Sonic 1 to get the 3DS treatment.

Should I ask about the end of level signpost? =|

 

Everything is a bit off because they are emulating the YM2612 at 32kHz instead of 44100kHz.

The spindash is a bit buggy too (you can't break monitors if you are touching them by either side; if you spindash next to the Marble zone pistons you'll run in place with the Spindash smoke).

Here's a recording so you know how does the game sound like. The spindash rev sound is horrible on the higher speeds.

 

Ouch, it hurts to see them take so much care in a lot of things and then leave such a last decade emulation error in there... Why doesn't the Giga Drive support ADXs?

I don't think I've heard the mentioned waterfall sound error anywhere before, by the way.

 

Playing streamed music is a lot more costly than emulating the YMm2612 and for that same reason Sonic Classic Collection on the DS had framerate issues. They couldn't even add the TV frame on the nostalgia mode because of framerate issues too. Using streamed music also doesn't mean the quality is better, as they could still use 32kHz for the songs too...

 

productive

Anyway, here's a mildly technical review which you Retro Engine nuthuggers really don't deserve, but.

3D Sonic the Hedgehog is just that, Sonic the Hedgehog except in 3D. The game plays identically to the original, it's the same engine going through the same motions. Background parallax is now in stereo so each line that scrolled at a different speed in the original now also has matching 3D depth. The foreground graphics have been handled manually; scenery objects which used to appear behind Sonic are now dropped back a layer, the HUD is bumped up in front of everything else. The effect is nice and makes the colors feel rich and pop out more. I dunno, I like it. There's definitely a degree of emulation behind the VDP since the sprite limit is there, though its effects are slightly different in some instances.

The main options let you switch between International and Japan versions and toggle the Spin Dash on and off. International mode is just that: less scrolling effects on the backgrounds, TM on the Sega logo, shorter cheat codes, scrambled level select order. Japan mode meanwhile has all the rev01 stuff including the hidden credits and plot twist PSB graphic reveal, and somewhat unexpectedly also fixes the notorious "spike bug" (despite being present in both MD versions of Sonic 1). When Spin Dash is on you can spindash (duh) and the camera switches to Sonic 2 style, where there's a delay before the screen scrolls. You also can't outrun the camera unless you try really hard (by looking up and then quickly spindashing down something tall) but even then going off the bottom of the screen no longer kills you prematurely. There is no skid smoke like in Sonic Jam, though.

Other options allow you to set the controls (including turbo fire for some baffling reason), set the screen to Retard CRT Mode (which turns on NTSC filtering and turns off 3D), and switch between "fall-in" and "pop-out" stereo projection. You can also set the sound volume and toggle between MD1 and MD2 PSG output style, which I'm fairly certain only tweaks the PSG volume levels a tiny smidge. FM sound is synthesized in real time, which means all the effects like speed up and pitch bends and fades work just like the original, though to be expected also sound a tad different. The game still sounds just like Sonic 1, but if you've played the game as much as I have you're going to notice all the little different inflections and shit. It's fine, stop burning your house down.

There's a few bugs, which is kind of annoying. When you go into a special stage, the screen fades to white, then blacks out for a second or so, then fades back in from white. This is probably something to do with the original because I remember some weird flashing there as well. A really dumb bug is that while the pitch bend for the spindash sound is present, it's not correctly capped -- so if you keep pressing the button, the note overflows and then becomes progressively lower in pitch. I've thought about reaching out to M2 about this issue since patches are actually a thing on the 3DS, but I'm not sure how much trouble it would be to push it down Sega's different channels.

You can still crash the Z80 with certain sounds on the sound test which mutes the game until you completely restart the application, which is annoying because the factory "Special" mode activates the level select by default (a nice move for casual mobile gaming); you can also hang the game by crouching at the end of LZ like usual, except the illegal instruction message never gets printed, it just floods the level with the water palette and then it's dead as shit.

tl;dr: better than S1 GBA, better than Classic Collection; possibly better than Retro remake if you favor 1:1 parity with the original over knuckles route buttsecks

EDIT: ninja'd on several accounts but hopefully the insight is worth it

 

No way. I don't know what gives you this idea, because emulating YM2612 is far more processor intensive than simply decoding ADPCM (ADX) and playing it back. Decoding a single ADPCM sample may take around 15 to 20 instructions, while emulating YM2612 would require you to handle not only each channel, but then mixing them all together as well. The reason Sonic Classic Collection used streamed audio was because it was much faster than emulating the audio. Unlike it's predecessor, (JenesisDS) Lordus didn't have access to the 2nd ARM CPU since that's reserved by Nintendo for official titles. He was using that in jenesisDS to handle all of the audio, which is why that was able to run full speed while Classic Collection was not.

And another thing... the 3DS has dedicated DSP hardware, so it could process compressed streamed audio for free. The DSP would be doing all of the decompression itself, allowing the main CPU to handle everything else.

