In terms of gameplay, is Sonic Adventure DX substantially different from the Dreamcast version?

I do remember it being a real problem during the World Ranking days in SA1 where people were apparently filing down their Dreamcast analog stick gates (or removing the controller cover entirely) in order to make the analog stick move beyond the range it was normally allowed, and it would actually have a perceptible difference in making Sonic run faster.

 

Speaking as someone who had the DC original back at launch, I was aghast at how shit the GC version looked when that one came out.

 

There is one thing to remember with this comparison: there are *TWO* Dreamcast versions of Sonic Adventure. The original JPN release, and Sonic Adventure International, aka the US release that was later released world-wide. This version had roughly nine months of additional work done to it, which is like almost an entire extra 1/3 of the development cycle. Sonic Adventure International, aka the US launch release, had a bunch of bug fixes to common errors in the JPN version. The Gamecube port that all subsequent ports were based off of is based on the original JPN Sonic Adventure release. A good example of such a bug fix is falling through the floor in the whale chasing sequence in Emerald Coast. While it's still possible to fall through if you get unlucky in the US Dreamcast version, the original version has a bunch of ways you can reliably make yourself fall through that don't work in the international version, which do work once again DX. As a result, the game is basically as buggy as the original JPN release, which was more buggy than the Dreamcast version almost everyone else played. And that's of course nothing to say about all the changes owing to Dreamcast specific architecture, like the order independent transparency that the Dreamcast's tile based deferred rendering afforded that the GCN and subsequent machines lacked.

Funnily enough, a bunch of small fixes mainly relating to camera and object behavior/placement are updated in DX to match the international version. And there are also small changes that are made that neither reflect the original nor the international version. Shit, DX has bits of a prerelease version still inside. It's a bizarre mismash of the entire Sonic Adventure release timeline, resulting in a substantially inferior product from the US launch DC version that most people reemember

All this is why, even with the update patches to the Steam version of SADX to bring the visuals closer to the Dreamcast version, I still massively prefer the International DC version. It quite literally plays better than any version of DX.

 

You've got to be fucking kidding me. This isn't the first time I've seen teams use the original release instead of the updated release to base ports on. Why do they do that?!

The other instance that immediately springs to mind is that Valkyrie Profile's PSP port is based on the original JPN release instead of the North American release. The latter had some quality of life changes.

 

Well that sucks. I wonder if it would at all be feasible to track down the code changes between JPN SA1 and Intl SA1. It would likely require a disassembly of both, so long as the labels etc line up between the two, automated comparison tools could help in narrowing down the functional differences. Reason I say this is because if those fixes could somehow be hacked into the PC 04 release, that would be a great improvement. I just hope that we can one day have lantern lighting and order independent transparency simultaneously, as well as a full restoration of the DC cutscenes.

 

That!

We really need all this stuff mirrored on Sonic Retro - stuff gets lost and I start doubting myself.


Obvious differences between the Japanese and "International" releases is something I was going to look at once upon a time, though if we need to throw SADX in there, there are people better placed for that.

I did do a bit with Sega Rally 2 which also had pretty substantial changes, although I think the big one is Blue Stinger, which I hear had a completely different camera perspective overseas. I also had a brief look at Pen Pen TriIceLon, though the changes there don't seem to have been quite as severe (if you squint you could almost call that a Sonic game - Land Ho! was made up of former Sega devs, and Jina Ishiwatari did the levels).

 

What's more is it's likely based on something even older than the original JPN release given it has prototype stuff still built in. It's honestly crazy.

Sega has a history of doing dumb shit like this tho. Like when they had M2 make a 3D version of Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 for the 3DS... and used the original Mega Drive roms instead of just starting from the Taxman port which meant it lacked all the cool shit of the tax port. Which was especially annoying as that was back when Sonic 1 and Sonic 2's taxman ports were solely on android and were infested with Sega Forever.

 

I don't think it's even really an uncommon thing in the game industry as a whole, archival seems to be something of an issue for a lot of companies. Square comes to mind, Kingdom Hearts and a few of the Final Fantasies have source code that's long gone.

 

It really depends on the company, the team, and the location. Storage in Japan is premium. Historically, those teams with backgrounds in actual computer science, like Id, were very good at keeping their old stuff, by nature of their background education. Cowboy coders like in lots of the early game industry, not so much. The Amiga scene is riddled with people who have, long long after the computer had died, released their source code and assets and such to the public.

