[Black Squirrel]

Not new, but far better quality than what we had.

[Sodaholic]

This is about as accurate of a recreation as I can manage:



I do believe this was Sonic's original blue palette. It shows up in three places that I know of whenever the Sonic 1 sprites are used outside of gameplay in other games: Eraser, CD (time travel sequence) and Crackers. It's also a bit brighter (as described by the developers), and I don't think they ever wanted Sonic to be robin-egg blue, but that was the natural consequence of tweaking the colors to be slightly (but not significantly) darker when working in the very limited 9-bit RGB colorspace and they considered the saturation level acceptable enough.

That it reoccurs in stuff written from scratch while sourcing S1's art seems to suggest that these blues are the ones in his "digitizer" source files and that the darker, less saturated palette set is sort of "tacked on" program-side.

[JumpingRyle]

Looks great!

Mark Cerny (who wasn't really involved in the development of Sonic 1) said this about the color: "the character's color was changed just prior to release. Sonic had been a lighter blue, but he was very hard to see against the ocean backgrounds, so his color was darkened at the last moment."

http://www.sega-16.c...iew-mark-cerny/

[steveswede]

Sodaholic, on 23 May 2015 - 06:07 PM, said:

This is about as accurate of a recreation as I can manage:

Very nice.

[cornholio857]

Sodaholic, on 23 May 2015 - 06:07 PM, said:

This is about as accurate of a recreation as I can manage:

Excellent recreation!

Also, drx, thanks for those high quality scans. I'm always interested in early Sonic 1 material.

[kazblox]

Sodaholic, on 23 May 2015 - 06:07 PM, said:

This is about as accurate of a recreation as I can manage:



I do believe this was Sonic's original blue palette. It shows up in three places that I know of whenever the Sonic 1 sprites are used outside of gameplay in other games: Eraser, CD (time travel sequence) and Crackers. It's also a bit brighter (as described by the developers), and I don't think they ever wanted Sonic to be robin-egg blue, but that was the natural consequence of tweaking the colors to be slightly (but not significantly) darker when working in the very limited 9-bit RGB colorspace and they considered the saturation level acceptable enough.

That it reoccurs in stuff written from scratch while sourcing S1's art seems to suggest that these blues are the ones in his "digitizer" source files and that the darker, less saturated palette set is sort of "tacked on" program-side.

Nice!

[SpeedStarTMQ]

Isn't that more or less the colour of Sonic 2's?

[Black Squirrel]

Sonic's palette blending in with the water in Green Hill Zone was an issue at one stage. But they fixed it:





not by changing Sonic, but by changing the water.


I'm not sure Sonic's palette changed all that much - certainly not as radically as some seem to believe. And in Sonic 2 shots, Sonic's palette comes off as far more... "blue" than anything I've seen of Sonic 1.

[Woofmute]

That dark blue water was left in the title screen background at least.

[SpeedStarTMQ]

I can't remember if I ever knew that, but if I had, I'd forgotten. It's not something I ever really notice but it's a great titbit of info.

Has anyone actually ever hacked Sonic 1 to change the palette of the water back and seen if it actually affects visibility?

[steveswede]

Black Squirrel, on 24 May 2015 - 07:32 AM, said:

Is that the debug info on the bottom right? Surprised to see even changes like that on different builds.

[DigitalDuck]

steveswede, on 24 May 2015 - 10:08 AM, said:

Black Squirrel, on 24 May 2015 - 07:32 AM, said:

Is that the debug info on the bottom right? Surprised to see even changes like that on different builds.

Likely changed because of sprite limits. Also reveals layout change - here's the same spot in GHZ2:

[The KKM]

JumpingRyle, on 18 May 2015 - 08:05 AM, said:

The "vector" in Vector Synthesis is written "bekutoru" in Japanese, which does not match how the character is named.

http://ja.wikipedia....%82%B7%E3%82%B9

The character is named　"bekutaa" as in the flight-related terms.

