Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: MarkeyJester - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

I wasn't sure where to put this, but I felt it belonged here, it's engineering after all...

I have spent the past eight years of my life; researching, programming, and understanding my most favoured childhood games console, the SEGA Mega Drive, and in all that time I can say without a doubt, it has been one hell of an interesting experience. I have learnt to do so much with the hardware via Sonic ROMS, homebrews, tools, the lot. It has also opened me up to the world of programming in a general sense, hell, I know how to program in C now.

I have great satisfaction in knowing the true striving efforts, that game programmers went through to achieve what they needed to achieve, and that has intensely risen my respects for them. You know, you really start to realise that... ...they were chosen for the job for a good reason, and maybe they deserve more merit than people give them credit for. It has also made me realise how talented you guys are too, the stuff I see (Mega Drive related or not) just blows my mind completely. We have a fare few brilliant artistic people around here, and some musically talented individuals too, and lest we not forget those experienced programming robo-members out there! It is just so awesome to not only see, but work with most of you doing things that just seem surreal to a normal everyday individual.

I won't drag it on any further, I'll just get to the point...

I'm tired...

...As in REALLY tired, I'm starting to find myself getting rather bored with the Mega Drive stuff I do. It's at a point where, I'll start up something cool, but can't be bothered to finish it because I know I'll succeed in the end. It's almost as if there's nothing I cannot do, no challenge I cannot fulfil, and I just quit it halfway because there's no point in going to the trouble of proving something, that doesn't need proving... I'm not sure I can explain it better than that, but there you go.

So, given that fact there, I'm deciding to release this homebrew I've been working on. It is not complete mind, but the last homebrew game I did, I never ended up releasing and simply swept it under the rug. I wouldn't consider this playable, but it has a few nice touches here and there, so this disclosure some might find inspiring enough to further their own ideas if any.

Download

Having said the above, I'm not going to be listening to feedback, opinions, merits or criticism, under the assumption that everything is considered subject to change (if it were to have continued, it would probably have turned out different in many ways), thus, renders feedback useless. I'm gonna be drifting away from Mega Drive related stuff and take a more relaxed position on the board, you know, hang around and post in places I normally wouldn't post, stuff like that...

For what the ROM is worth, enjoy.

!!ob yllɒɘɿ I

Come one, come all!! May I present to you; The Naked Hedgehog

Props to those who get the referrence d=

This is another one of my little experiments, because you know... why not! If you'd like to take part then go and grab yourself a pair of 3D glasses, I'm not talking about those new shaded ones though, I mean the standard Red and Blue/Cyan ones.

This experiment is to test the old 3D double image effect on Sonic 1. It uses various effects which include; different colour shades, different image displacement types, and different drawing modes. It isn't perfect as, clearly speaking, the levels are not designed to handle the effect, but the individual modes do help to find a near appropriate type.

WARNING: The ROM features flickering colours that may cause eye strain, and may not be suitable for anyone with past/known symptoms of seizures\epilepsy.

Download

You will need a 6-button controller for this, as X, Y, Z and MODE buttons control the effect in various ways. This list is as follows:

• MODE = 3D mode (00 Off, 01 Frame, 02 Scanline)
  
• Y = Distance mode (00 Normal, 01 FG Stretch, 02 Reverse, 03 Reverse & FG Stretch)
  
• X = Red colour (00 Filter, 01 Push, 02 Bright)
  
• Z = Cyan colour (00 - Filter (Blue), 01 - Pushed (Blue), 02 - Filter (Cyan), 03 - Dark (Cyan), 04 - Darker (Cyan), 05 - Pushed (Cyan))

Each level has different varients of colour, so the effect may need adjusting depending on the level's colour. I must also point out that "3D mode" will be 00 Off by default, which will do nothing obviously.

I find the effect works sometimes in some places, but not all the time. It can also depend on how far away from the screen you are standing/sitting, as Flygon noted in one of the tests, he had his back against the wall of his room being really distant from the screen. While I on the other hand, found being up reasonably close helped, so be sure to try looking at the screen at different distances. I also found that where you focus can have an effect on the 3D display. For example, in GHZ if you look at the background directly, it tends not to work, there as if you are standing on a platform object, and focusing on Sonic and the platform itself, the effect becomes a little more noticable.

Other things that may effect the visuals include the type of TV screen and hardware/simulator you run the game on. Flygon reported spots of colour bleeding on a CRT screen. The region frequency is another thing to note, 60hz and 50hz may have different visual results, and you might get more flickering on the 50hz PAL mode. Another note about flickering, lag in a few possible places can cause this, especially on 02 Scanline MODE, so please keep that in mind.

LazloPsylus and I have gone through each level checking out various modes, and our recommended modes are:

• GHZ 0 2 3 1 or 0 1 4 1
  
• LZ 1 2 2 1 (When concertraighting on the background) or 0 2 2 1 (for a darker background)
  
• MZ 0 2 4 1 (OK for the grass area) 1 2 2 1 (best for the underground parts)
  
• SLZ 1 2 2 1 (Generally for the bottom part)
  
• SYZ/SBZ 1 2 2 1

We have found that 1 2 2 1 does generally work the best, with 0 2 3 1 being a darker version. 0 2 0 1 works quite well but is very dark, so you may have a tough time seeing it. What's really interesting, is that GHZ of all levels, was the one that didn't seem to turn out very well. It seems that levels with backgrounds that have very little parallaxing, and enough foreground coverage tend to work the best.

A very special thanks to Flygon and LazloPsylus who did a fantastic job being my eyes while I didn't have the glasses until recently, the effect would not work as well as it does in most levels, without their assistance helping to tune it right.

I wasn't sure if this was the correct place to post this, if you staff feel the need to move the thread, then please do so.

About a year or two ago, I wrote a simple program for windows that could read a text document full of assembly-like instructions, to display images, sorta like a primitive version of a flash player, I don't know, it was just a practice program I wrote to test my C knowledge. It was originally a program for personal use, but, seeing as I don't actually "use" it, I thought I'd share it with you guys, maybe one of you might have a valid use for it, who knows.

Download

And here are a few example scripts:

An animation test
A screen resizing test
A timer/clock example

Simply open a "script.txt" text document with the program, and then click "start" in the script menu to play the script.

I don't expect any of you to comment, or to take any interest in this, like I said before, it's just a left over test program I was experimenting with which happens to be lying around on my HDD doing nothing. So for what it's worth, enjoy.