 

The Retro Engine versions of Sonic have been treated oddly since the beginning. We know Taxman had it running on all sorts of platforms (including the Dreamcast), but other teams were seemingly hired to... re-port the engine, and all it resulted in was lower performance.

I'd put money on Sega believing it would never run on the 3DS. Although I'd put more money on them wanting to pretend the Retro Engine didn't exist for strange political reasons.

 

Isn't that's because they're using their "Gigadrive" emulator? It's what all their 3DS releases were based on. Sonic 1 was the 3rd release in the series. Sonic 2 was one of the last ones in 2015.

 

I got into an argument about this with an M2 employee. They claimed it had nothing to do with that, and that they put just as much work into modding the sonic rom as they would have changing the taxman port because they added the spin dash and the timer from the mega tech version. According to them, and it was about "having choices" and how they wanted the "original to be preserved." I pointed out that it wasn't a very good example of choice, since I can play Sonic 1 & 2 with spin dashing and such a million different ways on my TV, yet the only way I could play the tax version was on my android phone, but apparently I was just being "difficult."

 

Is that discussion anywhere public?

 

I'd assume it's still online but I left that forum years ago and thus can't search my old posts anymore. I tried googling for it just now but that doesn't give me any results.

edit: found the post, reposting:

Back and forth continued for a bit, but that's probably the best, most relevant post, because other people started joining in and talking about sega ages in general. The part about doing as much work comes from another post where they talked about adding the drop dash and spin dash and mega play rules and the 3D emulator and all that jazz.

EDIT: Turns out it was a Sega employee, not M2.

 

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It's funny going into that thread, or any Reset Era thread, and seeing all the banned and deleted users. Every page has at least one.

Edit: I read through the thread. Sam only made a single post, and they don't really imply anything development wise other than M2 and Taxman taking different approaches (obviously).

Still seems like the reason they went with the original ROM version is because this project was focused entirely on their Gigadrive emulator and the 3D functionality. This was Mega Drive focused project, not a Sonic one.

 

Honestly I quite like how characters look in SADX. Like yeah maybe the lighting’s simpler but the cel-shaded look is cool and the models are SO much more refined than the blocky originals.

 

Sam kept going with me in PMs, which I obviously can't get to anymore, because I don't have an account. And the same project had non-mega drive games in their release, like After Burner II, Alien Syndrome, Fantasy Zone II, Galaxy Force II, Outrun, Outrun 3D, Space Harrier, Space Harrier 3D, Puyo Puyo, Super Hang-On, and Thunder Blade. So no, it wasn't Mega Drive focused. Of the 30 games released, only 10 were from the Mega Drive.

EDIT: Actually, this was for the Switch Sega Ages releases, not 3DS, which is even less focused on the Mega Drive. Of the 20 games released, only 6 were mega drive games.

 

A blunder on my part in specifying Mega Drive, but my point still remains. The 3D Ages project seems like it was a wide net approach with all the heavy lifting being done via their emulator and not through modifying the games themselves. Doing the Taxman versions would mean they'd be taking development of their emulator to instead work on a separate one off project.

The Taxman versions and all their visual enhancements would be ideal of course, but I can see why they took the approach that they did.

 

What I meant with the edit was the Sonic ports in question were for the switch, not 3DS at all, so they never used the gigadrive emulator period, as that was their custom 3DS emulator that could display 3D elements like parallax. I had misremembered that this was for the 3DS. Their switch release, by comparison, is just plain-jane normal Sega Genesis emulation, nothing special. It was just a rom hack being sold, nothing special. That was why I was so upset, it seemed drastically less custom than the 3DS sonic 1 rerelease. They leaned hard on "We are including the mega play version."

Any case, this is something Sega has a history of, putting out older, lesser releases of games when they get re-released instead of more definitive/updated versions. Sort of like how no Sonic collection since has included the Easy Mode from Sonic Jam.

 

I think it's also worth noting that, as much as I like the Taxman ports, they 'do' have minute but real differences in physics and aren't a perfect replica of the original engine. And they were coded in a substantially different way that any internal SEGA coder may not be familiar with. Lord knows we later saw all the problems with the s3K port because of just how difficult replicating an old "retro" game engine perfectly can actually be.

We have Origins now, such as it is. And we have RSDK fan hacks for ourselves. I can see why some in SEGA would want to base a new enhanced port off of the ROM code.