Wow I've only played the first zone and I can say that this is one of the most technical hacks I've ever seen. The first three bosses were in a sense an actual challenge with their patterns changing due to your location. Also absolutely loving the sound options menu.
I didn't plan to release a soundtrack before, since the game borrows a lot from the other Genesis games; while this kind of porting can be times harder and more time-consuming, it all sounds quite similar after all, apart from several quality improvements and tweaks. To my surprise, quite a few people have asked me to release the game's soundtrack already. I was happy to hear a lot of people actually loved the game's music. I'm sure, Jet and S_T_D, who were behind the most awesome compositions, are even happier about this! Thank you! We'll try to please you with even more original tracks in the future and show what SMD is truly capable of in terms of sound quality.
For those of you who would like to enjoy listening hack's music in your music players, I've recorded the soundtrack of the Sonic Winter Adventure's First Public Release, featuring the most significant music in the hack. To make it more interesting, this release also includes several bonus tracks that weren't present in the game. All of them are original remixes made by Jet, with several ones being prepared specially for this release.
Tracks list:
1 - The Frozen Hill - Act 1 (Jet) ... from Megaman Zero 3
2 - The Frozen Hill - Act 2 (Jet) ... from Sonic Advance
3 - The Frozen Hill - Act 3 (Jet) ... from Cool-Spot
4 - The Ancient Castle (Jet) ... from Battletoads and Double Dragon
5 - The Final Factory - Act 1 (Jet) ... from Megaman 2
6 - The Final Factory - Act 2 (vladikcomper) ... from Dangerous Seed
7 - The Final Factory - Act 3 (S_T_D) ... from Journey To Silius
8 - Robotnik's Park (vladikcomper) ... from Magical Hat no Buttobi Turbo! Daibouken 9 - The Big Boss (Jet) ... A Remix of The Adventures of Batman & Robin
10 - The Big Boss - Extneded Verison [Bonus Track] (Jet) ... A Remix of The Adventures of Batman & Robin
11 - Credits (vladikcomper) ... from Dangerous Seed 12 - Title Screen (Jet) ... A Remix of Megaman: The Wily Wars
13 - Title Screen - Alternative Version (vladikcomper) ... from Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad
14 - Menu Theme #1 (vladikcomper) ... from Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad 15 - Menu Theme #1 - Remix (Jet) ... A Remix of Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad
16 - Menu Theme #2 (vladikcomper) ... from Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad
17 - Menu Theme #3 (Jet) ... from Sparkster
18 - Theme of Winter (vladikcomper) ... from Mega Turrican
19 - Theme of Power (vladikcomper) ... from Mega Turrican
20 - Theme of Happiness (vladikcomper) ... from Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad 21 - A Tribute to Tempo [Bonus Track] (Jet) ... A Remix of Tempo
22 - A Tribute to Sonic CD (S_T_D) ... from Sonic CD 23 - A Tribute to Megaman [Bonus Track] (Jet) ... from Megaman X
24 - A Tribute to Mr. Nutz [Bonus Track] (Jet) ... A Remix of Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad
The highlighted ones are original remixes and bonus tracks. To my mind, the track is worth listening at least for them -- Jet has done a marvelous job once again! He'll appreciate it if you give it a listen.
Sweet remixes! Definitely helps bring it a little further away from the source material. :D
I'm not sure if this is possible to program or if it's been considered already, but what if the boss areas were constantly scrolling at a fast pace? I'd imagine that the bosses would need few changes to make them look right in this situation. For example, the first boss could sprout wheels when it stops bouncing:
Spoiler
This may or may not make it harder for the player to maneuver Sonic, but I think something like this - an illusion of the same kind of speed the player experiences in the stage beforehand - would help smooth out the sudden transition and pacing between stages and bosses.
SonMP3 support. Awesome stuff. Music definitely fits.
No, it's definitely not SonMP3, not my style.
I always prefer working with the plain hardware, being limited with its capabilities, trying to overpass them by implementing interesting software tricks, creating the fastest and most optimized code to make possible things that hardware weren't expected to handle. I love to push the limits and prove that many things are possible with the old hardware, that's the reason always I implement some impressive things in my games, they are kind of PoCs I'm working hard on. In the first SWA release those impressive in my viewing things were SEGA logo, transparent Press start message on the title screen (rendered pixel by pixel in the realtime) and, finally, rising lava boss (one may think this is displayed by sprites, but no, sprites limits simply won't allow you to create a scrolling layer to cover the entire screen).
I know, the statements above were a little bit unrelated to the question, they are here just to illustrate my point of view in general -- how I'm doing things and why I'm doing them. That said, I would never consider using an emulator plugin that had nothing to do with real hardware itself.
Quote
I'm going to say Sega CD. Very cool!
So, yes! What you hear is CD-Audio played by the Sega CD hardware. This isn't a full movement to the Sega CD whatsoever, it's just a little experiment I'm pulling off. If people like what they see, I may consider a complete migration to the Sega CD. You'll see what I have when Hacking Contest starts, see you in a few days!
