easy). The team manager is going to get in a very rough spot dealing with the lower budget.
Well, people like me would work on a contract basis and are paid set amounts for a complete project. In that case, though, what you're saying about the desire to do as little as is required is probably true of a lot of people. It's not true of everyone, though, and you would be working on a schedule, subject to approvals, etc
Techokami, on 12 March 2013 - 03:06 PM, said:
Very impressive! I know this is infinitely unlikely, but since you've abandoned these PoCs, will you be releasing the sources to them so that another person could take them and finish porting over the games?
I'll let you know if I do :P
The best use for them now, though, would probably be to build something new out of them instead. Completing conversions of the original games is probably pretty dangerous territory
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