 

I believed that he optimized his YM2612 emulation code to run using the hardware channels on the DS so it's not mixed on software and I've read the reason he used streamed audio was because he couldn't make the sound better (the DAC on JenesisDS is a bit off-sync). He did make the game DSi enhanced and I couldn't find exactly how faster it is but I see sources mentioning the ARM9 being twice as fast, shouldn't it run as good as JenesisDS then? That's why I thought emulating the YM2612 was faster.

 

I was still hoping they would have found a way to fix it for the international release because, as irrelevant as sound quality might be to some, this is a flaw that other developers have already been able to work around.

I guess only the 3DS' limitations are at fault here, but you can't blame me for expecting their sound emulation to be an improvement over Genecyst.

 

But it's not broken. It sounds like that on real hardware if you use speakers that can't reproduce sounds over 32kHz.

 

So I bought it and just finished it. My observations:

Most stuff sounds crystal clear, some sounds awful, so I'm not sure this is a khz thing. Sounds most noticeably affected:
-Spindash rev up, after a few button presses
-End of level signpost
-Boss being hit
-GHZ: Waterfall sound gets constantly interrupted.
-SBZ: Electric posts, sawblades

I've never owned a Mega Drive 2, so I can't talk about the faithfulness of that specific option.


Now, regarding the 3D effect, I think there's some missed possibilities here. For example:
-The foreground is always at the same depth as the sprites. This is due to the foreground being used sometimes as a background depending on the area, but it causes the indoor areas to look entirely 2D.
-Marble Zone could have benefitted from the ruins and lava being a little more into the background, rather than at the same level as the rest of the foreground.
-Labyrinth Zone only has one layer for the foreground+sprites and one for the background. It looks like they just didn't bother with this one.
-Star Light Zone's "nearby metal posts" are just one pixel nearer than the rest of the foreground, so they just don't stand out.


And some odd stuff:
-The Special stages put Sonic farther away from the camera than the rings and the rest of the scenery. It looks really odd since his sprite actually overlaps everything else, making the effect incoherent (and it almost seems like Sonic is not going to reach the rings).
-Also in the Special Stage, everything might just flicker at once from time to time, for no apparent reason.
-As pointed out, unusual black screen after fade to white when entering the Special Stage.
-Robotnik's "crouching" frame before jumping shows his legs all garbled.
-Not sure if there used to be that much overall flickering after defeating the Final Zone boss.
-Japanese mode changes the spike behavior to Sonic 2's for some reason. I'd understand if it was done by the spindash mode, but this makes no sense.
-You can't map the Start button to the actual Start button, which is specially weird when Select and Start are both used to bring the interface.
-For the curious, you can't place bumper-flowers in the ending with Debug Mode anymore. =P


Regarding the TV mode, I love M2 and hate them for it.

The TV blur and colors are easily the best of their kind, surpassing the effect I've seen in any other Mega Drive emulator to date, and this makes me wish they would let Taxman/Stealth use this filter for their remakes. On the other hand, as I had already expected, the simulated TV looks too curved to be comfortable to play with. They should have definately given the option to manually modify the curvature from this level to no curvature at all (and no, turning the 3D slide all the way down won't really make it flat).



By the way, I know it's a minor thing that's not even supposed to be there due to this being an actual emulator, but it's kind of a bummer that it doesn't save your high scores like Arika's 3D Classics do. =\

 

Im really enjoying the CRT television effect but the problems with the FM channels really detract from the experience. Is this really the best thats possible with the 3DS hardware?

 

The CRT television setting makes a big difference. I forgot how pink Marble Zone was supposed to look. But why on earth it adds that stupid curvature to the screen I'll never know. It kinda ruins a really good thing.

 

The 3d effect is actually really good. The whole game appears clearer for some reason, like the depth really makes the whole game visually easier on the eyes. Almost like it was supposed to be this way. Played it right though and aside from the sound issues I think it's the best 'virtual console' attempt on the 3ds for anything so far.

 

When I first read they are running 2 copies of the game for the 3D to work and are using the second rom's sprites for more layers I got a bit disappointed.
I don't know if the 3DS rendering is fast enough for this, but theoretically one can use the second set of sprites as depth maps. Each sprite thus can have 16 levels of depth, and with the priority bits and possibly the palette selector they could be even more. The indices in the palettes could represent the whole range of depth(512 units?) with Z-buffer like distribution. The closer the values to the camera, the smaller the distance from one another.
Though this much work could have very well been spent remodelling the whole game ala Generations.

That being said, I like the new look of the game.

 

I've just found a way to chop Eggman's head off after the final fight.

Wait for him to get into his escape pod, hit him, wait till he goes offscreen, go right and..!


No idea if this happens in the original Japanese version, haven't checked yet.

 

If you lift the 3D slider reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally slow you can garble the screen a bit :P Right in between 'no 3D' and 1 px of 3D distance.