More awesome :-) And once again I see you already found everything I had in mind - keep it up! Super-easy Sonic's boss as Knuckles coming up...
Cool video. The missing gravity can also be trigged in Icecap, if I remember right. However, you forgot another one in Act 1. Probably it isn't a glitch, but I always found it curious. Play as Sonic alone, start Carnival Night Act 1, jump a moment before touching the ground. Tails will hit the ground too, and he will be stucked there jumping indefinetely. I guess it is something to do with his AI. This can also cause Tails to appear in Act 2 100% of times (I discovered this glitch while playing the Mega Collection version, but I know it also happens in the original too. In the MC version Tails appear in Act 2 after this glitch even if playing Sonic 3&K). Also, nineko pointed out some time ago that this behavior can also happen in Mushroom Hill Act 1.
Very nice. My favourite of that lot is the Batbot-by-boss glitch, though Tails in the water is also funny =P
Yes, and in Flying Battery Zone, as seen in the current TAS for S3&K. That TAS, also, breaks CNZ in an inexplicable way.
Some stuff just shouldn't happen. As far as cut-off boundaries are considered for the bottom of some stages. It seems only Sonic 3 stages have this problem. The way it was fixed for this one stage and doesn't exist in S&K levels shows how rushed Sonic 3 really was. Apperently they forgot about some of the stages except the one below. NO BOUNDARY AT THE BOTTOM. Sonic 3 Alone So instead you fall all the way from that spot to the very top of the stage and then it kills you after falling all the way down. Now it's fixed. Sonic 3 & Knuckles Now that just kills the character at the correct point.
Very nice! Loving "Dark Carnival" , I thought for years it must be possible to skip that switch. And you found a way to skip the lights going out in the first place too, well played! I think this whole series of vids is great, fascinating stuff. I demand more people post their support in here, clearly loads are reading / watching it P.S. No "Sonic's boss as Knuckles" though, and that's a dead easy one! Too easy? Or are Knuckles' tricks coming separately?
What you call "loopback" is when you have reached the end of the level layout "width". As you might already know, a Sonic final level layout is built of a grid of 128x128 tiles, called meta blocks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata). The level layout is an 1 dimensional array, and by knowing the level layout width, it can draw each stride (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stride_of_an_array) of the level vertically to make the level 2 dimensional. Now, what happens when you reach the end of the level layout width? It wraps? NO! As you can see in Hydro City Act 1, when you passed the level layout width, the water level doesn't match up with the background. It is off! Now the background is moving in another speed so it isn't off by that much. But the foreground is off by exactly 1 meta block upwards. This is because the level layout is 1 dimensional. When the current stride of the level layout has been read, the next stride will begin, even if it isn't in the right 128x128 grid. Wrapping a level would allow the current stride of the level layout to be drawn over and over again using modulo calculation. However, calculating the modulo of the stride to wrap the level is too expensive (really not, since all Lava Reef acts do at least one modulo for the fake background layer to wrap), and also using a check to stop drawing tiles at the end of the level layout width is pretty much useless anyway, the loopback is a feauture the programmers ignored to save CPU time for other cool stuff. Now, to answer your question about why there are background elements in the foreground. You see, at the bottom of the level layout, there are garbage (data that doesn't belond as level layout) or the background layout (can be that easy really, but I don't want to check it out). And since the level layout reads the next stride after the first stride has finished, that means that the end of the level, at the bottom, if you loopback, the last stride will be replaced with.... yea, garbage. That garbage happens to be the background meta blocks, so I guess the data might be the beginning of the background layout, or simular data. The Genesis CPU isn't multitasking the way our PC's are, so there is no support for protected mode. When Saxman programs ProSonic to simulate Sonic 2, he MUST not allow loopback the way the original game does it because once data is read outside the level layout, the CPU will throw an exception 5 (access violation) because of protected mode protecting memory that his process don't own. With single tasking old CPUs, you can basically read/write to any memory location and hope things will not crash. Sonic 3 is full of crashes (entering debug mode while standing on a rotating barrel in HCZ or CNZ) for example, but they are caused by other exceptions. lol, I hope you'll understand I just felt like writing all this crap anyway :P
Oh, Tails, Tails, Tails. I love how you always include something that makes Tails look like a traitor or something along the lines of that. Great stuff. Also, I lol'd when Tails lost a chunk of his head on the barrel after the bumper sequence and the Blue Knuckes with Glasses.
Why isn't this stickied? Also GoldS you should make yourself a wiki article with this stuff aswell as a bio of you.