Quote
Sweet remixes! Definitely helps bring it a little further away from the source material. :D
Thanks for liking my choices! Unfortunately, most of them comes from other games and albums so far, but SWA will hopefully have its own CD soundtrack in a while. I'm glad to announce there will be one original composition in this release. Time didn't allowed for more, sorry.
Quote
I'm not sure if this is possible to program or if it's been considered already, but what if the boss areas were constantly scrolling at a fast pace? I'd imagine that the bosses would need few changes to make them look right in this situation.
Yes, this is something I've considered already for the next boss I'm planning. I remember what you said about slow Sonic's acceleration as opposed to awkwardly fast jump dashes and boss attacks, making it somewhat clumsy all together. Thanks to you I've realized it becomes even more problematic when you are fighting the boss in a small room limited by just one screen and it should be overall more balanced during the running boss fights (like Sonic Advance 2). So yeah, I'm surely going for it and I'm planning to redesign some of the bosses I already have. And that concept you've suggested, it's awesome, thanks!
Cool! I can't wait to see what you come up with later down the road. Given all of the cool programming quirks of this hack, I think it really has the potential to take the Genesis physics to a whole new level.
HACKING CONTEST 2013 SPECIAL
It's a been a little while since the last release -- it was on April 28. Originally, my plans weren't to release the next update too soon, apparently some people were asking me if there would be a SWA release on the hacking contest, and I actually thought this would be a wonderful idea. I quickly changed my plans then to get the next version ready by the this year's Hacking Contest.
Sorry to disappoint those who has played the first release already, but there isn't new levels in this special edition. This is the reason I'm not calling it a proper release, but just an edition. Unfortunately, there weren't enough time to add new content without holding the quality bar I set in the first release. However, if you would like another play through a little upgraded and improved version of the game, then be my guest!
As you might notice from the recently shown video...
... one of the biggest additions in this version is the CD-music playback. Many of you wondered since if I really went for porting the whole hack to Sega CD.
Well, partially. I've been indeed thinking of moving to the Sega CD platform recently, so by this small update, I'm setting a little experiment here. It all depends on you, my dear players! If many of you prefer CD-music to old-school chiptunes, I may really consider a full porting to the Sega CD platform.
So what platform Sonic Winter Adventures is now on? Both!
Sonic Winter Adventures is present in a form of a ROM, that can work on plain Sega Mega-Drive platform, as well as using Sega Mega-CD addon. In other words, you still can play it as your ordinary Mega-Drive ROM in any emulator, but once you active the Sega CD emulation, the game is able to use this platform's extended features for CD-Audio playback. If you were to put this on real hardware, it would look like so: you plug a cartridge in your Mega-Drive, append it with Mega-CD addon, insert CD-Audio disk in your Sega CD and play. This is so-called Mode 1: booting Sega CD from a cartridge (as opposed to Mode 2: booting from a disc).
I would like to hugely thank Tristanseifert, LazloPsylus and MarkeyJester. This won't happen without the help of this awesome guys! Thank you for providing me hardware initialization code, support, testing it on real hardware, and specially for answering my dumb Sega CD hardware questions, as I even didn't have enough time to read through the pile of docs (yeah, the decision was really taken too late).
How to use
Booting with the Sega CD addon (highly recommended!)
Run SWA.BAT to open the game in a specially configured emulator.
To connect a CD-image and boot Sega CD, just drag&drop SWA.CUE file onto the emulator's window with SWA running. The game will reboot and a notification message will appear if success.
Booting as an ordinary SMD ROM
Run SWA.GEN in your favorite emulator.
For more info and configuration guidelines (if case you would like to configure your own emulator manually), see ReadMe.txt.
Aha I knew your hack was using Mode 1! (I mentioned it on Youtube when people were asking "How'd he do that?" ) I absolutely loved the music I heard in the trailer, so I'll be giving this another go while using the CD audio. :3
I'm not sure if this is possible to program or if it's been considered already, but what if the boss areas were constantly scrolling at a fast pace? I'd imagine that the bosses would need few changes to make them look right in this situation.
Yes, this is something I've considered already for the next boss I'm planning. I remember what you said about slow Sonic's acceleration as opposed to awkwardly fast jump dashes and boss attacks, making it somewhat clumsy all together. Thanks to you I've realized it becomes even more problematic when you are fighting the boss in a small room limited by just one screen and it should be overall more balanced during the running boss fights (like Sonic Advance 2). So yeah, I'm surely going for it and I'm planning to redesign some of the bosses I already have. And that concept you've suggested, it's awesome, thanks!
I hope you only do it for one boss though. Personally I find auto scrolling boss battles weak compared to cleaver design on boss patterns and openings which you have done in this hack already.
steveswede 
02
) I absolutely loved the music I heard in the trailer, so I'll be giving this another go while using the CD audio. :3
