Knuckles' Emerald Hunt

I knew ahead of time that at least two judges wouldn't be able to vote for this hack (I was even joking in IRC that there wouldn't be anyone left able to judge it). It's not about the trophies for me, it's about showing people the work that I and others have been doing, and above all else, seeing people have fun playing Sonic games.

I'll make a post about the updated version soon, but not right now.

 

Well here we are, SHC2016 is over, and now I've made some final touches so that I can say Knuckles' Emerald Hunt is completed. For those that weren't paying attention, the changes from the version in last year's contest are:

• Redesigned level select.
• Redesigned score tally.
• Tikal added as a playable character.
• Competition mode enabled, get three out of five emeralds before your opponent. Each player gets one radar box that detects the emerald closest to them, and the difficulty setting does affect it.
• More music choices.
• Sandwich mode unlocked by playing sound FA in the sound test.

The main ROM can be downloaded here, for single player and local multiplayer. Those looking to netplay should get the netplay ROM for a more stable experience, as the normal ROM can desync very easily.

Because music is such a large part of this hack, Valley Bell has also prepared a VGM pack with tags for titles and authors pulled right from the source code.

Speaking of source code, a few months back I was thinking about how so many SADX mods are hosted on GitHub, so I figured why not release the source code to a MD hack? So I present to you, the source code to Knuckles' Emerald Hunt (modified slightly to remove music the authors weren't comfortable with sharing).
In this archive, you will find:

• Barely commented code
• An implementation of an SA1-style emerald radar in Sonic 2
• A modified object manager to support the emerald radar
• S3K rings manager (MarkeyJester put way too many rings in HPZ for S2 to handle)
• A port of Knuckles from KiS2 (basically what you get after following my guide)
• Ports of various S1 levels/objects by Flamewing
• Fancy scrolling level select
• Fancy scrolling credits, with a tool to generate the data for said credits
• A lot of custom music
• A custom "radar ping" sound effect
• Flamewing's Ultra DMA Queue
• A modified Sonic 2 sound driver by Clownacy and Valley Bell:
  • Support for S3K PSG instruments by best-fit mapping, and extra frequencies required for e.g. sliding sound
  • S3K-style speedup (no more hardcoded speed shoes tempo table)
  • Support for multiple "SEGA" samples, with automatic bankswitching (no size restriction)
  • Support for multiple music and DAC sample banks
  • A tool that allows easy management of music and DAC samples by editing INI files, with support for SMPS2ASM and automatic Saxman compression
• A partially implemented extra zone that I never got to finish based on the DOS game Hocus Pocus

Once again, I'd like to thank everyone who helped me figure out why my code didn't work, contributed art or music, submitted records to the leaderboard so I could figure out how to set the ranks, livestreamed, reviewed, did a playthrough, or just enjoyed playing this hack.

And now, I leave you with a video:
http://youtu.be/Pq4Ao9W2Tc0

Edit: Oh by the way, since someone may find it useful, here's a map of HPZ:

Spoiler

 

The hack is finished, there won't be any new content.

 

I have no plans for the Megadrive currently. I'm currently focusing on Sonic Adventure DX (specifically custom missions), and considering trying "something" with Sonic & Knuckles Collection.

 

Who made that picture anyway? I've seen it in a couple videos.

 

Well then make a script or something if it bothers you that much. Everyone else gets by with doing it manually.