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Heres my set of rules for good level design (not repeating anything mentioned earlier in the thread):

* 1-ups are sacred. The best thing about sonic 1 and 2 is that you could make your own mini game by hunting for 100% 1-ups. They were placed strategically and never over-used (as in Sonic 3). Use only 1 or 2 (maximum 3) 1-ups per act and place them in places where they will only be found by people looking for them. There are so many secrets in Sonic 1 and 2 that people in this community don't even know about, or only know about due to level maps or debug. Everytime I netplay with someone they're always like "I didn't know about that". Hiding things provides years of re-play value. I'm still discovering things on platforms in the sky in emerald hill zone. And you can also pull an OOZ gimmick and place 1-ups where they can be seen from the main game path but not got easily from there.

* Don't try to hide the bottom or top of the level. Despite wanting to make your level look big, you should give the player a sense of location and distance. The best stuff is skirted along the tops and bottoms of the levels.

Maybe ill post more later. I'm not feeling well right now.

Listen you assfuck, first of all you don't need to mark a work as copyright in order for it to be copywritten, all original work is implicitly copywirtten the moment it's created. The little © symbol has absolutely no legal purpose or binding and serves no other useful purpose than to clearly mark the date that the work was released and thus when it was copywritten (e.g. created).

Second of all, no amount of copyright is ever going to apply to any of these things, because you cannot copyright (implictly nor explicitly) a work that is derrived from a copywritten work, for which you do not have express consent to derrive from. That means that unless you have express permission from SEGA to derrive on their work -- nothing.. absolutely NOTHING that you create involving sonic, whether you include your own creative works or not, is your property. Any work you create that involves sonic becomes property of SEGA. There are several legal precidents to back this up - I suggest you take a look at the Copyright article on wikipedia.

This means that technically, absolutely no one here (with the exception of the few devs from SEGA that post here occasionally) own or in any way can claim ownership or authorship of anything that they've created that is sonic-related, no matter how much time they've spent on it, and no matter how much original work is in there. All SEGA has to do is say "you can't use Sonic" and the work instantly becomes theres. They don't even have to sue you for this to happen.

Now.... my opinion:

Regardless of how much or little you technically own of the hack, it's a super dick move to take someone else's music, art, or otherwise and just slap it into your own hack. I think anyone that does this should be beat the fuck up in the Costco parking lot after dark. If I worked on a hack for months and someone just came in and ripped a piece of music off it and put it in their hack, I would probably have to find them and have someone beat the shit out of them. That's not right - I don't care who's claiming or not claiming ownership.

If you're too fucking dumb to create your own music or too lazy to sequence a song or at the very least grab a song that no ones heard off a cheap ass MIDI site, then you don't deserve to have your hack played. Why should people take the time and effort to play your hack when you didn't even take the time and effort to do all the work yourself?

You don't need to modify gens at all to make this work. All you need to do is save the value to SRAM, and while the emulator is running, have your program run in a tight loop of monitoring the filename where the SRAM would be saved to see if it's been modified. (or you can use filesystem notification if you're leet), and once the SRAM file is modified, you can read the value and kill the gens.exe process.

That's what I'd do.

ALSO.... do not forget to try MTZ as super sonic. The super sonic music is a lot more colorful! (Just remember that if you get a shield and sober up, it's not so easy to get rid of it as super sonic).

Also theres a known bug where if you end the game (game over, start + a, whatever) while in MTZ, the title screen/etc will have their palette musically affected as well.

Yeah, I have not looked at the code for LRZ3 in S&K, but it took a lot of modification to make that autoscrolling stuff work. The sonic engine isn't designed for it -- it's not mario brothers.