Random Hack/Mini Project Thread

Damnit, someone else has already proved my idea possible! How do infinite looping levels work by the way, does it involve a huge rewrite in the level engine with chunks being overwritten on the fly?

 

More or less just changing the level position, and moving all the necessary objects (aka those which you could see on screen later on the loop again, and players), and you are usually set. Sometimes you may need to load the tiles in, but to give correct looping effect that should not be necessary.

 

Well, in the actual level I am overwriting chunks on the fly. The level's composed of a number of $800x$400 (or 16x8 128px chunks) which are loaded in (eventually a random) order. The game only keeps the previous, current, and next section in memory at any time (although deleting sections isn't working properly and I need to fix that - I'm fairly sure that's the cause for objects failing to load). Object positions are added as necessary to put them in the right place, and then when the camera reaches $3100 I'm subtracting $2000 from the camera, Sonic's position, and all objects. I'm also doing the same thing in reverse when the camera reaches $F00 by adding everything again. (Plus some DLE management.)

The boss section does it the boring way, though - it's just a layout with teleporting objects, the same way S3K did a few of its bosses.


If all you want is an infinite looping level, you don't need to do much - the engine is already capable of doing this in the Y direction, after all! It's just teleportation yeah, waaaah zabadoobapbap!

 

Having done something similar for a Sketchhog hack a while back, I'd say I personally prefer the Double Jump. I think the Triple Jump is overkill... just my opinion though.

 

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

 

You didn't happen to reverse engineer the data formats while you were doing whatever voodoo magic you use to do all these things did you? But really, that sounds very nice, even nicer if there's something similar for Sonic R. We could finally have all the Windows Sonic games working on Vista+!

 

I haven't really looked at the data formats, beyond the PCX/PIC and LBM image files.
A while ago, I managed to run Sonic R with DXWnd2, but only as a window and in DirectDraw mode. Apart from that, I haven't looked into that game yet.
But I have Sonic CD 1996 working perfectly again. :v:

 

I'd love you to share your secrets if it meant getting SK Collection working

 

Last I checked, Sonic & Knuckles Collection was the only pre-SADX Sonic game that still worked perfectly in modern versions of Windows.

 

After you patch it to fix the framerate problems.

 

If by "patch" you mean "set a value in an ini file", yes.

 

It's not a secret or anything you can easily apply to the game yourself. It's just a piece of software. I'm currently working on a GUI for the settings, once that's done I'll release it here.

Yeah, the programmer(s) made a smart choice. In windowed mode, if the current video mode isn't 8 bit, the game does not use DirectDraw but renders to a DIB section (memory bitmap). That nicely avoids a couple of problems. However, the game also does not use Vsync that way, which results in a somewhat jerky frame rate, at least on my PC.
I basically wrote a DirectDraw emulator that internally uses DIB sections as well, and I do use Vsync for smooth frame rates (on 60 Hz monitors).

The wiki is apparently missing one "secret" INI file setting: MIDIFlag (default is "1"). If it's 1, the game will first try to load midiout.dll, and if that fails, it'll try bgm.dll; vice versa for MIDIFlag=0. Makes you wonder if they had planned an alternate music playback method. The game was never shipped with a bgm.dll, as far as I know. Luckily there's smpsout.dll now!

 

The game does still enable DirectDraw for a moment, which is annoying because it forces the display mode to change to 16bpp and back, causing a momentary black screen. I tried poking around the code in the disassembly, but I have no idea what it's actually doing or how to make it not do it.

I did notice the MIDIFlag setting when I was making SMPSOUT, but it's kind of useless...

 

Inspired by MegaGWolf's most recent Sonic Hack Showcase of Sonic 1 Painto Edition 2, I present to you:

Sonic 1 - The Enhanced Special Stage Experience

This was created using Mercury's ReadySonic kit.

(A little last-minute, I know, but I wanted to get this out.)

 

This is probably the best hack of 2016!

 

A hack that is so good it's the best of hack of next year?! =P

It's fun, I'll give it that great way to blow some time.

 

What's the big deal? It's a version of Sonic 1 where I can actually get all the Emeralds.

 

Oh hey, an extended version of this

 

Not extended, but a completely new hack. I literally didn't know anything about Cinossu's thing before I published my one. They were spawned from the same idea though, so I guess there's that. :v:

 

Let's have some fun.