So I got asked to relay a response to this, meanwhile

VEDJ-F @ SSMB said:

One last note I'd make [about Madonna being dated as 1989] is that the authors had been in contact with several SEGA staff including Ohshima (as indicated by the interview section where he talks about the concepts), so they could have gotten the dates verified from the source as opposed to making guesswork. Even the usage of ベクター over ベクトル doesn't seem that big a distinction. All it is is a literal spelling out of the English term using a Japanese writing system catered for it. You've said yourself that Ohshima seems to struggle with English to this day, would he have been so aware to know the distinction between the two when looking up names for him? Especially as ベクター seems to be the more commonly used (and is especially prevalent in art, which he does) and is the go-to spelling for any fictional character (see: Vector in Yu-Gi-Oh, Vector in Transformers). I dunno, what's your stance on it?

At this point I should start trying to convince her to join here instead

[JumpingRyle]

The KKM, on 25 May 2015 - 05:04 AM, said:

JumpingRyle, on 18 May 2015 - 08:05 AM, said:

The "vector" in Vector Synthesis is written "bekutoru" in Japanese, which does not match how the character is named.

http://ja.wikipedia....%82%B7%E3%82%B9

The character is named　"bekutaa" as in the flight-related terms.

So I got asked to relay a response to this, meanwhile

VEDJ-F @ SSMB said:

One last note I'd make [about Madonna being dated as 1989] is that the authors had been in contact with several SEGA staff including Ohshima (as indicated by the interview section where he talks about the concepts), so they could have gotten the dates verified from the source as opposed to making guesswork. Even the usage of ベクター over ベクトル doesn't seem that big a distinction. All it is is a literal spelling out of the English term using a Japanese writing system catered for it. You've said yourself that Ohshima seems to struggle with English to this day, would he have been so aware to know the distinction between the two when looking up names for him? Especially as ベクター seems to be the more commonly used (and is especially prevalent in art, which he does) and is the go-to spelling for any fictional character (see: Vector in Yu-Gi-Oh, Vector in Transformers). I dunno, what's your stance on it?

At this point I should start trying to convince her to join here instead />/>

Thanks for conveying the messages />

Bekutaa and bekutoru are two distinct words in Japanese. Just because they derive from the same foreign word doesn't change this. To a Japanese person, they are different and are used in different contexts and are not interchangeable. To be clear: They are not just "a literal spelling out of the English term using a Japanese writing system", they are words that have been fully incorporated into the Japanese language and there is no ambiguity about their use. A Japanese person does not have to have any English knowledge to use either.

An analogy for English: "hostel", "hospital", and "hospitality" all derive from the Latin "hospes" but we would never confuse the 3 and can clearly use them without knowing Latin.

The reason why both bekutaa and bekutoru are used in Japanese is that bekutaa comes from the English pronunciation and bekutoru from the German pronunciation. Bekutoru is used more in the fields of physics and biology, which due to historical reasons have a lot of German loan words.

Sorry to go into this detail, but I want to make it clear: If the character of Bekutaa had been based on "Vector Synthesis", then it would make no sense to use "Bekutaa" rather than "Bekutoru", as they are distinct terms.

If you really want to argue for this, you should also disprove my argument concerning the more logical association with flight. Bekutaa has very clear associations with flight in Japanese, and Sonic has a strong connection with flight. Yuji Naka even used to wear a leather flight jacket with the Sonic logo on it.

I will agree with this: The choice to have Vector play a keyboard in the band might have resulted from the similarity of bekutaa and bekutoru, but I think the name was ultimately chosen for the association with flight. Occam's razor and all that />

This post has been edited by JumpingRyle: 25 May 2015 - 09:08 AM

[The KKM]

well then, in that case

this was to go on last post, but tumblr ate the ask, so I'll add it now

Quote

To me, it just doesn't make sense for Vector to be named after the aviation thing when he has nothing linking him to it. Sonic and Mach are terms seen a lot in aviation, but that's because aviation is the only place you see things that fast (it does make the jet link sensible with the Mary Garnet story)...

And in response to your post now,

Quote

Okay, so I'm pretty certain that Ohshima also made Espio, and Espio's name is derived from espionage. One problem; there is no specific term for espionage in Japanese, it's just スパイ (Supai, SPY). The only way to get エスピオ (Esupio) would be to work out the name you want in English, then give it a rudimentary conversion to Katakana. It wouldn't surprise me if that same process got applied to Vector, but the conversion came out as the common one and not the specialist one.

I'll add that this last one seems to me to make the most sense- whatever the reason why Vector was chosen as a name, it then got the spelling it did simply because it was them writing it from the English, even if they, for an example, meant the term that comes from German.